ABSTRACT
Palestinian women in various positions hold divergent views on wearing gold. When I did fieldwork in Jabal Nablus (West Bank, Palestine) in the 1980s, older rural women showed me with pride the gold coins sewn on pieces of cloth that they wore as necklaces inside their dresses. Younger rural women pointed to the heavy gold bracelets they were wearing, the necklaces with large pendants, their earrings and so on. Most of this jewelry was at least 21-carat gold. Higher class urban women, on the other hand, especially the well-educated and professionally employed, would wear different types of gold, usually finer-worked, smaller items of a much greater variety. This was 18-carat gold, often imported from Italy. These women considered the heavier bracelets, which were also commonly worn by the less well-off urbanites, and may well have been part of their own mothers’ gold assets, as traditional and old-fashioned, and therefore as not suitable for modern women to wear. Younger rural women, on the other hand, and the poorer urbanites liked to have some small items of Italian gold, yet would still hold most of their gold in the form of 21-carat bracelets. In their eyes, 18-carat gold is not really gold.
