This article traces the genealogical interruptions caused by perpetual war and unrest in Gaza – at my time of writing devastated beyond recognition – as observed through the case of a Romani family from the region1. By ‘genealogy’, I am self-consciously invoking classical anthropological language in the study of kinship. In part, this is an effort to disrupt the turn away from such language in the anthropology of the last several decades for reasons that I have argued elsewhere (see Roy 2020). The situation is not homogenous. Feminist anthropology, for instance, has expressed discomfort with the androcentric roots of the gens, devised by early anthropologists based on fixed notions of patrilineal lineages, often centred on the Roman family, while also recognising its capaciousness and flexibility in theorising contemporary political projects (Bear et al 2015). Other feminist anthropologists have also recognised the utility of a ‘generational mode of thinking’ that is characterised by its inherent instability and unpredictability, ‘accounted for in relations dispersed across borders, space, and time and among disparate people and things’ (Ghosh and Sehdev 2022: 247). These latter anthropologists’ conception of ‘generation’ comes close to that found in the work of sociologist Karl Mannheim (1952), in which a ‘generation’ is interchangeable with a ‘cohort’ that is shaped by shared cultural markers, rather than a one that is bound by consanguineous kinship (see Pilcher 1994). My argument here is that the inherent instability of the gens–genealogy–generation semantic complex, as well as the instability in the concept of ‘generation’ itself, are not reasons for disposal but for further exploration. A secondary argument is that both these instabilities are biological, meaning that they are structured by constraints universal to the human experience irrespective of individual psychology; these are constraints that in anthropology are readily explored through the idiom of kinship – that which orders human relations within some construct of the family, be it consanguineous, fictive, affective or otherwise. Indeed, modern iterations of kinship categorically collapse these classical typologies (see Sahlins 2013).
In exploring the effects of perpetual war on the gens–genealogy–generation complex, I take a slightly different route from the influential view that treats the traumatic event as one that perpetuates psychologically in its aftershocks, like ‘tentacles’, in the everyday lives of its victims (Das 2006). Although the self-evidence of such tentacles will be clear in my ethnography to follow, I focus here not on the psychic life of the traumatic subject, but on the biology of human experience; on the inevitability of birth, death and the work of time in structuring all that in between. Take this to mean the bio in biopolitics. By putting biology at the centre of my analysis, my aim here is to search for anthropological structure based on the life histories captured by my fieldwork, and the concepts that emerge from this long-term engagement.
Although not explicit throughout, this article is in dialogue with two recent articles, each addressing my two main thematic underpinnings – war and kinship. The first is a recent article on life in the southern Lebanese borderlands, in which Munira Khayyat (2023) invites readers in the Global North to empathise with the everyday lives of inhabitants of corners of the Global South where war, in its multitude of forms, has become habitual; predictable, almost like seasons. Because wars since the mid-twentieth century have taken place, with some exceptions, against ‘distant’ backdrops away from the wealthy centres of liberal hegemony, Khayyat sees such possible empathy as part and parcel of decolonisation; a decolonisation, in a sense, of consciousness (2023: 184). It should not be controversial to suggest that Palestine, especially Gaza, offers similar transformative potential for the world. But how are Palestinians themselves transformed across generations by perpetual war and conflict? There is no shortage of films, novels, visual art, testimonies, for example, that narrate precisely such transformations. Take, for instance, the Palestinian writer Adania Shibli's novel Minor Detail (first published in Arabic in 2017 and translated into English in 2020), in which a Bedouin girl is raped and murdered by an Israeli soldier in the aftermath of the 1948 War. Generations later, a young woman in Ramallah becomes deeply affected by reading about the event. She sets out on a quest to investigate its circumstances, only to find herself identifying with the traumatic event to the point of neurosis. Without entering into the narrative work of the novel, the point here is that the traumatic event perpetuates across generations, as if it were a stand-alone entity of almost talismanic resilience.
Shibli's novel is a great work of literature, but its discursive orientation towards the problem of violence is indicative of tendencies in which trauma, to quote Didier Fassin and Richard Rechtman (2009: 22), ‘has imposed itself on society in such a way as to become the central reality of violence’. What would happen, however, if we think of the transmission of violence across generations not through the lens of trauma but through the ‘minor’ register of genealogy and kinship? Perhaps because the enormity of the events of 1948, its gruesome details still not fully uncovered, and the subsequent ‘growing up’ of the Palestinian story contemporaneously with advances in media technology – first cable and satellite television, then internet and social media – that the theatre of violence in Gaza, Jenin, Jerusalem and elsewhere has become a mainstay in the world's consciousness. It is perhaps understandable that kinship, especially its articulation using arcane anthropological concepts, has not been the dominant field of inquiry in narrating the Palestinian story.2 Yet, the destabilising of the Palestinian family has long been a tactic of Israeli governmentality (Roy 2024-a), notable because the centrality of kinship in the social order of the region – ‘axiomatic’, as Suad Joseph (1993) puts it – cannot be overstated. As such, my article aims to show a ‘minor’ dismemberment of Palestine, here in the register of kinship, as an effect of generations of violence.
