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Arpan Roy, "Relative Strangers: Romani Kinship and Palestinian Difference" (U Toronto Press, 2025)
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- [00:00]
A
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B
welcome to the New Books Network hi and welcome. I'm Roberto Massa, your host and today my guest for the New Books Network is Arpan Roy. Arpan is the author of Relative Romani Kinship and Palestinian Difference. The book was published by the University of Toronto Press in 2025. Examining how memory, intergenerational transmission and kinship work together by Artpan Roy Relative Strangers sheds light on Romani life in Palestine. The author presents an ethnography portrait of Dom Romani communities leaning between Palestine and Jordan, zooming in on everyday life in working class neighborhoods and under condition of perpetual rule and instability. The book focuses on how domes are able to sustain ethnic difference through kinship even when public performances of difference are no longer emphasized. The kind of alterity that is neither visible by obvious markers like race or religious difference nor detected by the antennas of a state. Drawing on a long term ethnographic fieldwork in Jerusalem, Ramallah and Amman, the author makes a case for such alterative for Romani people and other groups in the region. Before we delve into all of this, first things first. Arpan, welcome.
- [01:55]
A
Thanks so much for having me.
- [01:57]
B
Let's start with them. Just a question about yourself. Can you tell us a little bit more about you, your work and how you came to work on the Dom Romani?
- [02:08]
A
I guess my vocation in anthropology probably has something to do with my own background as an immigrant to the United States. I was born in Calcutta, India, where I left when I was eight years old with my family landing in St. Louis, Missouri of all places. I think immigrants are always looking at the world through an anthropological lens and they're always doing a kind of comparative analysis. I'm of course not the first person to make this observation. It's interesting also for me to note how many of the early anthropologists were outsiders in their own capacities. Many were religious minorities Franz Boas, Levi Strauss. Also the British anthropologists like Malinowski and Elvis Pritchard were Catholics in this Protestant milieu. Some were gay, like Margaret Mead and Ruth Benedict. So I think I'm very conscious of alterity in my work and invested in anthropology as a science of alterity in its many dimensions. This used to be a rather vast area of reflection in anthropology, probably until the 1980s, when conventions shifted for various reasons. My work with the domes in Palestine began with my PhD dissertation, which I wrote at Johns Hopkins University. I had already been researching in Palestine since 2012 as an MA student and was looking for a topic for my PhD. I tell the story in the book of how I met a man in a bar in Ramallah who was very drunk. He was drinking alone. It was a bar I used to hang out in, and it was kind of a bohemian hangout in Ramallah. It closed during the pandemic. Anyway, this man told me about the existence of a Romani enclave in Jerusalem. He didn't know much about them. All he knew was that they were there and that they had a language apart from Arabic. This was sometime in 2013. The interaction stayed with me, and when I looked up the topic, I couldn't find much scholarly work. Almost everything that was available online was journalistic, very often sensationalist and repetitive. The exception to this was linguistic research on the community by a linguist by the name of Jeroen Matras, who's Israeli and professor of linguistics at the University of Manchester. But his research had its own limitations. For him being Israeli, he had difficulties of access to the community and so forth. By that point, I had already read most of the canonical social science scholarship on Palestine, the Edward Said and so forth, and was searching for new ways to engage with a place that I had more or less become obsessed with. I would say for this reason that my work is first and foremost on Palestine and secondarily on Dome Rumanese. My formal fieldwork began in 2016. I submitted my dissertation in 2021, but work on the book continued right up to its publication at the end of 2024.
- [05:21]
B
Now, your journey to this book, as you mentioned, started somehow in Ramallah, but perhaps we need to take a step back. Began with a poem of all things, a Mahmoud Darwish translation by Agassa Shahid Ali that you came across in a New York bookstore. So, from poetry to an anthropological monograph about Romani kinship in Palestine. Can you walk us through that journey? And again, what finally led you to the Dom Romani community specifically. So perhaps we're going to pick up again on your very eventful meeting in Ramallah.
