Living Palestine: Family Survival, Resistance, and Mobility Under Occupation

This groundbreaking volume takes a deliberate look at how entire households, families, and individuals "cope," negotiate their lives, and achieve personal and collective goals in Occupied Palestine. Contributors raise critical questions about tradition vs. modernity and the sociocultural consequences of emigration. Living Palestine establishes that household dynamics (i.e., kin-based marriage, fertility decisions, children's education, and living arrangements) cannot be fully grasped unless linked to the traumas of the past and worries of the present. Likewise, family strategies for survival and social mobility under occupation are swept up in the tide of history that engulfs the world in which Palestinians live and struggle as individuals, households, and as a society. Living Palestine is drawn from an expansive 1999 research project of the Institute for Women's Studies at Birzeit University in which two thousand households in nineteen communities were surveyed with an aim to examining the Palestinian household from multiple perspectives.

Contents:

"Modernity Aborted and Reborn: Ways of Being Urban in Palestine," Lisa Taraki and Rita Giacamen
"Living Together in a Nation in Fragments: Dynamics of Kin, Place, and Nation," Penny Johnson
"Six Families: Survival and Mobility in Times of Crisis," Lamis Abu Nahleh
"Emigration, Conservatism, and Class Formation in West Bank and Gaza Strip Communities," Jamil Hilal
"The Paradox of Women's Work: Coping, Crisis and Family Survival," Eileen Kuttab