Theoretical and Methodological Considerations for the Study of Palestinian Society

To study thePalestinians is basically to study a society in conflict and transition. The majority of the society's members live in dispersion as refugees and members of exiled communities, whether in the Arab countries or the West. Some continue to live in their homeland, such as in Israel where they live as a minority, or as a majority in highly contested political environments such as the West Bank and Gaza. Thus, it is not surprising that issues of identity, control, and resistance, among others, comprise key concerns of any intellectual enterprise purporting to render intelligent the fragmented experience of the Palestinian people.

While maintaining a particular emphasis on refugees, this paper situates recent studies of Palestinians in the context of (1) social science debates surrounding qualitative and quantitative methodologies with special reference to Palestinian society; (2) theoretical discussions of power, resistance, and subjectivity; and (3) ethnographic studies of refugee identities.

Methodological Quandaries

The long, established tradition of positivist social science, which looked to natural science as its model for theory construction and empirical testing, has dominated the social sciences off and on throughout the twentieth century. However, during the last two to three decades, positivist social science—particularly sociology—has yielded to many influences emanating from philosophy and the humanities. This cross-fertilization of ideas has brought new insights to social science, insights which have left their mark in terms of methodologies, choices of research topics, and, above all, have blurred the lines separating the social sciences from other disciplines. Sociology, for example, has acknowledged the place of qualitative and ethnographic studies as integral to the discipline and not as a "soft," add-on component to what used to pass for predominantly hard-core positivist social science.

Even before the recent popularity of qualitative social science studies, such studies have always occupied a place in sociology, including Arab sociology. The American sociologist Howard Becker reminds us that qualitative studies made their debut in the United States more than six decades ago.¹ Arab sociology boasts a rich tradition in qualitative social science, as in the work of the Iraqi sociologist 'Ali Al-Wardi. Following in the footsteps of the fourteenth century Arab thinker Ibn Khaldun, 'Ali Al-Wardi explored the interplay between urbanism and nomadism, and their impact on the development of individual personality and community life in Iraq.² Similarly, there are the valuable studies of village life by the Egyptian anthropologist Hamid 'Ammar in which he analyzed the values and personality make-up in rural Egypt.³ Until recently, qualitative community studies in the Fertile Crescent, Egypt, and North Africa comprised the bulk of what was reported in Arab social science.⁴

Applied social science, involving the collection of social statistics, was introduced to the Arab world in the nineteenth and early part of the twentieth centuries as part of the administrative requirements of western colonization of the region. Following political independence in the first half of last century, indigenous scholars and the government elite expanded the use of applied research techniques to meet the bureaucratic and educational needs of the fledgling states. However, not until the 1960s did western-educated Arab social scientists begin to experiment with positivist methodologies in a sustained fashion. At this time they began to carry out survey research to uncover public attitudes and orientations to current affairs and policy matters. Although this coincided with a period when positivism was under attack in western scholarship, to a very large extent the undertaking of quantitative survey research in the Arab world proceeded without heeding the problems raised by such an approach. Two different sets of problems presented themselves. The first is specific to third world regions; the second is more theoretical, and focuses on an epistemological debate concerning objectivity and knowledge claims.

With regard to the former, three such problems are worth mentioning. First, consider the meaning of "public" in the context of the developing world—or the developed one for that matter. The notion that there is a public "out there" amenable to survey research is problematic in Arab society. To respond to a questionnaire interview assumes...