- [05:57]
A
Yeah. So encountering the poem, I think, was a similar kind of mystical synchronicity as meeting the man In Ramallah. This happened in December 2024. I remember it vividly. I had just moved to New York to become a writer. I had dropped out of college. Of course, I went back, and I was working odd jobs and living with friends. Now I was a teenager in suburban Chicago when the second intifada broke out in 2000. For those who remember, it was all over the news for several years. But it was hard for me to really wrap my head around it being a teenager, not having adequate resources, Although I followed the events broadly speaking, this particular poem, which Agha Shahid ali translated as 11 stars over Andalusia, is a very famous poem by Mahmoud Darweesh. It evokes the conquest of granada in the 15th century to situate the Nakba of 1948. He begins the poem with a very wonderful scene. Al ul kamanja tibki na ghajar al habin al Andalus. Al kamanja tibki al Arab al kharijin mir andalus. So it's violence. Weep with Romanis traveling to Andalusia. Violins weep for Arabs leaving Andalusia. Of course, Agha Shahid Ali, who was Kashmiri, was doing a kind of double operation by deploying Darwish's historical metaphor to describe the loss of Kashmir. Quite simply, the poem changed my life. I began reading Darwish and also other Arab poets. Smartphones still hadn't fully entered the picture. So it was a world of books. One would have to navigate the world of books to go from point A to point B to understand any given topic. Palestine more and more came into view for me through this reading as the most urgent issue that I knew of and one that really organized my moral compass in a way that nothing else did, or at least nothing else that I knew of or could understand. It's something I couldn't have gotten from the news at that point in my life. So that poem still means a lot to me. As I said, I think the encounter with the poem had a certain mystical, syncrotic quality. I became totally obsessed with Palestine very soon thereafter. Again, this is 2004. Later I became an anthropologist of Palestine, although now I'm researching in Syria. I learned Arabic. Eventually I researched the topic of Romanis, and now I'm living and working in Andalusia, in Granada. And none of this was planned. So the poem shot through my life in a very strange way.
- [08:43]
B
Most of our listeners will probably associate Romani people primarily with Europe. Before we get into your argument, could you give us a brief portrait of the Dom Romani who they are how long they have been in Palestine and where they live today. And why do you think their presence as being so systematically overlooked, even by Palestinians themselves?
- [09:07]
A
Sure. So I'm not a specialist of Romani studies, although of course I engage with it, and I have some very good friends and colleagues who are Romani studies scholars. But generally I can say that the field of Romani studies has been outrageously Eurocentric. Almost everything we do about Romani people comes into question if we take into consideration the history of Romanis in the Arab world. For instance, the historian Christina Richardson has done very important work in recent years in showing how Romani characters appear in Arab Arabic literature from the 8th century onward and become quite recurring by the 10th century. They're particularly prominent in Mamluk, Cairo. This should be a bombshell in how the world understands the history of Romani people. But to my knowledge, this work hasn't sent the disciplinary shockwaves in Romani studies in the way that it should. The point is that the antiquity of Romani tribes in the Arab world, and probably Palestine, is considerable. Now, I'm very transparent about my limitations as a researcher. I'm an anthropologist, a cultural anthropologist, researching in the present. As much as I would like to give a long dure History of RMEs in Palestine, as people often ask me to do, I'm unable. Today I can say that there are large concentrations of Ruminis in Jerusalem, in Gaza, and since the blockade of the Gaza Strip, about half the community from Gaza has moved clandestinely to the West Bank. And I write about this quite a bit in the book. This being said, Romani characters were quite prevalent in Palestinian cultural production in the 20th century, including in poems by Mahmoud Darweesh, Hussein Barghouti, novels and short stories by Emil Habibi, music and film, and so on. But this visibility in cultural production suddenly disappears in the early 1990s. Now, the early 1990s, it's a very important time for two reasons. One, it's the era of the first intifada and the Oslo Accords, which ends the Intifada, which really shifts the discourse in Palestine toward more of a political issue, whereas before one could argue it had been more of a revolutionary issue, becomes a more political issue. It was also the time in which Romani's historically nomadic community settle into permanent housing in Palestine. It's a process that begins in the 1950s, and it takes about four decades to complete. Such processes are consistent with the settlement of nomadic groups, be they Romanis or Bedouins or others, in many parts of the world in the same period, from mid to late 20th century. In any case, this disappearance of remedies from public life, by which I mean living in shanty settlements, publicly performing music and dancing and so forth, this disappearance contributes to their disappearance also from cultural representation in literature, film and music and so forth. Before we get to our discussion of mnemonic difference, it's important to note here how precarious cultural memory is and how it's different from mnemonic difference we see in politics all the time. How people very often make terrible mistakes that they probably wouldn't if they only remembered they made the same mistakes 20 years ago. So people forget very quickly. Hannah Arendt made the observation that in ancient Greece philosophy was considered a higher pursuit than politics because each new generation of politicians would just forget the lessons and achievements of the elder generation and just undo everything that had been accomplished. So cultural memory is very short lived and people forget things very quickly. I think Romanes disappeared rapidly from Palestine. Cultural memory as a result of the nature of forgetting beginning in the 1990s, which was in this crux between their own historical process as a nomadic community becoming sedentary, and also wider political tendencies in Palestine, in the region marked by the Intifada.
