Palestinian Martyrdom Revisited: Critical Reflections on Topical Cultures of Explanation

This paper ponders the tide of public discourse which arose in response to the Palestinian martyrdom bombings in the recent Al Aqusa Intifada, in which social scientists and anthropologists have been active participants, and where the reasons and causes of this phenomenon have been the centre of debate. The paper questions the value of this analytical posture by placing it next to a habit of everyday discursive practice the author of the paper became aware of during fieldwork with politically active in the First Intifada. People (esp. women) would entertain an instrumentalist explanation of actions or qualities of which they showed themselves in other moments, and in other ways, proud (e.g., mothers, of how clever and courageous their children are in confrontations with Israeli soldiers; young couples of taking up residence with the groom\u27s father\u27s family or in the vicinity) but which they also understood to cause aesthetic offence and moral outrage internationally. The paper asks what posture the anthropologists is to take when people we work with work with this \u27global\u27 and critical view on their practices and deploy an instrumentalist perspective as \u27ideology\u27 with which they cloak causes and aesthetics they believe in but which offend, for example an attitude that violent death (political \u27suicide\u27 and \u27murder\u27) is not inevitably anti-aesthetic but meaningful in an obvious way