The second article framing my discussion appears in a recent special issue of this journal (Abram and Lien 2023), in which the authors offer a conceptual pairing of ‘kinning’ and ‘de-kinning’. ‘Kinning’ refers to the well-worn position in modern anthropology, building on the classical anthropological concept of ‘affinity’, that kinship is an active process with considerable individual agency and flexibility, rather than a set of relations ‘fixed in time by birth, marriage, or death’ (2023: 4). Yet, it is not as if the ‘fixedness’ of kinship has disappeared entirely, and I engage in this article with a particular strain of structuralist anthropology that sees birth order as a fixed anthropological constraint that, among other constraints, orders social relations (Héritier 1995). ‘De-kinning’, by contrast, is not exactly an antonym of ‘kinning’, but, rather, ‘the indifference that comes with not recognising kin relations at all . . . gradually losing touch, not knowing one's cousins’ (Abram and Lien 2023: 13). The authors, as well as other articles collected in the aforementioned special issue, provide compelling examples of both kinning and de-kinning. Yet, I follow Andrew Shryock (2013) in expressing a certain exasperation that Arab/Islamic kinship, that which has historically been the bedrock of the anthropology of the Middle East – and, thus, should be a point of reference on the topic in the same way as India is for caste or the Amazon for cognition – is almost always absent from such discussions. In Arab/Islamic societies, kinship is, as mentioned above, ‘axiomatic’, not particularly permissive of fields in which kinship is ‘made’ anew. Recall here the old adage: ‘You can choose your friends but you cannot choose your family’. This being said, I offer in my ethnography here cases not exactly of ‘de-kinning’ but of interruptions of kinship roles and responsibilities within a fixed kinship order, and the difficulties, frustrations and trials to which such interruptions give way. In Palestine and especially Gaza, such interruptions, of course, are caused by seasons of devastating war.
It is with this epistemological background in mind that I turn to kinship; this ‘minor’ register of the transmission of violence. In the following two case studies, one focusing on a woman I call Farhana and the other on her maternal uncle (khal), I draw attention to not only the biological constraints at odds with the instability of a social and political situation that always demands a break from structure, but also that the instability itself announces itself through the raw materiality of biopolitics.
Farhana
Farhana is a Dom Romani woman from Gaza. Twenty-two years old when I first met her in 2016, she grew up in the Jabalia area of the strip, where Doms had settled in the 1980s after a hitherto nomadism by which they, like many other Romani groups, traversed regional borders. The erection of militarised borders that arrived with the foundation of Israel in 1948 curtailed movement between Palestine and the remainder of the Levantine region for perhaps the first time in history. Doms, however, redirected their labour and human flows towards Egypt via the Sinai peninsula, which remained accessible from Gaza under successive Egyptian and Israeli regimes between 1948 and 1982. Further constraints emerged after the advent of the Israeli checkpoint system in the late 1980s and early 1990s, and ultimately the blockade of the strip by Israel and Egypt beginning in 2007. To the extent that life usually finds a way even in impossible situations, new ‘illegal’ migrant communities of Doms (and non-Doms) from Gaza are today found all over the West Bank – the economically more preferable of the two nominally Palestinian-administered territories – and above all in the working class peripheries between Jerusalem and Ramallah. Families from Gaza settle together in clusters in specific localities, often in a single apartment building or a street, shaping new recognisably Gazan quarters that evoke the Arabic hara, an urban unit characterised by kinship or ethnic affiliation. Israel is aware of these new formations. In managing these new clandestine migrations, Israel is attentive to the workings of kinship. For instance, the maternity ward at the Makassed Hospital, the main Palestinian hospital in Jerusalem, overflows with Gazan children with birth-related complications. But escorting them to the hospital is not the mother or even the father, but usually an elderly relative. These are the relatives who have been granted a temporary permit to exit Gaza as chaperones for children needing medical care in Jerusalem, for fears that granting the permit to the mother would effectively be a one-way ticket out of Gaza. This, in any case, was the status quo before the war beginning October 2023 and subsequent genocide.