- [13:19]
B
When I was reading your book, it really reminded me of some urban processes when early 20th century, sometimes cities demolished entire apartment blocks, houses in order to make room for boulevards and then tram lines. And they simply disappear. And yet people live there. And sometimes historical documents talk about those streets and roads, but they just disappeared. I want to talk about something here that has to do with your sort of concept. The main heart of the book is this concept of mnemonic difference. The idea that Dom Romani identity in Palestine is sustained not through visible markers like language, clothing or occupation, but but through something much more intimate and harder to see. Can you explain what you mean by mnemonic difference and why you think kinship in particular, specifically the Arabic institution of Vidar, is the vehicle through which this difference is preserved?
- [14:20]
A
So mnemonic difference is something that I adapt from Ashish Nandi's concept of mnemonic cultures. It's really my term, but it's closely linked to Nandi's body of work over several decades. Ashish Nandi, for those who don't know, is a very prominent Indian social theorist who really pioneered postcolonial theory in India. Nandi has this idea that certain cultures in the world draw their essence as a culture from a repository of experience accumulated over time, and that this repository is transmitted intergenerationally, but isn't expressed materially. Of course, it slips out in little signs and intrigues, like motifs in epics, legends, myths, or perhaps naively revealed in a grandparents tale or something like that. It could also be a bodily gesture or a certain style of speech, what Pierre Bourdieu called hexis. There's a kind of memory work here similar to the psychoanalytic concept of the dream work, in which the pre verbal or non verbal finds expression independently of conscious action. Nandi thinks that all cultures have aspects of this and that this was prominent in Europe before modernity, before these statist homogenization processes. Kind of flattened difference in many parts of Europe, sorry, beginning in the 18th century onwards, which is very sad to think about. We forget that, for example, in medieval France there were something like 12 languages and now there are two and one. Very soon, the early one. But today, according to Nandi, mnemonic cultures are prevalent in the Third world, where he says, one still finds a thousand little cultures. So mnemonic difference is my way of looking at how alterity persists in an ancient traditional society like Palestine. Now, the Arab world is an incredibly diverse region of many languages, religions, ethnicities, a diversity that has historically been used for imperial manipulation and continues to be in Syria and Lebanon and so forth. What's interesting for me is that outside of these colonial situations, the diversity of the region under, for example, the Ottoman state and intermodernity isn't expressed through identitarian or legislative processes. Rather it's something woven into the experience of the social. One encounters radical alterity in Palestine all the time and nobody thinks it's particularly exceptional. It's just kind of there, it's just a reality of everyday life. Now something that anthropologists very often do, for better or worse, is that they take a very ordinary, mundane concept and make it into this big theoretical thing, which is what I do also, again, for better or worse, with the dar. The dar is a very common everyday word in Arabic, meaning the family, but also the material house and sometimes some kind of combination of the two meanings. But dar also connotes the ethics of the people who live in a particular house, their religious upbringing, their academic or professional merits, their political affiliation, their ethics in life, which in the Arabic would be adab and so forth. So my argument in the book is that the DAR organizes the social mnemonically and becomes the vehicle for the transmission of mnemonic difference across generations. This is especially the case when a material expression of difference no longer exists, because as I said, the Rumanese in Palestine largely stopped living as Romanes by the early 1990s, late 1980s. So distinction becomes an affair contained by the private life of the family inside the physical fact of the house, which in anthropology we call kinship.
