AJDIP/319-2014 Considerando

One of the key epistemological aims of contemporary anthropology is without a doubt to strive for a deep understanding. Anthropologists observe a wide array of social and cultural phenomena in order to understand how people act, why they act the way they do, how they define and give meaning to their being and to the actions they take, and how they make sense of the world they act in. A way to approach, and partially reach this understanding, is to engage in fieldwork, to immerse oneself within the life-worlds of those whose societies and/or cultures have aspects about which we hope to learn more. By spending time in the community that is under anthropological scrutiny, the researcher is expected to gradually learn to understand processes that were previously foreign and maybe even incomprehensible to them.

And thus, in my view, the way in which a given fieldwork proceeds is an inherently hermeneutic process. While in some ways critical of the hermeneutic approach, Michael Agar (1980) has noted that hermeneutic philosophy fits neatly with the concerns that ethnographers have always stressed in their work. Historically, hermeneutics was developed in order to interpret scripture and historical source material, and in anthropology it has been appropriated for textual interpretations on the social (see Geertz 1973; also Jackson 1987). But what is of concern in this research are not its textual applications but its more recent developments in the social sciences, history, and ontology. In these fields, hermeneutics aims to understand what is distant in time and culture (Shapiro & Sica 1984: 4); it is a philosophical theory and method that ascertains the nature, character, conditions, and limits of understanding (Keane & Lawn 2016: 1). It is not, however, merely about scientific inquiries on interpretation and understanding but part of humans’ experience of the world in general (Gadamer 2013: xx). Here, the hermeneutic approach is a philosophical undercurrent that helps in making sense of people’s ways of negotiating their being by bringing attention to their temporal and spatial situatedness.

Before getting into the details of the spatiotemporalities of Palestinian refugee communities, I delineate the theoretical discussions on the hermeneutic approach and its connection to the ethnographic method, in order to introduce the ontological basis for adopting it as a structuring premise. There is always uneasiness in adopting Western philosophical discussions in anthropological inquiries (see Das, Jackson, Kleinman, & Singh 2014), but what makes it rather easy to bridge from hermeneutics to anthropology is its inherent openness to ways of being. German philosophers Heidegger and Gadamer, the latter being the student of the former and greatly influenced by his work, are central to the development of contemporary, philosophical hermeneutics, as they gave it the ontological turn that redirected the attention of hermeneutic understanding to being in general, rather than its being seen only as a method to be applied in scientific inquiries.

The similarities between ethnography and hermeneutics start from here, in that neither of them is a method in the strictest sense of their being able to reach exact knowledge by following a preset path; rather, they lay us open to, in theory, an infinitely continuing circle of understanding that predisposes us to ways of being. Ethnographic knowledge is always mediated through the ethnographer, and their cultural and historical situatedness, which structures the understanding of the world of others. Similarly, contemporary hermeneutics, following Heidegger and Gadamer, stresses that understanding is always affected and shaped by the historical position

and tradition of the interpreter. Heidegger calls these preunderstandings a fore- structure, and this cannot be escaped because it is an existential part of being itself and is, thus, a condition of possibility for thinking one’s being in the world. This fore- structure is an outcome of the historicity of being, of thrownness to a place and time that structures our existence and thus also understanding. The fore-structure is, in fact, essential for understanding as, according to Heidegger, “[e]very interpretation which is to contribute some understanding must already have understood what is to be interpreted” (Heidegger 1996: 142) and the question is thus not how to escape the circle that holds these preunderstandings, which has been the aim of more classical forms of hermeneutics, but “how to get in it in the right way” (Heidegger 1996: 143).

