Palestine, Poverty, and Neoliberalism

The journey with Luigi Achilli continues

I came to know Luigi Achilli through his work on human smuggling, but he also spent a year living in a Palestinian refugee camp. What did he learn there? What can the rest of us learn from the research based on this field work? And what is the deal with anthropology, anyway?!

In this all-new interview, I ask Luigi another series of hard questions, and he once again answers with candor and good humor.

Questions include:

1. Your earlier research is based on your long stay in the Palestinian refugee camp of al-Wihdat in Amman, Jordan.  Most Americans will immediately picture a bunch of tents surrounded by a fence. Could you quickly explain what refugee camps in Jordan are actually like?

4. You describe most Palestinian refugees as politically disengaged and apathetic.  Couldn’t you say the same about most Italians or Americans?  Are they even more politically disengaged and apathetic than we are?

6. My stereotype was that it would be hard for you to interview Palestinian women, but I was surprised by the strictness of the gender segregation you describe.  Do anthropologists ever conclude that popular stereotypes are accurate or under-stated?  Are anthropologists biased against stereotypes?

8. In the West, another top cause of poverty is not failure to find jobs, but failure to keep jobs.  One of the refugees you interviewed told you that his friend “can’t do the same job for more than a couple of weeks because he is too lazy.  Also, he always argues with his employers.”  You tell another story about two young male refugees who get jobs at Kentucky Fried Chicken outside the camp, but then beat up a couple of co-workers.  You can call this “machismo,” “hegemonic masculinity” or just “impulse control.”  Whatever words you prefer, is this a major cause of poverty in al-Wihdat?

10. “Neoliberal” is normally a term of abuse, especially in academia.  But you make it sound pretty good: “The neo-liberal turn in Jordan has thus had profound imaginative implications on local understandings of affluence and well-being.  This is perhaps best exemplified by the emergence of specific patterns of consumption among camp dwellers. Mass-produced and mass-mediated consumer goods such as television sets, satellite dishes and computers have become a main aim of people’s aspirations.”  Did you intend to make neoliberalism sound good?

11. Here’s my reading of your work.  Some refugees focus on short-term gratification: drinking, acting tough, petty crime.  Others focus on fantasies of nationalist and religious violence.  But most refugees focus on bourgeois success: getting a good job and providing a comfortable life for their families.  To me, it’s obvious that the third path is vastly better for the individual, Palestinians in general, and the world.  Is it obvious to you, too?

12. Westerners usually fear that Muslim migrants will fail to assimilate, but the refugees you interviewed seem more afraid that their children would assimilate if they moved to the West. “Squeezed between the need to make money and the uneasiness of bringing up his daughter abroad for an indefinite period of time, this man – in his late 20s – was overwhelmed by a dilemma: ‘if I stay at home [without a proper job], my wife will leave me, but if I go abroad [with the whole family] for years, who knows how my daughter will grow up in a different place?... You know, in Europe it is normal that girls go out with men before marriage! I don’t want my daughter doing this. I would move to a better place in Amman, but if I travel [to Europe] with my daughter, she will end up behaving like Western girls!’”  Who’s more right about the likely extent of assimilation: Westerners or migrants?

17. What’s next for Luigi Achilli? Personally, I’d really like to see you do ethnographies of ordinary Western businesses.  If you like illegal markets, I think you’ll be amazed by legal ones.

Here’s the full interview.