- [18:23]
B
I want to move forward to the chapters of the book. So your first chapter revolves around the neighborhood of Bab Huta in Jerusalem Old City, once the Romani enclave of a city, today largely vacated by doms who have moved to the working class peripheries. Yet you argue that Baba continues to function as an ethical spree for domes, even after they have left it through the stories of Musa and Ibrahim. What does it mean for a neighborhood to retain this kind of gravitational pull on a community that no longer physically lives there?
- [19:02]
A
So, as you know very well, Roberto, there's a lot written about Jerusalem's Old City being organized along these so called confessional lines, the concept of the four quarters of the city. And you probably know all the critiques of this. It's true that this has over time become a social fact by mere repetition, usage of this term. But again, mnemonically, something else continues to persist. Jerusalem, at least until its total, what I call ontological sea change with the events of 1967, did have a Jewish quarter and an Armenian quarter and so forth. But these weren't divisions of the city as much. They were markers to accentuate particular settlements within a more generic Arab Islamic city. And today one still finds an African quarter, Halabi or Aleppin quarter, and so on. And these aren't divisions of the city so much as, again, indicative of a particular settlement history that gives territorial expression to kinship, meaning that people related to each other settle together in a single area. And this becomes a kind of quarter of people who are related in some way. In Jerusalem, this is true both within the Old City and also outside the Old City walls, where neighborhoods are marked by a kind of. They're marked by a particular kind of settlement or family history. So for instance, in the French Hill area where Carmel was, it's home to a big concentration of families displaced from Lifta in 1948, or Rasul Mahmoud is known to have a few streets of families who fled to Palestine from Spain during the Reconquista, which Ahmad Al Rish read his poem about. Of course, you find such things also in other cities in Palestine and definitely in the region. It's a future of the eastern city, by and large. A friend was telling me recently about how there are entire Kurdish villages that moved to Tehran, but there's no Kurdish quarter per se, because the various Kurdish settlements are dispersed throughout the city. So it's really a question of the Eastern City, which Jerusalem, for most of its history has been and continues to be. Bab Hatta, a neighborhood within the Old City walls, at least since the 1950s, has been associated with Romanis in Jerusalem, although it was never exclusively a Romani quarter. Since the 1990s, Romanis followed the general trend of Palestinians from the Old City moving out to the urban peripheries. And therefore they dispersed spatially into various neighborhoods, kind of on the outskirts of Jerusalem, let's say. Yet all those who moved out still have relatives in Babhatta, and kinship events like wakes and Ramadan gatherings tend to be held in the neighborhood. One major example of this is that Rumidis bury their dead almost exclusively in the Al Rujahideen cemetery, just right outside Babhatta, instead of the cemeteries in the localities where they've lived now, in some cases, for over 30 years. So this is very unusual, to bury your dead in a neighborhood that's not yours. So the point I explore in this chapter is how kinship and territory interact. And the gravitational pull, as you put it, is an instance of mnemonic difference in that it can't be explained materially. It only fits if one looks at the entire mnemonic inventory of which this is one expression.
- [22:40]
B
One of the most unexpected and thought provoking chapters of the book deals with begging, specifically the begging practiced by Gaza Dom women in the streets and markets areas of the West Bank. Now, you approach this as a form of caste, like labor, that marks an ethical boundary and cultivates a kind of egalitarianism within dumb families. How did you come to see begging not as a social pathology, but as an ethnographic window onto something much deeper about kinship and difference. And I want to say here, I guess, for many, the image of Romani people begging now intersects the idea of driving through large roads in European cities, and you find these women just begging at a traffic light. So I was reading your chapter and I had this image, and I was really trying to make sense of all of that.
