Star-Tied Water: Tracing Life in a Colonized Palestinian Village During the Anthropocene

Authors

  • Author

  • Yasmeen Qadan

Keywords:

Palestinian Village, Slowness, Anthropocene, Colonialism, Acceleration, Sensory Environment, Star-tied Water

Abstract

This article traces practices that sustain the continuity of life in Palestinian villages, approaching practitioners intimately through a methodology of slowness. It examines the Anthropocene as an embodiment of accelerated time deeply intertwined with modernity, colonialism, and capitalism. It argues that resistance to this acceleration emerges through the sensory environment and the relationality between all its components, from the earth to the sky and stars, to the blood in our veins. Focusing on the practice of star-tying water, this article explores an alternative trajectory of interconnected movement between the environment and the body, allowing for contemplation of the surrounding space and the identification of practices that bridge past, present, and future.

References

  1. The tripartite structure of modernity, colonization, and capitalism, which underpins the redefinition of the environment in the Palestinian context, is rooted in the co-articulation of progress, speed, value, consumption, violence, and attrition. These components are not discrete. This structure was built by imposing categories that legitimized a continuous, accelerating process of destruction of colonized bodies and environment.
  2. Tawfiq Canaan, “Folklore of the seasons in Palestine,” Journal of the Palestine Oriental Society , vol. 3 (1923), pp. 21-35; Tawfiq Canaan, “Plant-lore in Palestinian Superstition,” Journal of the Palestine Oriental Society , vol. 8 (1928), pp. 163-203. We might also add the work of the journal al-Turāth wa-l-Mujtamaʿ (Heritage and Society), founded by the Inash Alusra Association in the early 1970s, which drew heavily on Canaan’s work and published translations of many of his articles as well as other heritage and folklore pieces. See: Inash Alusra Association , accessed on 20/10/2024 at: https://tinyurl.com/bdnatmyz
  3. For more on the anthropological concept of dwelling, see: Tim Ingold, Being Alive: Essays on Movement: Knowledge and Description (London: Routledge, 2001); Martin Heidegger, Building Dwelling Thinking: In Poetry, Language, Thought , Albert Hofstadter (trans.) (New York: Harper & Row, 1971), pp. 145-161; Christopher Tilley, A Phenomenology of Landscape: Places, Paths and Monuments (Oxford: Berg, 1994).
  4. This paper is based on capitalist-colonial acceleration in Palestine, from British colonialism to the present time. British colonialism intensified Ottoman land laws, which created five categories of land, to legally designate agricultural land, rationalize farming, and facilitate the collection of taxes without having to rely on the local customary law of the ḥamūla and the ties of kinship and solidarity. According to Marxist structuralism, British exploited this law to introduce capitalist production via European-Jewish capital investments, land purchases from absentee landlords, and reclassification of “dead lands” to build settlements, creating markets for their products, which destroyed local Palestinian agricultural produce value. Cash-based economies led to peasant indebtedness and wage labour, and generated surplus value for European-Jewish settlements and a capitalist mode of production. This also deepened class divisions and empowered local elites (landowners), who themselves exploited the same property law. See: Talal Asad, “Class Transformation under the Mandate,” MERIP Reports , no. 53 (December 1976).
  5. Walter Benjamin, “Central Park,” in: Walter Benjamin, Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings , vol. 4: 1938-1940 , Howard Eiland & Michael W. Jennings (eds.) (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University press, 2003), pp. 30-31.
  6. Peter Brannen, “The Anthropocene is a Joke,” The Atlantic , 13/8/2019, accessed on 20/10/2024, at: https://tinyurl.com/2avcuyjz
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  12. Ibid., pp. 77-78.
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  26. Paul Klee’s Angel of History was central to Benjamin’s article on the concept of history. See: Walter Benjamin, “On the Concept of History,” Simon Fraser University , accessed at: https://tinyurl.com/5m3zp2d7