When I first met Farhana, she had recently arrived in the West Bank town of al-Ram from Gaza, reunited with her parents, four of her siblings and other extended family after several years of them having begun their exodus from Gaza. Since that time, another of her brothers has made it out of Gaza with his children, albeit leaving his wife behind, while three of her brothers still remain in the strip. The family, like other Gazan families, is now fractured from within the immediate household, having no choice then but to create new kinship assemblages from the extended family to mitigate suddenly missing members. As the eldest daughter of eight siblings and the third eldest overall, Farhana was always something of a second mother to her younger siblings, as well as to the numerous children born to her brothers. By being the eldest daughter, her responsibilities became a lifelong endeavour as the first in a set of siblings – ‘fixed’, as I discuss shortly – in contrast to the ‘middle’ siblings whose responsibilities may change with the arrival of new siblings. This gave Farhana a certain maternal authority in the family, but one that was interrupted when the family began leaving Gaza. We might see the chronology of her birth order as the eldest daughter as fixing her to a set of duties, but the biological conditions of her life, here determined by political instability, as corrupting her capacity to perform these duties. It should not be difficult to imagine the shock that accompanies the rupture of a closely knit family for whom kinship is contiguous with life itself – the ‘mutuality of being’, as Marshall Sahlins (2013) famously called it – as well as the shock of living three wars between 2008 and 2014 before she was able to migrate. In al-Ram, I found Farhana's role as caretaker and junior maternal authority restored, but with a certain discontinuity that corrupted the integrity of her role. Reassuming her duties towards those who left Gaza as infants and are now conscious, speaking children, as well as for those born in the West Bank after the exodus from Gaza, Farhana is at once a respected family member – again, a kind of junior mother – but also kind of a stranger who appeared one day from a faraway place.
With Farhana, we can see the integrity of collective duty determined by biological chronology – the duties or ‘obligations’ of kinship – with the corruption of this chronology by biopolitical factors like war, migration and so forth. But there is another way in which Farhana's trajectory is complicated. Doms are a Romani people still transitioning from itinerant labour to settled urban life, and Farhana's female kin almost entirely work in begging and alms collecting as a relic of a Romani itinerant past. Prior to the first Palestinian intifada of 1987–1993, the failure of which inflicted long-term damage to what is morally permissible in society, the repertoire of possible labour for Dom women in Gaza included, alongside begging, professional dancing, theatre and other amateur arts (to be discussed later).3 Farhana, a child of the intifada, only learned this specialised labour within the private confines of the household, but, unlike most of her female family, only deployed this skill in times of economic hardship. Farhana, in a lightening of her kinship duties with the migration of her family members to the West Bank, completed her secondary education and enrolled in university in Gaza to study law – the first in her family to do either. To be sure, I do not wish to detract from Farhana's exceptional achievements with functionalist explanations, but it is true that a ‘space’ was made available for her by the partial relieving of her kinship duties. But even this space invites context given her exceptional circumstances. Her studies were constantly interrupted by university closures during times of conflict, general strikes and more, and her recollections of the sound of bombs falling during Israeli attacks are chilling enough to unsettle even the calloused heart of an anthropologist of a war-torn Middle East. All of this is to say, Farhana's qualitative selfhood – her subjectivity, if you will – comes into conflict with her ‘fixed’ place in her lineage as the eldest daughter. It is a kinship role that endures interruptions, but is not without a certain estrangement that has everything to do with the vulnerability of biological life.
This is, of course, only part of Farhana's story, of which there are many twists and turns; all of which, to my analytic sensibilities anyway, revolve around kinship. Farhana, after arriving in the West Bank, continued her studies, this time at a two-year college, but had to begin from the first year because of being unable to transfer her university credits from Gaza. A secondary education and then a longer than usual tertiary education brought Farhana into prolonged society with other Palestinians in a way that her family members had never experienced. She formed friendships outside the family, became introduced to the world of religious piety that is a central feature of public decency but unavailable in her household, and, in the period that I got to know her, began clandestinely dating a (non-Romani) man from Ramallah. Yet, this integration into public life was to be at all costs kept separate from the life of the family, and particularly from any exposure to the family trade – begging. Just as the recipients of Farhana's kinship duties became estranged from her by the temporal interruption, Farhana too became estranged from her family.
Recognition and Transmission
What does Farhana's newfound strangeness in the family mean in anthropological terms? For a start, we can establish that unforeseen interruptions, improvisations, setbacks and little sieges that inflict the biological trajectory of life work together with temporal categories to determine the nature of kinship. The gens here is fundamentally unstable; again, ‘accounted for in relations dispersed across borders, space and time and among disparate people and things’ (Ghosh and Sehdev 2022: 247). At the same time, this fundamental instability is nonetheless conditioned by some constraints, of which one is the ‘fixedness’ of Farhana's place as the eldest daughter. It was Françoise Héritier (1995) who observed that, regardless of the myriad of variations of the world's kinship systems, three maxims can be said to be stable in spite of cultural relativity: (1) life is born from some kind of union of man and woman (regardless of fertilisation technique), (2) all individuals are born as a set of possible siblings and, crucially, (3) the birth order of these siblings is fixed.
