Crossing the boundaries of history: Exploring oral history in researching Palestinian women in the mandate period [1 ]

Women's History Review

Volumn 5, Issue 3, 1996, Pages 351-371

  Fleischmann, Ellen L ^a  

^a GEORGETOWN UNIVERSITY   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 0040364689     PISSN: 09612025     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1080/09612029600200118     Document Type: Review

References (29)

1. This article primarily deals with my research experience in the West Bank, Israel and Jerusalem from September 1992 through June 1994. I also did research in Jordan and England. Because I was restricted by time and financial resources, I had to focus the work in those areas where I could find relevant sources on my topic while making effective use of the time. Thus, I chose to focus on geographic Palestine, where the largest concentration of Palestinians resides. The global dispersal of the Palestinian people, coupled with the effects of war, forced expulsions and other factors, has also resulted in the scattering of their historical record, making it difficult for historians to collect the necessary pieces to reconstruct Palestinian history. For example, I attempted to travel to Lebanon, where I could have found additional rich resources both in people and documents, but the travel restrictions imposed on Americans by the US State Department made this impossible. For a cogent discussion of the many difficulties inherent in any research project on Palestinian women, see Rosemary Sayigh (1987) Femmes palestiniennes: une histoire en quête d'historiens, Revue d'etudes palestiniennes, 23. pp. 13-33.
2. Fatawa, (plural of fatwa), formal legal opinions in Islamic law.
3. Joan Wallach Scott (1988) Gender and the Politics of History, p. 8 (New York: Columbia University Press).
4. Paul Thompson (1988) The Voice of the Past: oral history, p. 27, pp. 6-7 (Oxford: Oxford University Press).
5. Nikki Keddie & Beth Baron (Eds) (1991) Women in Middle East History, p. 1 (New Haven: Yale University Press). Note the passive voice here, implying the objectification of women as subjects of research.
6. Not surprisingly, perhaps, Middle Eastern researchers themselves are the exception, as they recognize the importance - indeed, the urgency - of utilizing oral history to record their pasts. One such research project is Bir Zeit University's Center for Palestinian Studies and Documentation, which is exhaustively documenting and 'memorializing' through oral history interviews the Palestinian Arab villages destroyed in 1948. See Susan Slyomovics (1994) The memory of place: rebuilding the pre-1948 Palestinian village, Diaspora, 3, pp. 156-168.
7. In the intervening years, a new generation of historians has begun to utilize different methodologies and approaches from that of their predecessors. See for example, Joel Beinin & Zachary Lockman (1987) Workers on the Nile: nationalism, Communism, Islam, and the Egyptian working class, 1882-1954 (Princeton: Princeton University Press)
8. Margot Badran (1995) Feminists, Islam, and Nation (Princeton: Princeton University Press)
9. individual contributions in Edmund Burke, III (Ed.) (1993) Struggle and Survival in the Modern Middle East, (Berkeley: University of California Press). Nonetheless, methodologically, Middle East history still lags behind such subfields as European and American history, which have rich genres within their own specialities, such as labor, women's, cultural and social history. Very little oral history has been produced by Middle Eastern historians in the West; anthropologists have provided historically-oriented anthropological studies
10. See for example, Ted Swedenburg (1995) Memories of Revolt: the 1936-1939 rebellion and the Palestinian national past (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press)
11. Rosemary Sayigh (1979) From Peasants to Revolutionaries (London: Zed Press).
12. Judith E. Tucker (1983) Problems in the historiography of women in the Middle East: the case of nineteenth-century Egypt, International Journal of Middle East Studies, 15, p. 321.
13. Ted Swedenburg (1985/86) Problems in oral history: the Palestine Revolt of 1936, Birzeit Research Review, 2, p. 31.
14. Amitav Ghosh (1993) In an Antique Land, pp. 16-17 (New York: Alfred Knopf).
15. An exception to this lacuna is Soraya Altorki & Camillia Fawzi El-Solh (Eds) (1988) Arab Women in the Field: studying your own society, (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press). This excellent book, as the title suggests, focuses primarily on the personal experiences and issues specific to Arab women researchers studying their own societies. None of the contributors is a historian, however, and although many of the methodological issues raised are helpful and relevant, many problems one encounters in oral history research are not addressed.
16. Julie Peteet (1993) Authenticity and gender: the presentation of culture, in Judith E. Tucker (Ed.) Arab Women: old boundaries, new frontiers, pp. 49, 57 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press).
17. Scott, Gender and the Politics of History, p. 18.
18. Kristina Minister (1991) A feminist frame for the oral history interview, in Sherna Berger Gluck & Daphne Patai (Eds) Women's Words: the feminist practice of oral history, p. 29 (London: Routledge).
19. Sayigh, 'Femmes palestiniennes', p. 23.
20. Ibrahim Muhawi & Sharif Kanaana (1988) Speak Bird, Speak Again, p. 2 (Berkeley: University of California Press).
21. E. H. Carr (1986) What is History?, p. xx (London: Macmillan, 2nd edn, ed. by R. W. Davies).
22. Daphne Patai (1991) US academics and Third World Women: is ethical research possible? in Gluck & Patai (Eds) Women's Words, p. 142.
23. Thompson, Oral History, p. 110.
24. Sondra Hale (1991) Feminist method, process, and self-criticism: interviewing Sudanese women, in Gluck & Patai (Eds) Women's Words, p. 125.
25. Swedenburg, Memories of Revolt, p. 22. For more discussion of this 'rescue' effort and Palestinian strategies for constructing their own historical narrative, see especially pp. 17-43.
26. Patai, 'US academics', p. 137.
27. Judith Stacey, Can there be a feminist ethnography? in Gluck & Patai (Eds) Women's Words, p. 114.
28. Hale, 'Feminist method', p. 133.
29. Carr, What is History?, p. xx.