AG37 - Visualiser les espaces israélo-palestiniens

This workshop is part of a research-training project supported by Aix-Marseille University and the French Research Center in Jerusalem, in collaboration with Locus Sonus. It examines how visual patterns (maps, graphs, trees, rhizomes, etc.) affect research on Israel and Palestine. As elsewhere, as devices for materializing, spatializing and thus manipulating our thinking, they are consubstantial to the elaboration of knowledge. They orient our questioning, the definition of our hypotheses and thus contribute to the construction of the objects we are supposed to study. Their influence is therefore felt at all stages of research: data collection, reading, processing and analysis, as well as in the writing and dissemination of results. If the influence of the reflective approach on the field of Israeli and Palestinian studies has favoured fairly in-depth analyses of the cultural, social, economic and political conditions through which researchers produced and disseminated their knowledge, the influence of research formats remains rather ignored. Papers will be organized around three axes: state of the art, critical reflection on one's own research practices, and feedback on art-science experiments. These experiments will mobilize the visual arts as much as the sound arts because in order to evaluate the visio-centric character of our scientific approaches, it is necessary to move towards other modes of perception. Finally, ocusing on Israeli-Palestinian spaces as a whole, this workshop will include interventions on both Palestinian and Israeli societies. 

 

Responsable : Cédric Parizot, IREMAM, CNRS, Aix-Marseille Université, France

 

The Palestinian authors, Emile Habibi, Anton Shammas and Salman Natour, grasped the novel form as the tragedy of the articulation of a memory of the Nakba through a particular assemblage of characters anchored in a chronotope set between a minority Palestinian space and a hegemonic Jewish-Israeli time. The examination of these chronotopic experiences will allow a dialogue with Israeli writers including Amos Oz, A.B. Yehoshua and Yeshayahu Koren to question their own literary space-time. From this literary practice, I question the type of chronotope and the validity of the essential correlation of space-time relationships (Bakhtin) in both Palestinian and Israeli literature, and to understand the models in use that affect the making of these novels. 

 

The cemetery is a factory of traces, a set of signifiers that Palestinians try to defend in the face of the double erasure of their presence led by the Israeli state (Makdisi, 2010). This is why the goal of my thesis work is to make a funerary cartography of Palestine. Funeral practices come to dialogue with the physical part of the tomb and the whole cemetery.

First, I will explain how the map highlights the fundamentally territorial dimension of the cemetery and remains a privileged tool for Palestinian researchers to strengthen their sense of belonging to the land. Since the concept of the grave is to occupy space and delimit a pre-square for eternity, the map is a privileged means of representation. In a second step, I will show how the physical and human signifiers and meanings maintained by the will of the living around the dead question cartographic models. In trying to map the practices of visitors and managers in their cemeteries, the challenge is to maintain the space-time of the visit to the cemetery, its affective dimension and its share of improvisation and do-it-yourself. While the map gives a teleological and fixed vision of this set of gestures and words that come to redefine the place of the dead, I question my own cartographic process to understand how it transforms my vision of the cemetery as a place of identity construction.

 

 

The enlistment of French Jewish and non-Jewish volunteers in the Israeli army is a phenomenon that has marked the history of the State of Israel since its creation in 1948. Judged by the perspective of studies on transnational armed engagement, the analyses carried out give little space to the trajectories of those who settled in Israel after their demobilization. At the crossroads of history, anthropology, and sociology, I hypothesize that this military engagement is part of a migratory experience. Following the example of research on migration since the 1980s, I am mobilizing a network approach to apprehend these movements, to reveal their multi-situated nature and to consider the importance of interpersonal relationships.

In order to evaluate the influence of the network schema on my approach and to consider possible alternatives, my communication will be divided into three parts. I will first present the different uses of networks in the field of migration studies. Then, inspired by the anthropologist Tim Ingold, I will propose a critical analysis of the influence of this graphic form in the production of my questioning. Finally, I will propose replacing the use of the network model with the meshwork model, where the threads refer to the trajectories of the people surveyed and the nodes to their links and relationships. I will then evaluate the heuristic repercussions offered by the alternative use of these two visual models.