- [23:36]
A
Yeah, so this was probably the hardest chapter to write because of all the ethical sensitivities around the topic, as you mentioned, I definitely don't want to perpetuate stereotypes of any kind. As I mentioned in the book, I considered dropping the topic altogether until a prominent Palestinian anthropologist, who I'm sure you know, encouraged me to look at it through the concept of caste, and I thank her for it. Begging, of course, is a phenomenon widely associated with Rumi people in various parts of the world. And this leads the layperson to make all kinds of culturalist assumptions about begging and ru many people. There is also the Marxist explanation that Romany begging is a remnant of lump in proletarianism when in the 19th century Traditional crafts and occupations were extinguished by industrialization and there emerged new urban populations with no recourse but begging. I'm sympathetic to the Marxist explanation, I think it's true in part. But I also offer a third theory more attuned to biopolitics, which shows how begging is a form of organized labor adaptable to the fundamental precarity and instability of life in Palestine, especially for Romanis, who are a people, for the most part without property ownership. Now, a very traditional division of Arab society in the Arab sociological tradition going back to Ibn Khaldun and really carrying. Carrying into modern Palestinian scholarship, imagine society as being divided into three categories. You have the falaheen, the peasants, Bedouin or pastoral nobodists or nomadic pastoralists, and the medanin, the city dwellers. Now, if you look at what's happening in this division, it's really that each group owns property of various sorts of the city dwellers have their homes and businesses. The falaheen in Palestine and the region were not landless serfs as in European feudalism, but belonged to land sharing collectives, or at least the vast majority did. So peasants in Palestine historically landed and Bedouins too, have valuable rehnam flocks, which are very valuable, and have informal land agreements between tribes known as dira, which is interestingly, it's a word related to dar etymologically. So Bedouins are not propertyless nomads, as is often incorrectly assumed. Knowing that very many people have been present in the region in some capacity since at least the 8th century, I find it fascinating that they have been for the most part excluded from the social imaginary. At the same time, it's not really so exceptional. Something we find from the Greeks all the way to the anarchist philosophy of Proton to Hannah Arendt, is that there's a kind of consensus that one can't really participate in political life without possessing property. It's something you find in political philosophy across the ages. So property is a base in society from which to operate. It's kind of a legitimacy in political life. So I share some life histories in this chapter of Romanis who at certain points did manage to acquire property, but then lost everything because of the particular precarity of life in Palestine. The Nakba, the Naxeh, the Gaza wars from 2006 onwards, all leading up to the genocide in 2023. So any socioeconomic gains made in a lifetime is very quickly and violently undone, and you're back to square one. Begging under these conditions is flexible labor and practiced in networks organized along kinship lines. Over time, the experience, or the experiences accumulated by begging as organized labor becomes mnemonic material that accentuates a kind of difference between a we, a we Romanese, and a they, a they non Romanese. And this is really what I get into in this chapter, how this line forms through the repetition of begging under very difficult circumstances.
- [28:00]
B
And I want to focus now on the question of the Gaza Domes. They migrated to the Jerusalem Ramallah peripheries since the blockade began in 2007, and they occupy an especially precarious position, undocumented in their own country, unknown even to the Jerusalem Domes, living just streets away. And you describe a failed marriage proposal between a dumb woman from Gaza and a dumb man from Jerusalem that you personally got involved in. What did that episode teach you about the extraordinary fragmentation of Palestinian society and what it means for kinship bonds? Why are they not communicating with each other? I felt like reading the book that as much as they are the same community, there's like, almost a war separating them.
- [28:49]
A
Yeah. So one of Israel's projects in managing an unwanted colonized subject population has been to contaminate the healthy, organic functioning of the family. There are many ways this happens, and some, well, definitely some much more violent than the ways that I describe. But what I aim to do in this book is show the assault on the family through a kind of minor or everyday register that never reaches the spectacular mythic violence of Gaza. For example, I don't know if after Gaza, if this is the route I would have taken, but this is what seemed to me missing from the anthropological literature on Palestine at the time, which is the myriad of ways in which the Palestinian family has been transformed by colonial fragmentation on the one hand, but also the capitalist demands of modernity on the other. This particular story that you refer to involves a Dome woman from Gaza whose family had resettled in the west bank in recent years, and a Dohm man from Jerusalem. Now, in the past, it was common for Romanis across Palestine and even between countries to marry. Some of the elder Gaza Romanis I met were born in Egypt and married into families from Gaza and in Jordan, you still have marriage across remedy tribes spanning Iraq, Palestine, Jordan, of course, Egypt, of course. The fragmentation of Palestinian enclaves in recent decades has made this impossible, and new cultural differences have emerged. This particular marriage proposal fell apart because of newly emerged distinctions in dowry rates. So the dowry is more expensive in Gaza for various reasons than in Jerusalem. The nature of the wedding itself Gaza domes hold mixed gender weddings full of dancing and so forth. Jerusalem domes used to do this, but they switched to gender segregated weddings. And keep in mind that Jerusalem and Gaza are not very far apart, so for such new cultural distinctions to have emerged within just a few decades, it's quite striking. So as I said earlier, my work is primarily about Palestine, and I guess this is one example of how the story of Romanes and Palestine is a microcosm of the Palestinian story.
