Files

Abstract

The thesis aims to understand the sense of Palestinians’ lifeworld under a colonial order by examining how Palestinians perceive colonial experiences through their bodies. Through phenomenological anthropology of lived experiences, the thesis critically reads and theorizes experiences of colonialized Palestinians in a settler colonial order, introducing an account of Palestinians’ subjective experience rather than the materialization of colonial power. The thesis was inspired by the anthropology of lived experiences and by phenomenological anthropology, to grasp different bodily experiences by observing and capturing spatiotemporal units of the flow of experiences of life. It attempts to grasp practical and theoretical understandings of being-in-the-world, yet as-bodily-colonized, through how colonial power represents and constructs Palestinian bodies as anomalous ‘others’, and how theses ‘others’ experience life and death in such a context. The different lived experiences that the thesis explores reveal the epistemological and ontological aspects that are immanent and associated with being a colonized subject. The lived experiences of family mobility and love bring to light the way that the colonial power produces social death, and the way that colonized Palestinians’ bodies are inscribed spatially. Stories of Palestinian death and dying reveal the way in which living and dead Palestinian bodies are incarcerated, and how invasion and ethnic cleansing exist in the structures of everyday life experiences. Further, these stories expose the way in which Palestinian bodies embody spaces of oppression, such as checkpoints, and the way in which their bodies have become a prosthetic to these spaces.

Details