Oral transmission as meta-occupation: The significance of historically passed on meanings of everyday life in processes of deculturalization

ABSTRACT

This article presents research findings from an urban sociology study of the practice of Palestinian oral transmission in the face of deculturalization. The concept of deculturalization (Spring, 2004) is adopted to enable the analysis of intertwined processes of marginalization and deprivation in their spatiotemporal extension and their impact on the communities concerned. Using the Reflexive Grounded Theory Methodology (RGTM), the research explored how Palestinian refugees in Jordan, Palestine, and Israel conceptualize and practise oral transmission and how their practice mirrors the deculturative condition they experience. Participatory observation and guided interviews were conducted with 13 families, each with three generations, and a number of activists and scientists. Combining the RGTM with elements adopted from Systematic Metaphor Analysis enabled the discovery of inversion as Modus Operandi of oral transmission and as a strategy of dealing with deculturalization. It revealed oral transmission as meta-occupation that facilitates other occupations, operates as a means of knowledge and space production, constitutes belonging, and unifies a scattered community across time and space. Thus, oral transmission has the potential to defy occupational injustice (Stadnyk, Townsend, & Wilcock, 2010) and to undermine and partly undo the impact of deculturalization. This article provides significant insights into the occupation of oral transmission among Palestinians and its function within processes of deculturalization, and potentially amplifies occupational science understandings of these processes in relation to occupation. Categorizing oral transmission as meta-occupation adds to occupational science terminology and may constitute an appropriate category to connect with other disciplines, promoting occupational perspectives.

KEYWORDS:

• Occupational science
• Palestinians
• Oral transmission
• Deculturalization
• Inversion
• Meta-occupation
• Occupational justice

Notes

1. This article is based on a presentation titled “Occupation under occupation – Everyday life and its significance in processes of deculturalization” delivered at the Occupational Science Europe Conference 2017 in Hildesheim, Germany. I used “Occupation under occupation” as a wordplay which refers to the different meanings of the term occupation and their intertwining in the researched field. These different levels of meaning range from occupation, as it is dealt with in occupational science, and being occupied with something or in a situation, to military occupation. However, these meanings intertwine in the researched field. For example, military occupation in the Westbank has an impact on occupational scopes, not only for those living there, but also for their relatives in the diaspora. After I learned that Lavin (2005) had published a book chapter titled “Occupation under Occupation: Days of Conflict and Curfew in Bethlehem”, to which I refer in this article, I decided to modify the title.

2. To enable a clear differentiation of occupation as human being and doing (in the sense it is used in occupational science) from occupation in the military or territorial sense, the term “military occupation” is employed to denote the latter meaning.

3. With regard to the comparability and resemblance of settler colonial endeavours, including Zionist settler colonialism, Veracini (2008) suggested to “consider a Western settler colonial consciousness as a discursive and ideological practice utilizing a ‘settler archive’ that was constituted through numerous passages of political, religious, and colonial histories during the last five centuries” (p. 148). He developed the term ‘settler archive’ to describe “a repertoire of images, notions, concepts, narratives, stereotypes and thoughts” (Veracini, 2008, p. 149) and elaborated on the intersection of colonial, settler colonial, racist and genocidal practices in and outside Europe. Veracini (2008) pointed out that “this archive is constantly tested, updated, added to, in progress … readily available to be mobilized in different contexts” (p. 148).

4. As far as I know, the term “doing life” has not been used in occupational science. In this article, I use doing life for the various occupations that protagonists refer to in their oral transmissions. According to the data, these references encompass all kinds of occupations through which the narrated protagonists “transact with the world” (Dickie et al., 2006, p. 90) and that are – in their repetition – modified due to changing situations. This interpretation correlates with the understandings of research participants and mirrors in the concepts of ard(earth) and `ard(performance) as they are explicated in this paper. Thus, oral accounts can be understood as representations of possible modes and systems of transaction that are narrated and passed on as a repertoire. However, descriptions of doing life gain particular significance against the background of the dominant Israeli narrative, in which the existence of Palestinian life as such or its equal value is denied: By portraying Palestinians as either non-existent or underdeveloped and nomadic, Palestinian life is rendered removable (Wolfe, 2008, p. 113), while at the same time unmaking its removal (El-Qasem, 2017, p. 82).

5. A collection of traditional Palestinian folk tales titled Speak, Bird, Speak Again: Palestinian Arab Folktales was published by Muhawi and Kanaana (1989). It can be accessed online: https://publishing.cdlib.org/ucpressebooks/view?docId=ft4s2005r4&brand=ucpress

6. The notion of community that emerges from the data can be understood as a construct referring to social fabrics that are considered relevant and applies to different levels of relationship. It can refer to the extended family, the former neighbourhood, the former village or town, as well as to the Palestinian people as an ethnic group. The different concepts of community that can be reconstructed from the data prove to be convergent with the inclusive additivity (Ong, 1987) that is characteristic of “orally based thought” (Ong, 1987, p. 37). Community consists of communities, just as history consists of (hi)stories and Palestine as an entirety is made up of all places it comprises (El-Qasem, 2017, p. 247). Furthermore, community encompasses the other-than-human elements of the community, as explicated above. This data-based understanding correlates with the transactional approach in occupational science, as it is adopted by Dickie and colleagues (2006) and Frank (2011), building on the philosophy of John Dewey. In fact, the inclusive additivity that mirrors in the researched practice of oral transmission can be connected to the idea of “organism[s]-in-environment-as-a-whole” (Dewey & Bentley, in Dickie et al., 2006, p. 88), in which all elements, human and other-than-human are understood as interdependent, co-emergent and co-constitutive.