13th Congress of the International Society for Folk Narrative Research

Presentation Abstracts

KANAANA, Sharif

Half a Century of Palestinian Folk Narratives

This paper traces the changes in folk narratives told by Palestinians from the 1940s when Palestine was under the British Mandate up to the present time. Palestinian society has undergone numerous socio-political changes during this period. With the establishment of Israel in 1948 more than half of the Palestinians were driven out of their homeland and became refugees, mostly in other Arab countries. Those who remained in the country came under Israeli, Jordanian, or Egyptian rule.

In 1967 the remainder of historical Palestine was occupied by Israel, and more Palestinians became refugees. The remaining Palestinians stayed in what became known as the Israeli Occupied Territories, also known as the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. The rest of the world has come to know about the Palestinian people mostly due to their struggle against Israeli occupation during the last two decades which included the First Intifada, or uprising, in the early 1980s, the Second or ‘Al-Aqsa’ Intifada, which started in late 2000, and the so-called ‘Peace Process’ in between. Many differences in cultural, social, and political organization have emerged among the various Palestinian groups in different parts of the world, having had to cope with totally different circumstances.

Also, changes have taken place within each group over time, as circumstances in the different countries of the Middle East, where Palestinian communities have resided, changed.

This paper proposes that all these changes across space and time are reflected in the narratives various Palestinian communities or sub-communities tell. In addition to the geographical and temporal dimensions, the differences in narratives are analysed along the dimensions of gender, age groups, and political orientations.

Many changes and differences among the types of narratives told by Palestinians have been discerned. These involve differences in the popularity and frequency of, in the functions served by, and the settings for narratives of the genres that have always existed in the Palestinian culture. A special emphasis is placed on the analysis of the narratives from the two Intifadas.