Gadamer follows his mentor in stressing the impossibility of overcoming the preunderstandings embedded in the tradition people belong to as historical and finite beings. Instead of fore-structure, Gadamer speaks of prejudices, and calls for the abandonment of the prejudice against prejudice (Gadamer 2013: 283) that has been prevalent in European thought since the Enlightenment. Nevertheless, Gadamer’s insistence on rehabilitating prejudice does not denote uncritically accepting what is passed on to us as prejudices by tradition, but rather “do[es] justice to man’s finite, historical mode of being” (Gadamer 2013: 289). It is the task of hermeneutics to determine which prejudices should be validated as productive preconditions for understanding and which abandoned as being misdirecting. What is of importance in this process is that people are always within a tradition and cannot thus completely reach understanding outside the notions that the tradition has passed on to them. It should also be highlighted that this embeddedness in a tradition concerns not only knowledge-production but being itself, and hence fore-structures and prejudices are part of everyday negotiations about how lives are lived. While in the Palestinian context the words tradition and heritage usually connote the pre-exile customs that are often appropriated for political purposes, here the terms are not used with this cultural meaning but rather describe the ontological condition of being that reveals the thrownness to a pre-existing historically and spatially bound world.

The embeddedness in tradition (that can be conceptualized as culture, community, society, or any other formation of the human’s being that exists in a specific historical moment), is something that should be easy for an anthropologist to accept. In a very hermeneutic manner, Michael Jackson has noted that “there is no ahistorical, absolute, non-finite reality either outside or within us that we can reach by adopting a particular discursive style” (Jackson 1987: 17, italics in original). In his later work, he further describes that his own take on the ethnographic method can

be seen as a hermeneutic circle encompassing intellectual movement between the three horizons of one’s own world, the society one hopes to understand, and humanity as a whole (Jackson 2010: 49–50). In the hermeneutic approach, understanding becomes possible in a process that Gadamer calls the fusion of horizons, which ties together the horizon of the present, itself a product of the continuous testing of prejudices by encountering the past and understanding the tradition one is always within, with historical horizons that are at the heart of the inquiry (Gadamer 2013: 317). It is specifically the notion of horizontality that highlights the spatial dimension of Gadamer’s hermeneutics, as the “horizons change for a person who is moving” (Gadamer 2013: 315). In a more mundane and grounded sense, the horizons, in other words the location in a tradition, are thus also part of the ways in which people understand their possibilities, and here it is clear that movement can be a way of broadening them: the motivation for emigrating is often the hope of finding new possibilities in the horizons produced by different historical processes. Though Gadamer discusses specifically how it is possible, through a hermeneutic process, to reach an understanding of history, it has been suggested that similar merging can be pursued not only temporally but spatially (see Marcus & Fischer 1999: 31). Not only can hermeneutics bring together temporally separate, historical epochs with their own horizons of understanding, but also spatially separate horizons that are the differing understandings held in different cultural positionalities. Understood from this perspective, Gadamerian historical hermeneutics can be applied in anthropology as “cultural hermeneutics” that opens the interpretive horizons of an ethnographic process, which is “an intersubjective and hence inherently hermeneutic praxis” (Fabian 2014: xix). Gadamer has himself also stressed hermeneutics as a moral phenomenon that aims to understand the other (Gadamer 2013: 366), an anthropological project par excellence.

What further ties the two approaches together is that the ethnographic process implies the type of openness that is also characteristic of the practice of hermeneutics. In an untranslated work, Gadamer specifies that

[h]ermeneutic philosophy does not conceive of itself as an “absolute” position, but as a way of experience. It insists on the fact that there is no higher principle than to keep oneself open to dialogue. This however always implies to acknowledge in advance the possible right, if not the superiority of the interlocutor” (Gadamer 1986: 505, quoted in Schwarz Wentzer 2016: 193). When engaging in ethnography, we always go into the field with presumptions, or prejudices as Gadamer calls them, but simultaneously the ethnographer needs to

“embrace” the field and not remain attached to pre-defined ideas about what is important and meaningful. Nevertheless, one can never escape these prejudices as they are also a precondition for understanding. Without them, one would be unable to make sense of the world or to ask questions in the first place. Yet what is stressed in both ethnography and hermeneutics is that the gained knowledge should be an outcome of an evolving process of understanding that includes abandoning and reconfiguring prior notions – moving toward the other in an open way. Therefore, the preconditions of understanding are not only limiting but always entail the possibility of understanding differently, of being open to ways of being and of comprehending the world.

