The Sensible Life of Return: Collaborative Experiments in Art and Anthropology in Palestine/Israel

Abstract

© 2019 by the American Anthropological Association As a younger generation of Palestinians have started to return to the lands and villages of their parents and grandparents over the last decade, they have come to acknowledge a sensible world for which they have no immediate experience. The smell of wild za'atar, the sound of the breeze roaming the land, and the stories of trees and rocks are all experiences handed down by their parents and grandparents, heretofore unavailable to their own sensible life. This article is about a project-to-come that attends to these returns and the sensible/material worlds being invented. It is about the making of a collaboration between an anthropologist and an artist to create an experimental laboratory for Palestinians returning to their former lands and villages for speculating about their futures or what is yet to come. [Landscape, Sensible Colonialism, Materiality, Participatory Art, Palestine/Israel].