Archaeology, Architecture and the Politics of Verticality

The Israeli-Palestinian is defined by where and how one builds. This chapter explores the politics of verticality. The terrain dictates the nature, intensity and focal points of confrontation. On the other hand, the conflict manifests itself most clearly in the adaptation, construction and obliteration of landscape and built environment. Planning decisions are often made not according to criteria of economical sustainability, ecology or efficiency of services, but to serve strategic and national agendas. The West Bank is a landscape of extreme topographical variation, ranging from four hundred and forty metres below sea level at the shores of the Dead Sea, to about one thousand metres in the high summits of Samaria. Settlements occupy the high ground, while Palestinian villages occupy the fertile valley in between. This topographical difference defines the relationship between Jewish and Palestinian settlements in terms of strategy, economy and ecology. The politics of verticality is exemplified across the folded surface of the terrain–in which the mountainous region has influenced the forms the territorial conflict has produced

Socializing Evidence

Conference at the House of World Cultures [Haus der Kulturen der Welt], accompanying the exhibition Investigative Commons. The rise of counterfactual politics on- and off-line, presents societies with a dilemma. One option is to buttress the institutional basis of factual authority by supporting the existing judiciary, media, universities and cultural venues. Another approach, presented here, is more risky: to seize the contemporary moment of institutional crisis as an opportunity for a radical transformation of the way facts are produced and disseminated. This approach responds to the current skepticism towards institutional pronouncements with a vital form of collective truth-production; one that is both diffused and diverse, based on establishing an expanded community of practice that incorporates aesthetic and scientific sensibilities. Organized by one such community of practice, the Investigative Commons, this event brings together investigators, lawyers, activists, artists, architects and academics. They will discuss the ways in which new investigative practices have the potential to challenge different forums for the presentations of facts and articulation of claims: the mainstream media brought into crisis by the growth of ‘open source’ and 'citizen’ journalism; museums, which have been turned into sites of political contestation; and the courts where new kind of evidence, citizen-produced and crowd-verified, challenges traditional legal process

Investigative Commons

Exhibition at the House of World Cultures [Haus der Kulturen der Welt], Berlin, Germany. This exhibition showcases a new model for collaborative truth-production and investigative aesthetics, bringing together open source investigation, “counter-forensics” and strategic human rights litigation, Combining the knowledge of survivors of violence and dispossession with methods from journalism, law, activism and arts, it presents casework that confronts urgent contemporary issues: racist policing and border regimes, cyber-surveillance, environmental violence, the ongoing violence of colonialism and the complicity of institutions in them

On Forensic Architecture: A Conversation with Eyal Weizman

Yve-Alain Bois, Michel Feher, Hal Foster, and Eyal Weizman discuss “forensic architecture,” the practice of treating common elements of our built environment as entry points through which to interrogate the present. Forensic Architecture is also the name of a research agency established by Weizman to undertake independent investigations in the context of armed conflicts, political struggles, and environmental transformation. Participants discuss cases in which the agency acts on commissions from international prosecutors, investigative journalists, the United Nations, human rights organizations, and environmental-justice and media groups. The discussion of this practice is illustrated by brief examples taken from recent investigations in places such as Pakistan, the former Yugoslavia, Gaza, Syria, and Guatemala