In this research, the hermeneutic nature of ethnographic fieldwork was amplified by the multi-sited nature of the research process, which as a methodology highlights the relational nature of knowledge production and spatiality. The multiple fieldsites required me to engage with each site separately by acknowledging their unique histories and differing sociopolitical realities, while at the same time keeping them in the same circle of understanding. Lebanon, which was the first place I did fieldwork, was in this sense also the most formative site, as the experience I gained there redirected and sharpened the focus of the whole research. Even though each field visit was an experience of its own, the previous ones always informed and directed those that followed. As mentioned in the introduction, this research started with a specific interest in the understandings of future in relation to the right of return. Yet, during the preliminary field visits I encountered a reality that manifested a multiplicity of futures that in their everydayness were not reducible to the political project of the return, which in practice is too uncertain in its realization to meet the pressing needs of the everyday. Thus, refugees have to find different answers in their present when they project toward the future to address the limitations experienced in the different spaces of refuge, and this process of projecting toward the future, which is itself a hermeneutical way of approaching human existence, became the main focus of the research.

Past and future in the present

The appeal of hermeneutics for the aims of this research is based not solely on its close resemblance to the ethnographic process, but also, and rather more importantly, on the ontological hermeneutics and the understanding of temporality embedded in it. This approach is present in Gadamer’s philosophy, but especially so

in Heidegger’s early work. This specific way of temporalizing being constitutes the motivation for the structuring of this dissertation. Among my interlocutors, present situations were explained and clarified by drawing from past experiences, and their uncertain futures lingered over the present. These different temporalities usually had a clear spatial dimension, and it was through these spatialities that the past, present, and future emerged; this directed me toward approaching spatiality and temporality as intertwined, but without adopting the Kantian a priori assumptions about time and space as fixed pre-conditions of understanding. Rather than being chronological time, which comprises events that follow one another on a linear timeline, experienced time, though including elements of the former, is a more complex fabric in which different temporalities, both personal and societal, are intertwined. The Heideggerian alternative to chronological time resonates with this complexity, as it sidelines the centrality of the present and brings to the fore mainly the future but also the past in the temporal structuring of being (Heidegger 1996: 17). It is the constant movement between different temporalities that is integral to perceiving temporality in everyday encounters.

For my interlocutors, the past was appropriated by the present as the past of Palestine, of the homeland, where their lands and rights were, but it was also the past of the exile, the histories that had unfolded in the camps and that were constantly present in the landscapes in which the Palestinian refugees dwelt. Present was defined by the spaces of the host sovereigns, by the socio-spatial relations that reflected the political condition in each field. Future, on the other hand, reflected the hopes, the return to Palestine, the improvement of the situation under the host sovereign, or, in many cases, a new personal start somewhere else.

The centrality of past in the context of Palestinian refugees is amplified because the injustices of the past have never been resolved. Edward Said describes this relation of the present claims for a more just future to the injustices of the past when he writes that

the past for all us Arabs is so discredited as to be lost, or damned, or thought about exclusively in contrast to the present and not too credible projection of the future. […] the legitimacy of the future is built almost solely on the illegitimacy of the past – that seemingly limitless series of failures, invasions, conspiracies, destructions, and betrayals. (Said 1993: 70)

These political narratives and demands build on the past by projecting it into the future, but so does the everyday, as people always carry the history with them in “a sense that I, as a latecomer, am following something that preceded me” (Kisiel 1995:

