Plots and Deeds: Land, Ownership, and Autonomy in Rural Palestine is a historical ethnography of the central highlands of Palestine. It begins in the 1970s and tells the story of how worker peasants were at the center of a struggle against colonial dispossession and the dissolution of peasant agriculture. It follows the farmers, agronomists, lawyers, and surveyors who have drawn on agrarian traditions, legal claims, and agricultural modernization to develop an agrarian anti-colonial project. At the heart of this project is a theory and practice of autonomy that brings together agriculture, anti-colonialism, and private ownership. Plots and Deeds shows how the defense of land is bound up with the transformation of agrarian property relations, exploring the contradictory ways that ownership has shapes questions of development, sovereignty, and the good life in rural Palestine today. It argues that Palestine help us understand agrarian struggles across the Global South, and that it can help us consider what life in common might look like in a world where, it seems, everything is private.
Plots and Deeds is based on ethnographic fieldwork and archival research that I did from 2013-2022. I began preliminary research in the summers of 2013 and 2014, followed by a longer stay from October 2015 through the end of January 2017. Since then, I have completed two follow-up research visits: a 4-month stay in the spring and summer of 2018, and another 4-month stay in the summer and fall of 2022. During these years, I have gathered a wide array of sources from the West Bank, Israel, and Jordan: documents from state archives and private collections; court rulings and protocols; interviews with farmers, land brokers, lawyers, land defense activists, government officials, and surveyors; and long periods of participant-observation of ongoing Palestinian Authority land titling projects. All of this has been supported by the National Science Foundation, the Wenner-Gren Foundation, and the Palestinian American Research Center, as well as smaller grants from the Jewish Studies and Women, Gender, and Sexuality programs at Johns Hopkins University. Barring any unforeseen disasters, the manuscript will be finished by January 2023.
From 2017-2020 I posted some of my fieldnotes, mostly things I found fascinating but that didn’t make it into the book. You can find them in my fieldwork archive. I’ve also made most of the documents I gathered available online for other researchers to use. You can find those in the rural archive.
