Corporeal ethics in an ethnographic encounter: A tale of embodiment from the Occupied Palestinian Territories

SummaryIn this article, I document a problematic ethnographic encounter that I experienced while conducting fieldwork in the neo-colonized space of the Occupied Palestinian Territories. Through reflexivity, I describe how the encounter begins to illuminate the surfacing of prejudices that were originally enacted by oppressive neo-colonial structures but which I had come to discursively accept against the communities and the peoples that were to become the subjects of my ethnographic study. As I explain, these prejudices are sourced to the perception of the denigrated embodiment of the Other – in this case, the Palestinian masculine subject. Finally, I consider how I originally understood these latent prejudices and how I ultimately came to negate them through a prudent engagement with, and deconstruction of, a reified socio-political discourse that ideologically endeavors to maintain the subjugation of a disenfranchised and unrecognized nation.