Glenn Bowman (University of Kent at Canterbury)
Walling and Encystation: Containment as a Mode of Warfare
It seems vital, in the face of escalating Israeli expansionism in the Palestinian Territories and obstructionism in the “Peace Process”, to theorize the cultural foundations of a process of containment and dispossession of Palestinians that can no longer convincingly be seen as mere strategy. Symptomatic of the Israeli state program is the “wall” (a.k.a., “the Security Fence or the “Apartheid Wall”) and its radical encroachment into territory designed as the grounds of a future Palestinian state. The following essay attempts an anthropological analysis of the concept of “border” in contemporary Israeli thought and practice, and, in so doing, assesses the impact of a limitless sovereignty on both an encompassed minority population and on international relations more generally.
Glenn Bowman studied comparative literature, folklore and
folklife, and critical theory in the United States before coming to
Oxford in the late seventies to work under Edwin Ardener and Michael
Gilsenan at the Institute of Social Anthropology in Oxford. His
doctoral field research was carried out on the topic of Christian
pilgrimage in Jerusalem between 1983 and 1985 and gave rise to further
regionally based interests in shrines, monumentalisation, tourism and -
with reference to the Palestinian people - nationalism and conflict,
diasporic and local identities, and secularist versus sectarian
strategies of mobilisation. He has subsequently carried out a
longitudinal study of the mixed Christian-Muslim town of Beit Sahour,
near Bethlehem, which had played a substantial role in the Palestinian
intifada (uprising). At present he is continuing his work in Beit
Sahour as well as developing work on 'comparative walling' building on
his study of the genealogy and impact of the Israeli 'separation
barrier'. He continues to develop comparative work between the Middle
East and the Balkans, manifest in 'Constitutive Violence and the
Nationalist Imaginary' (below), and is currently completing work on a
project investigating historical and contemporary uses of shared
shrines in Western Macedonia, Kosovo and Albania and in
Israel/Palestine.
Bowman taught in the Anthropology Department
at University College London before coming to Kent in 1991 to join in
starting up an interdisciplinary programme (Communications and Image
Studies) concerned with issues of representation and its social and
cultural contexts. When that programme terminated in 1998, he formally
joined the Anthropology Department. Here he has launched the MA
programme in the Anthropology of Ethnicity, Nationalism and Identity
and co-convened the MA in Visual Anthropology.
Bowman is past
Honorary Editor of the 'Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute'
and is on the editorial boards of 'Critique of Anthropology',
'Anthropological Theory' and 'Focaal'.
