Introduction

This chapter lays down the conceptual and methodological framework for the volume and situates it in the context of scholarship on Palestine/Israel. It opens with a discussion of the contribution of the anthropological tradition to the historical approach developed in the volume: the gaze from below, the commitment to the “field,” the critique of “methodological nationalism,” and the acknowledgment of the political implications of academic knowledge. It continues with a discussion of several themes which run through many of the chapters: entangled histories; displacement, expulsion, and forced settlement; labor and the formation of national and ethnic hierarchies; and practices of telling, silencing, and “forgetting” history.