128). The past forms our heritage, or tradition as Gadamer calls it, and it is something that people share with their community and that directs the “possible projects” (Polt 1999: 101), though it does not determine them. As Gadamer himself has noted, and as Richard Polt reminds us in relation to Heidegger’s notion of heritage (Polt 1999: 101), recognizing our embeddedness in the past does not mean that people are determined by it nor does it make them conservatives; rather, it acknowledges that “we always produce it [tradition] ourselves inasmuch as we understand, participate in the evolution of tradition, and hence further determine it ourselves” (Gadamer 2013: 305). People thus always add layers to that which preceded them, and though never free to act in the sense that it would be possible to escape the conditions produced by the historical positions, people can, within the conditions that frame the everyday, make choices that redefine tradition for the coming generations.

However, in the Palestinian context, and also in the Middle East more generally, it should be remembered that the ones negotiating the ways of being are not primarily the free-standing individuals of Western thought, simply because the individual is not the primary subject through which being and self are comprehended. Rather, as Suad Joseph and Susan Slyomovics (2000) suggest, in the Middle Eastern context individuals are “encouraged to view themselves as always linked with, reciprocally shaped by, and mutually responsive to family and relatives” (Joseph & Slyomovics 2000: 6–7). This does not mean that individuals do not negotiate themselves also in individualistic terms, but simply that family and kin are at the center of a person’s – and a community’s – being in such a comprehensive manner that Western individualism is often unable to be accommodated. Suad Joseph has called this process, in which individuals are socialized in social systems “that value linkage, bonding, and sociability”, relational selving (Joseph 1999: 9), and it is within this system that modes of being within a tradition are negotiated.

From an anthropological perspective, it is self-evident that tradition(s) mold(s) people’s being, but ontological hermeneutics helps in bringing attention also to the role that the future plays in it. The present is, in the Heideggerian way of approaching temporality, always a reflection of the past, of the having-been, but it is also tied to the future as “the world opens up only thanks to the past and the future” (Polt 1999: 97). The present thus loses its oft-assumed precedence in the temporal structuring of what Heidegger calls authentic being. Even when thinking of the everyday, the present discloses itself as the fleeting moment in which people are often already directed toward what is to come. Present is, nevertheless, the only way to grasp the future which, by definition, can never be attained. To approach the future anthropologically is thus possible only through the present, and in order to do so

one must acknowledge that in the present people are already directed toward the forthcoming. Charles Guignon summarizes future-oriented temporal hermeneutics by noting that “human existence itself is an ongoing event given meaning by anticipations of where it is all going to come out ‘in the end’, anticipations which are constantly being revised in the light of developments along the way” (Guignon 2016: 138) and that “we are motivated to act by our futural anticipations and expectations” which again “make it possible for the past to emerge-into-presence as having significance as promising, obscuring, or challenging” (Guignon 2016: 141). In other words, in planning for the future the past is drawn upon to evaluate what is to be expected, what is achievable, and how it would be possible to amend the conditions that open up to us in the everyday.

Palestinian writer Fawaz Turki has proposed that “[c]ommunities in struggle feel habitual comfort only in the future tense, finding the strength to overcome extinction in their shared perception of ‘potentiality’, of the inevitable succession of what they have mapped ahead” (Turki 1988: 174). Yet, and maybe more central from the contemporary standpoint, it is specifically the experienced precariousness and vulnerability of the Palestinian refugee existence that further forces the refugees to project toward the future, as the uncertainties of the everyday do not afford them the luxury of not planning ahead. The anxiety (in its Heideggerian sense, see Joronen 2021) experienced in the everyday circumstances compels Palestinians to face the finiteness of their being and give precedence to the future. Faced with the extreme lack of options that characterizes life, especially in Lebanon, Palestinians are forced to make decisions that can ultimately widen their horizons, but which could also – as those taking the actions are fully aware – lead to the other extreme, to the immediate confluence with their mortality. Acknowledging the limitations in ways of being and acting, Edward Said ponders the possibilities with which Palestinians are confronted. Though written a quarter of a century ago, the sentiments expressed