Indeed, as per Héritier's second and third maxims, Farhana's disappearance and reappearance in her family does not alter her position as the eldest daughter and the responsibilities that this entails, however estranged she might have become. Paul Ricoeur, in a phenomenological commentary on Héritier, is, like me, stimulated by the observation that birth order in a set of siblings is an unchangeable constraint of biological life. Ricoeur (2005: 191–192) zooms in on the ethnological artefact par excellence – the kinship diagram – to make the point that, in anthropology's system of representing genealogy, the position of the ego is at the base of a family tree, a base from which ego's ‘fixed’ relations are represented by a series of splitting lines connecting various nodes that represent not only kinship relations but also time. He invites the reader then to shift from the external perspective of looking at this kinship diagram and to consider the ‘meaning experienced by the ego in this system of places’, which, for Ricoeur, is the civil identity conferred on the individual precisely by the place that one occupies in a lineage;4 that is, by civil institutions, and so forth. I quote his exquisite reflections:
In thinking about the meaning of this civil identity for myself, I discover with astonishment that before being able to think about myself or wanting to be a subject of perception, action, imputation, or rights, I was and still remain this ‘object’ . . . The parental project from which I issued – whatever it may have been – transformed the static aspect of the genealogical table into an instituting dynamic, one indicated by the word transmission – a transmission of life, itself instituted as human by the genealogical principle; transmission of the family legend . . . It is this contraction of a transmitted treasure into a naming process that authorizes our speaking for the first time of recognition in terms of a lineage. (2005: 193)
Lineage, for Ricoeur, is thus a twofold process of recognition and transmission. Recognition, that is, meaning both recognising oneself and being recognised by others within the kinship order, and transmission meaning that the ego is a ‘fixed’ fuse through which all kinds other relations are transmitting like currents. One might call this a reprisal of the nature/culture divide, and the contingency of the two to one another. If we are to put ourselves in Farhana's place in her kinship order in an act of radical empathy (that which I shorthanded in my introduction as ‘consciousness’), we can perhaps begin to feel the weight of the slow transmission of violence in the Palestinian family; a transmission that transforms the nature of the family itself. It is not, as in Shibli's novel, a passing of a traumatic event from one generation to another like a talismanic object, nor is it what is popularly referred to as ‘intergenerational trauma’. Both of these are, of course, also possible, but my reading of Farhana's story puts emphasis on the effects of biopolitics on the constraints by which the family is structured – that is to say, the effects of biopolitics on the kinship system itself. Note that the constraints on which I focus here, those observed by Héritier and elaborated phenomenologically by Ricoeur, are biological ones, determined by objective universal experience based on the finitude of human life. However, the expressions of experience transmitting through these constraints are constantly being remade and reinterpreted by all the nodes implicated in a kinship network – that which Ricoeur designates as the double movement of transmission and ‘recognition’. This is one way by which to make sense of the continuous making and remaking of kinship under conditions of extreme long-term duress.
I turn now to another case from Farhana's family to complement the above points, but with a slight variation. Unlike Farhana's case in which her generational expectations are able to withstand the onslaught of biopolitical pressures, albeit with a certain estrangement, the following is a case in which such expectations are remade.
Khalil
A sudden death in Farhana's family caused shockwaves that are still being felt. Farhana's youngest maternal uncle, who I will call Khalil, passed away last year from a heart attack. It came as quite a surprise to all; he was in his early fifties and was not known to have any serious illnesses. Khalil had become something of the head of his extended family for a number of reasons, fulfilling the ‘vacant’ role of paternal authority – ostensibly the ‘head of the family’ – because his two older brothers had become virtually non-functional as authority figures due to pervasive substance abuse. This is an unusual flouting of the ‘fixed’ duties prescribed to a generational order, as I will discuss shortly. He was a charismatic and resourceful individual, who amassed significant wealth in a short period of time through a variety of schemes, some illegal, and he was the first in his family to buy an apartment in the outskirts of Ramallah a few years before his unexpected death – no small feat given the rising cost of real estate in Ramallah. He was also the first of his siblings to successfully migrate from Gaza to the West Bank, thus paving the way for the migration of dozens of his family members and the establishment of a Gazan enclave first in al-Ram and later in another locality near Ramallah. By the time of Khalil's sudden death, his two older brothers had also died, one after migrating to the West Bank and the other in Gaza.