  27. Wajcman & Dodd, pp. 34-36.
  28. Benjamin, “On the Concept of History.”
  29. Ibid., thesis XIV.
  30. Ibid., thesis VI.
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  32. Walter Benjamin, One-Way Street and Other Writings , Edmund Jephcott & Kingsley Shorter (trans.) (London: NLB, 1979).
  33. Raja Shehadeh, Palestinian Walks: Notes on a Vanishing Landscape (London: Profile Books, 2009).
  34. Henri Bergson, Collected Works (New York: Shrine of Knowledge, 2020).
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  36. Ibid., pp. 416-418.
  37. Benjamin, The Arcades Project.
  38. Benjamin, “Central Park,” pp. 30-31.
  39. Benjamin, The Arcades Project , p. 417.
  40. Jacob Edmund, “The Flâneur in Exile,” Comparative Literature Review , vol. 62, no. 4 (2010), pp. 376-398.
  41. My mother’s practice of “star-tying” water extends from the early 1980s to the present. She learned it from her mother and grandmother, meaning that this tradition goes back, at least, to the 1930s.
  42. This section of the study draws on my doctoral thesis, which was titled al-Unṭūlūjya al-Bīʾiyya fī Zamaniyyat al-Fallāḥ al-Falasṭīnī: Masārāt al-Ḥaraka fī al-Muʿāsh al-Yawmī.
  43. Anas Ibrahim, “al-Sayṭara al-Isrāʾīliyya ʿalā al-Miyāh… Yanābīʿ al-Ḍaffa al-Gharbiyya ka-Mawāqiʿ Irtikāz li-l-Mumārasāt al-Istiyṭāniyya,” MADAR , 23/8/2021, accessed on 20/10/2024 at: https://tinyurl.com/yc24f7dk; Taysir Jabbara, “al-Sayṭara al-Ṣuhyūniyya ʿalā al-Miyāh fī Filasṭīn,” Reports and Follow Ups , Palestinian Research Centre, 12 December 2022, accessed on 20/10/2024 at: https://tinyurl.com/e5ew58ks
  44. Winona LaDuke, The Winona LaDuke Reader: A Collection of Essential Writings (Stillwater, MN: Voyageur Press, Inc, 2002), p. 58.
  45. In 2023-2024, as part of its pedagogical programme, the Birzeit University Museum assembled a group of anthropologists, sociologists, and historians to re-read the works of Tawfiq Canaan – most of whose collection of amulets and charms, more than 1,400 pieces, are held by the museum. The group attempted to understand Canaan’s intellectual trajectory by linking his texts to various items from his collection. While Canaan was clearly anxious that the peasantry was dying as a result of the project of colonial-modernist advancement, his works also show a hesitancy: a contradiction between his role as a doctor and his interest in all the forms of healing that lived with the peasantry on and within their bodies, above their heads, and beneath their feet. See: “Majmūʿat Tawfīq Kanʿān li-l-Ḥujub wa-l-Tamāʾim al-Filasṭīniyya,” Birzeit University Museum , accessed on 20/10/2024 at: https://tinyurl.com/78hhpv73
  46. Ibid., pp. 67-68.
  47. My father died in 2014 at the age of 55. He was a metalworker. From childhood, I saw him practice many forms of healing practice either at home or at my grandmother’s house.
  48. Tawfiq Canaan, “Arabic Magic Bowls,” Journal of the Palestine Oriental Society , vol. 16 (1936), pp. 79-127.
  49. Tawfiq Canaan, “Tasit ar-Radifeh (Fear Cup),” Journal of the Palestine Oriental Society , vol. 3 (1923), p. 130.
  50. Canaan also notes common expressions used by Palestinians to indicate that someone is unlucky: “his star is weak” [najmuh ḍaʿīf], “his ascension is weak” [ṭālʿuh ḍaʿīf]. Ibid., p. 129. Source: Tawfiq Canaan Collection, Birzeit University Museum, Palestine
  51. After my father’s death, we found many medicinal implements of this kind that he used. In the storeroom, there was a contract with one of his teachers, who he had borrowed these implements from Abu al-Farhani, from Tulkarm camp. The implements were returned to him in full.
  52. Canaan, “Arabic Magic Bowls,” p. 122.
  53. The bowl, dating back to 1920, is engraved with carvings of the 12 Signs of the Zodiac. In the middle, there is a six-line imprint, two intertwined circles, and two human figures.
  54. Rana Barakat, “Writing/ Righting Palestine Studies: Settler Colonialism, Indigenous Sovereignty and Resisting the Ghost(s) of History,” Settler Colonial Studies , vol. 8, no. 3 (2017), pp. 349-363.
  55. Hartog, pp. 312-314.
  56. Tim Ingold, The Perception of the Environment: Essays on Livelihood, Dwelling and Skill (London: Routledge, 2000).
  57. Paul Cloke & Owain Jones, “Dwelling, Place, and Landscape: An Orchard in Somerset,” Environment and Planning A , vol. 33, no. 4 (2001), pp. 649-666.
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