Introduction: Multimodal Anthropology and the Politics of Invention

This essay and the articles included in this special issue theorize the possibilities – and pitfalls – that emerge as anthropologists utilise a combination of audio, video, text, still images, performance methodologies, and web platforms to iteratively, collaboratively, and sensually generate relations with research participants, interdisciplinary colleagues and beyond. We are not necessarily interested in developing multimedia approaches to representing or disseminating anthropological knowledge – rather, we are concerned with how multimodality may contribute to a politics of invention for the discipline. We argue that multimodality offers a line of flight for an anthropology yet to come: multi-sensorial rather than text-based, performative rather than representational, and inventive rather than descriptive. This reimagined anthropology requires a move away from established forms of authorship, representation and academic publishing towards projects that experiment with unanticipated forms, collaborations, audiences and correspondences – including questioning what the open in Open Access should signify, as Anand Pandian (2018) has compellingly argued. As importantly, a focus on multimodality and invention invites a reconsideration of the pedagogy of anthropology – both in the sense of what gets formally taught within the disciplinary canon, and in relation to the manifold ways of teaching and learning together that emerge during fieldwork, not always made visible, and which exceed the textual and conceptual domain. Indeed, we use multimodality and invention to refer to the multiple ways of doing ethnography - and the resulting multiple anthropologies - that create ways of knowing and learning together differently. In the essay that follows we offer several provocations that multimodality and invention produce with regards to pedagogy, publication, and collaboration – which are picked up in novel ways in each of the articles included as part of this collection. Our essay is not meant as an enclosure, or a boundary, but rather a framing – that is, a point of view or an orientation to the multiple questions that emerge in each of the essays, where the respective anthropologists rethink engagement, form, and purpose in their ethnographic endeavours. We draw from John Jackson Jr. to argue that framing is at once “a gesture toward contextualization (a conceptual framing of the relevant issues) and a singular impression captured in time (as in the presentation of a framed painting or the relative irreducibility of a film or video still)”. Taking Jackson Jr.’s second point to heart, we offer this introductory essay as a still image by which to see with and through the ethnographic engagements of others. In this still image, the concepts of multimodality and invention are unpacked and interrogated in ways we hope offer an alternative way to think about ethnography and anthropological theory in a moment where the discipline is grappling with how to find ways to engage more effectively with the increasingly fractured and precarious worlds we inhabit

Concrete stories, decomposing fictions: Body parts and body politics in Ahmed Saadawi’s Frankenstein in Baghdad

This essay reads the English translation of Ahmed Saadawi’s novel Frankenstein in Baghdad (2018) to explore the “concrete stories” and “infrastructural narratives” devised by the US military in support of its occupation of Baghdad. By stitching together a city and society littered with composing and decomposing fictions, Saadawi’s novel reveals how biopolitical governance produces, contra the hegemonic US war story of security consolidation and societal stabilization, pervasive insecurity instead. Saadawi’s “decomposing fictions”, as I call them, operate on three homologous terrains: the (de)composition of the city; the (de)composition of the body; and the (de)composition of the narrative itself. Through this three-tired conflation, Saadawi shows how body parts are biopolitical, and how narratives actively and materially reshape human bodies and urban infrastructures. The essay therefore argues that the novel aligns with a critical posthumanist perspective, one that allows for a more rigorous consideration of narrative systems (including fictions) as constitutive of and impactful upon human and non-human bodies and urban infrastructures than other concepts, such as “planned violence”, have so far allowed. By theorizing a more complex relationship between narrative form and the built environment in the contexts of militarized colonial and biopolitical urban governance, the essay shows how Saadawi’s novel not only challenges the “imaginative geographies” of the colonial present, but its material infrastructures as well

Kafka at the West Bank checkpoint: de-normalizing the Palestinian encounter before the law

The checkpoint has emerged as a quintessential trope within the contemporary Palestinian imagination, to such an extent that “checkpoint narratives” have arguably come to assume a dangerously “normalized” status as everyday, even iconic features of Palestinian existence. Turning to the films Route 181 by Michel Khleifi and Eyal Sivan, and like twenty impossibles by Annemarie Jacir, this article explores how alternative representations (and theorizations) of checkpoint encounter might serve to “de-normalize” the checkpoint in a way that invites us to interrogate the very nature of the checkpoint apparatus in itself, including the nature of the “law” that it represents. Mobilizing the critical paradigms of the “state of exception” and “homo sacer” drawn from the theoretical work of Giorgio Agamben and the literary work of Franz Kafka, the article argues that apprehension of the enduring oddity and abnormality of the checkpoint serves as a vital mode of critical resistance to the policies of “spatio-cide”, “securitization” and colonialism exercised at the hands of the State of Israel through the checkpoint mechanism