I have written elsewhere (Roy 2024-b) about Khalil's death from the perspective of his younger sister – Farhana's maternal aunt – but here I would like to assess the undoing of the generational order and Khalil's ascendance to paternal authority in the context of the extraordinary circumstances inflicting Palestine. Khalil was in his late teens when the intifada erupted in 1987. Not being particularly responsible for the welfare of his family because of his age and also his place in the generational order, Khalil had devoted himself instead to a carefree, almost bohemian life on the streets of Gaza. He often frequented Gaza's cinemas, then dominated by Bollywood releases, and family photo albums from the 1980s and 1990s reveal Khalil's close mimicry of hair styles and fashions of Indian actors from that era. Indeed, the first time I visited Khalil in his home in 2016, I was surprised to find a framed photo of Bollywood legend Amitabh Bachchan hanging on his salon wall, alongside those of Yasser Arafat, Gamal Abdel Nasser and Saddam Hussein – heroes of the Palestinian cause on the international stage. Those who remember Khalil from his youth recall also his penchant for foreign spirits, once widely available in a Gazan society that was ‘purified’ by Islamist currents during the intifada, as well as hashish. Khalil carried these habits into middle age and to Ramallah, but by then had become accustomed to containing such moral deviance to the private sphere of his household, protecting what had become a public pious persona.
The intifada struck Doms in Gaza like a lightning bolt. The advent of Israel's new checkpoint system made mobile Romani labour difficult. Public attitudes towards Romanies soured under the influence of the new Islamist currents, and existing associations of Romanies with loose sexual mores deepened.5 Recognisably Romani labour, like cabaret dancing for women, became outlawed overnight under the new conservatism, affecting the livelihoods of two of Khalil's sisters, and (as discussed earlier) narrowing their existing labour repertoire to begging and alms-collecting only. His two elder brothers were general bricoleurs and sometimes alms-collectors, but also part-time musicians – another profession deemed unacceptable by the new Islamist current during the political emergency of the intifada.6 It was then that Khalil, hitherto the carefree younger brother, assumed greater financial responsibility in the family. Khalil's resourcefulness here deserves special mention. He was able to leverage his wide network of acquaintances from his ‘bohemian’ days, and he quickly became a reliable provider through a variety of small-time dealings. Gradually, he became the main decision-maker in the family. His elder brothers, previously more responsible for providing steady income for the family, were left emaciated by the new climate, and fell into patterns of substance abuse and alcoholism that they were never able to overcome.
While Khalil ‘ascended’ in terms of responsibility and rank in the family, remaking generational hierarchies, he was nonetheless still bound to the affects of his ‘fixed’ role as the younger brother. Classic anthropological studies of Arab kinship have long held that the younger brother's relationship to various other nodes in the family is characterised by a ‘romantic’ undertone (Joseph 1994). The relationship between ego/maternal uncle and brother/sister were said to show mutual loving, extreme fidelity to the other (Granqvist 1931) and, in Freudian analyses of the latter relationship, incestuous desire (El-Shamy 1979). Although I distance myself from such absolute structuralist categories, there was indeed something avuncular about Khalil. There was a lightness between him and his sisters, as well as between his nieces and nephews, including Farhana, that did not quite match the attributes of paternal authority that he had come to assume; a role marked, as per psychoanalysis and structuralist Arab kinship, by fearsome authority modelled on both kingship and the semitic God (Borneman 2004; Safouan 2007; Sawaf 2013). Again, I distance myself from such absolute structural categories, but I do take such attitudes to indicate a tendency in Arab kinship that I use as a discussion point in conceptualising Khalil's simultaneously shifting and ‘fixed’ place in his kinship universe. The gens is fundamentally unstable and dispersed, but it is also bound by a biological order.
Roughly a year prior to Khalil's passing, the family been consumed by a months-long feud with the household of his eldest sister – Farhana's mother. It was inopportune timing, because one of this sister's sons was supposed to have been married during this time, and another marriage, albeit likely doomed, was also being negotiated involving Farhana and her non-Romani lover. Khalil, having become the paternal authority in the family, was the arbitrator for these negotiations. All of this was put on hold during the feud. The troubles originated between Khalil's sons and the sons of the sister and her husband, a man I will call Mahmoud, over a disputed dealing of synthetic cannabis known locally as nice-guy, but it soon spread to other areas of family politics. Synthetic cannabinoids are readily available in the Palestinian territories, often easiest to buy in some of the most heavily militarised areas of the territories, like around Israeli checkpoints (Palestinian National Institute of Public Health 2017), leading to popular speculation that Israel encourages the flooding of addictive and destructive drugs into the Palestinian market. Regardless of the reason for the availability of such drugs, Khalil's sons have been able to capitalise on the demand, and such ‘diversification’ of Romani labour is part and parcel of the biopolitics of Palestine. I was present in Palestine for only the beginnings and after the happy ending of this feud, but I followed its disturbing crescendo from America by means of social media. More than once, I watched each set of sons live-stream violent threats from outside the homes of members of the other household, like professional wrestling monologues to hype a crowd. I do not know the full details of the extent of violence deployed, but I know of a few streetfights that resulted in police intervention, and at least one incident of vandalising a car.
