Palestinians Across Borders: Shifting Relations to Locality and Community

19 pagesInternational audienceThe phenomenon of transnationalism has become a general topic of increasing interest in ethnographic and anthropological research, and some contributions tend to consider transnational communities as homogenous in terms of shared meanings, nature and characteristics. However, the case of the Palestinians points to a multiplicity of identities and ties negotiated in a common reference to the homeland but yet articulated in different ways in their local, transnational and global dimensions. They present at the same time high levels of integration in their host society and cultural closure and resistance to assimilation; cosmopolitan values and hybrid identities. The diversity of transnational ties and cultural identities those social, political and economical transactions evoke here reflect differentiated relations to locality and community and those issues are at the centre of the discussion proposed in this paper. Based on ethnographic evidences collected among Palestinians in Britain, I will suggest that Palestinian transnational communities present at the same time characteristics of migrants, diasporic communities, political global networks and cosmopolitans. I will examine the relevance of factors as class, gender, generation, place of origin and specific social, economical and geographical trajectories in the making of such differentiated transnational ties. The importance of self construction and definition in the making of specific transnational relations will be explored in regard to phenomena of invention, interpretation, definition and transgression of borders albeit social, political or sexual. The multiple relations to location and community as revealed in the actors' subjectivities will enable me to propose an interpretative framework of the Palestinian transnational identity spaces that far from indicating fixed positions, rather highlights a "multi-locationality within and across territorial, cultural and psychic boundaries" (Brah)