What sense can anthropology make of this feud between (depending on from which ego perspective one looks) siblings, affines and cousins? For one, Mahmoud is the husband of Khalil's eldest sister, meaning that he is married to a sister who represents the ‘end’ of the living sibling set and who – like Farhana – was a kind of junior mother to her other siblings for being the eldest sister. Khalil's feud with Mahmoud, to the extent that he is married to this sister, was in some sense a feud between the lowest and highest rungs in the generational order of the sibling set. Because of this, the violence between the sons had both fratricidal and matricidal characteristics. If we are to take the ‘romantic’ view of the aforementioned anthropological classics in Arab kinship again as a talking point (if nothing else), such things are not supposed to happen to the younger brother; especially one partially nursed by this elder sister. Here, again, we see a betrayal of the expectations of belonging to a ‘fixed’ place in a lineage and the interruptions of chronic instability in Palestine that stitch into everyday life and kinship.
When I returned to Palestine after the feud's resolution, I spoke to Khalil on the phone but ultimately did not manage to visit him. Had it worked out, it would have been our last meeting, for he passed away shortly thereafter. I did, however, visit several other members of this family, including the other feuding household. The resolution of the feud had brought back a certain stability to this family, and the two marriage plans that were put on hold during the conflict were now moving along. I close my discussion of Khalil by observing that, in the case that I just described, the conjugal life of the younger generation is contingent on the stability of elder generations. That is to say, kinship here is contingent and hierarchical. It is not a rhizome by which any one point connects to any other point. Rather, a generational order organises what is possible and acceptable in kinship, although this order is prone to an assault from the biopolitical, that which in Palestine is particularly pertinent. To this extent, kinship is not only genealogy, but it is also genealogical.
Conclusion
Working towards a conclusion, I remind the reader here that the idea that birth order helps give shape to a social order is not a particularly new concept in anthropology. Meyers Fortes, for instance, noted in his classic ethnography of the Tallensi that birth order shapes structures of relations between siblings to the extent that two consecutive siblings are born rivals, whereas ‘odd numbered’ siblings are born into a relation of cooperation and loyalty (Fortes 1949). Perhaps a more universal example is the institution of the avunculate. Despite the varying interpretations of the culturally relativist variations of a given avunculate, the agreed-on premise that some sort of a special relationship is expected between a woman's (usually male) child and her (often youngest) brother is based on a ‘fixing’ of a set of relations that are both vertical and lateral. Furthermore, a case might be made that it is precisely an institution like that of the avunculate in which a given birth order is accentuated, and that which reinforces the chronology of the aforementioned vertical and lateral relations such as – taking the woman as ego – those between her youngest brother and her other siblings, as well as between her oldest son and younger children. Of course, this is contingent on how a particular version of an avunculate might determine sibling and gender relations. As recently as the 1990s, Claude Lévi-Strauss insisted on the viability of the avunculate in the figure of Earl Spencer, the brother of Princess Diana, who inherited a heightened responsibility in the upbringing of his nephew after the death of his sister. Lévi-Strauss saw this as a revival of an older avunculate, a feature of English kinship in the Middle Ages, that ‘returns’ in moments of crisis (Godelier 2018: 211–213; Lévi-Strauss 2004: 37–39).
What I have attempted to do in this article is bring attention to how this temporal ordering of social relations and expectations is restricted by the vulnerability of biological life. The two cases that I described illustrate two contrasting (but contradictory) aspects of the gens. Farhana's case illustrates constraint, whereas Khalil's case is characterised by possibility. For Farhana, we see that, regardless of the performance of her kinship duties having become compromised by Ricoeur's lateral or horizontal axis of context, the vertical line of her lineage could not be remade. I insist on the ‘biological’ as the frame by which to understand the contextual axis because it is her biological fact of life, in an absolute non-Cartesian sense that does not distinguish between res extensa/res cogitans, that is the site of war trauma and other political violence, social pressures and the work of time. Khalil, by contrast, is a case in which the constraint of his place in his generational order was partially remade by the circumstances of the political milieu of Palestine. I say ‘partially’ because although he assumed an authoritative position in the family despite his ‘fixed’ place as the youngest brother, he nonetheless retained the avuncular affects determined by his genealogical order. To be clear, my point in making such arguments is not to assert any kind of biological determinism. Rather, it is to interrogate what work biological life, as opposed to psychic life, does in ordering kinship.
Marshall Sahlins (2013), commenting on over a century of anthropological theory on kinship, gives both positive and negative definitions of kinship. ‘It is’, he writes, ‘the mutuality of being’. And what it ‘is not’ is ‘biology’. I have interrogated at length Sahlins’ concept of a mutuality of being elsewhere (Roy 2020), so I will not repeat those arguments here. To summarise, however, my point is that any kind of definitive statement on a shared human experience, that to which a ‘mutuality of being’ aspires, must also take into account humanity's destructive elements; its ethical shortcomings, death drives, tyrannies, etc. Many of these elements are biological. Moreover, and far from Sahlins’ idyllic vision of kinship, the household is often the site of some of the most cruel forms of violence (see Das 2006; Douglas 1991). Not only is it that family is here the medium of violence, but it is violence itself that shapes the very nature of a given family. This is perhaps an obvious point, but it is not at all obvious how families respond to this violent external stimuli. What I have argued here is that, in spite of infinite possible variations at the level of expression, there are certain finite constraints through which stimuli are absorbed. In this, I am making an argument very close to Clifford Geertz's (1966) view of culture as a ‘set of control mechanisms’ that narrow a certain infinitude of experience to a repertoire of possible moves. Héritier's three-tiered rubric is one such set of control mechanisms but, unlike Geertz (and crucially) is based on the biological experience of the human and not culture.
Kinship is messy. This is true both in its essential nature and also in its representation in anthropological theory. In the case of Romanies in Palestine, individuals often practice multiple simultaneous marriages, adoptions and abandonments, cousin marriages and sometimes continue having children late into life. Because of this, I have found it impossible to draw kinship diagrams to visually represent genealogy with temporal and spatial coherence. This does not mean that kinship does not exist, as anthropology of the 1980s surreptitiously promoted (e.g. Schneider 1984), but merely that visual and theoretical representation of kinship is limited in corresponding to its experience. The recalcitrance of Dom Romani families in Palestine to anthropological structure is mirrored in the generational relations within Dom families. They expand, contrast, ascend and sometimes collapse; yet they operate within an enterprise universally recognisable as the family, just as time runs through this enterprise universally recognisably as genealogy. Such ‘universals’, however, are interrupted, disoriented and reordered, but all without displacing the gens itself.
There is one final point that I wish to make before concluding. Although this article has been concerned with cases from my fieldwork with Dom Romani families in Palestine, I suspect that it may as well have been about any ‘kind’ of Palestinian family. True, there are certain peculiarities to Dom kinship that are not present in other Palestinian families, but it is also true, in a Tolstoyan spirit, that all unhappy families are unhappy in different ways, meaning that all families have their particularities. To this extent, the ‘minor genealogies’ that I have traced here of people living inflicted by decades of conflict are not contained to the Romani experience. They are also Palestinian genealogies, and Global South genealogies; minor genealogies of kinship remade, subtle and noticeable perhaps only to the anthropologist patiently sojourning a discursive world of representation based on a real world of tragedy.
Acknowledgements
The author would like to thank the Age and Generation Unit at Leibniz-Zentrum Moderner Orient, whose conference in 2023 is where these ideas were first articulated, and especially Samuli Schielke. The author would also like to commemorate Megha Sharma Sehdev for her “generational mode of thinking.”
Notes
The ethnographic content of this article does not discuss the war beginning in October 2023, which has caused genealogical ruptures in the family in a way that can no longer be considered ‘minor’. The family discussed in this article has lost close relatives in Gaza during the war, and all remaining relatives in Gaza have been displaced to refugee camps. As such, the longue durée of my genealogy under perpetual war extends far beyond the scope of this article.
One exception to this is Lotte Buch Segal’s (2016) sensitive ethnography of the wives of male Palestinian prisoners. In it, Buch Segal concludes that, in Palestine, kinship is the ‘anchor of belonging’ that binds individuals to one other, as well as to the collective, in the absence of a territorial state.
Whereas begging continues as a labour practice for Dom women, Dom men have diversified their labour to other working class vocations like construction work and other types of manual labour.
It has been brought to my attention by Reviewer 1 of this article that the English translation of Ricoeur’s text, on which I base this portion of my discussion, is imprecise. In the translation, Ricoeur’s use of the French lignée (meaning the succession of individuals) is collapsed with lignage (meaning the analytic concept of such succession) by the use of the English ‘lineage’. Although I note the inadequacy of the translation, I find the collapsed term to be nonetheless satisfactory in conveying descent.
For new conservatisms that emerged during the intifada, see Tamari (2009) and Hammami (1990).
To illustrate the extent of the cultural consequences of the intifada years, a Palestinian musician and music teacher in Jerusalem tells me that, after the standstill in institutional music patronage and education during the six years of the intifada, he was unable to find a single clarinettist in the city for a project he was assembling at the close of that period. Those who played clarinet at a high level had either left the country or had become rusty to the point of professional performance not being viable. The situation has of course recovered since then, but one wonders what long-term consequences were caused by this six-year interruption in Palestinian cultural life.
References
Abram, S. and M. E. Lien 2023. ‘Kinning and de-kinning houses: heirlooms and the reproduction of family’, Social Anthropology 31: 1–17.
Bear, L., K. Ho, A. Tsing and S. Yanagisako 2015. ‘Gens: a feminist manifesto for the study of capitalism’. Fieldsights (https://culanth.org/fieldsights/gens-a-feminist-manifesto-for-the-study-of-capitalism) Accessed 30 May 2023.
Borneman, J. 2004. Introduction: theorizing regime ends, in J. Borneman (ed.), Death of the father: an anthropology of the end in political authority, 1–28. Berghahn.
Buch Segal, L. 2016. No Place for Grief: Martyrs, Prisoners, and Mourning in Contemporary Palestine. Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press.
Das, V. 2006. Life and words: violence and the descent into the ordinary. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.
Douglas, M. 1991. ‘The idea of a home: a kind of space’, Social Research 58: 287–307.
El-Shamy, H. 1979. Brother and sister type: a cognitive behavioristic analysis of a Middle Eastern oikotype. London: Folklore Publications Group.
Fassin, D. and R. Rechtman 2009. The empire of trauma: an inquiry into the condition of victimhood. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Fortes, M. 1949. The web of kinship among the Tallensi. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Geertz, C. 1966. ‘The impact of the concept of culture on the concept of man’, Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists 22: 2–8.
Ghosh, S. and M. Sehdev 2022. ‘Generations’, Feminist Anthropology 3: 246–253.
Godelier, M. 2018. Claude Lévi-Strauss: a critical study of his thought. London: Verso.
Granqvist, H. 1931. Marriage conditions in a Palestinian village. Helsingfors.
Hammami, R. 1990. ‘Women, the hijab and the intifada’, Middle East Report 164/165: 24–28.
Héritier, F. 1995. Masculin/féminin I: La pensée de la différence. JACOB.
Joseph, S. 1993. ‘Gender and relationality among Arab damilies in Lebanon’, Feminist Studies 19: 465–486.
Joseph, S. 1994. ‘Brother/sister relationships: connectivity, love, and power in the reproduction of patriarchy in Lebanon’, American Ethnologist 21: 50–73.
Khayyat, M. 2023. ‘Resistant ecologies: the life of war in South Lebanon’, American Ethnologist 50: 181–195.
Lévi-Strauss, C. 2004. Cahiers de l'Herne. Éditions de L'Herne.
Mannheim, K. 1952. Essays on the sociology of knowledge. RKP Press.
Palestine National Institute of Public Health 2017. ‘Illicit drug use in Palestine: a qualitative investigation’ (https://www.unodc.org/documents/publications/Illicit_Drug_Use_in_Palestine.pdf) Accessed 30 May 2023.
Pilcher, J. 1994. ‘Mannheim's sociology of generations: an undervalued legacy’, British Journal of Sociology 45: 481–495.
Ricoeur, P. 2005. The course of recognition. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Roy 2024-a. Relative Strangers: Romani kinship and Palestinian difference. Toronto, ON: University of Toronto Press.
Roy 2024-b. ‘A space of appearance: Romani publics and privates in the Middle East’, Anthropological Theory 24: 175–200.
Roy, A. 2020. ‘The returns of life: “Making” kinship in life and death’, Anthropological Theory 20: 484–507.
Safouan, M. 2007. Why are the Arabs not free? The politics of writing. Oxford: Blackwell.
Sahlins, M. 2013. What kinship is – and is not. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.
Sawaf, Z. 2013. ‘Youth and the revolution in Egypt: what kinship tells us’, Contemporary Arab Affairs 6: 1–16.
Schneider, D. 1984. A critique of the study of kinship. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press.
Shibli, A. 2020. Minor detail. New York: New Directions.
Shryock, A. 2013. ‘It's this, not that: how Marshall Sahlins solves kinship’, HAU 3: 271–279.
Tamari, S. 2009. Mountains against the sea: essays on Palestinian society and culture. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.