- [31:12]
B
Now moving forward, in your third chapter you discuss several Dome deaths at the hands of Israeli forces, most strikingly the largely unnoticed martyrdom of Mohammed Nimr in 2015, whose funeral was attended by only 30 people with no solidarity from his neighborhoods of Esawiya and no visit from Palestinian Authority officials. Why was his death so socially forgettable? And what does that tell us about the relationship between the Dom kinship community and the Palestinian political community?
- [31:44]
A
So first of all, I'd like to say that there are other instances that I don't write about in the book in which a political martyrdom becomes Romani family's right of passage into society, but the argument I make in this chapter is a very particular and nuanced one. This particular case that I write about happened in 2015 during the so called Nayfin Tifada, which was a period of a wave of so called lone wolf Palestinians without any party affiliation carrying out resistance attacks using everyday household objects like kitchen knives, screwdrivers and so forth. And almost always it ended with them being shot dead on the spot. This man, Muhammad Nimr was killed by Israel during this period, but with multiple versions as to what really happened. Muhammad was a Romani man from Babhatta originally, but living in Isawiya since the 1990s and was known to suffer from mental illness. His wife had also recently left him and took the kids with her to Jordan, so there was a lot going on in his life. Regardless, the event was deemed strange even by his neighbors given all the baggage that he carried in his personal life. And the general consensus was that Muhammad couldn't have carried out an act of resistance, so most people just avoided the event's aftermath and the rituals normally bestowed upon political martyrs weren't to be in his case. I explore this instance of Muhammad's martyrdom or non martyrdom through the anthropologist Marshall Sahlin's theory of kinship being the mutuality of being, quote unquote. The mutuality of being meaning that kinship is made in life through relations with others and not necessarily a blood relationship between relatives. Now I have my critique of the mechanics of silence theory, but working with the assumption that this is indeed the case, that kinship can be constructed in society in this being with others, I explore here how kinship isn't made, but undone. I share through Muhammad's story, as well as some other stories in this chapter, of how some cases of a highly valued social fact like martyrdom couldn't withstand the top down assault on the Palestinian family by the colonial state. So that's really what I'm trying to do in this chapter. And it was very difficult to write. Also after I submitted the first draft of the book manuscript, some of my internal coupers from Gaza were killed in the bombings for 2023. And it's very interesting and moving for me to see how families cling to their loved ones as martyrs, even when society sometimes looks the other way or is caught up in other things. So the larger question here, it's maybe a theological question, is who or what is a martyr? And this is a question that continues to intrigue me even in my Syria research. Now, and I'll just say one last thing about this, because it's something that I've been carrying with me for a few years. This little Romani girl whose family I know very well, she's from Gaza, they live in the West Bank. I used to actually refer to her as my daughter when she was young because we really liked each other. She asked me once, arpan, if you die while you're in Palestine, would you be a martyr? And I guess I don't know. And this is kind of the mystery of the figure of the martyr.
- [35:27]
B
That's indeed a fascinating question, one that does not have an easy answer. Let's move to Oman. Let's move to Jordan. So your final chapter takes us to the capital city of Jordan, where you find something that has largely disappeared from Palestine. Romani people living publicly as Romani people represented in Jordan, tribal political structure and with a visible presence in certain Hebrews. So here you're drawing on Ana Haran's concept of a space of appearance. And you suggest that what Israeli colonial rule as suppressed in Palestine has in exile found a kind of public life. Can you explain that contrast and what it reveals about the relationship between property, political community and the possibility of difference?
- [36:14]
A
Jordan is a very interesting place because it's an old new place, as is well known. Jordan as a polity, or even a territorially cohesive entity, is a product of the 20th century colonial imagination. Joseph Massad's work is very clear in showing how modern Jordanian tribalism and its Bedouin national culture are really colonial inventions constructed to serve state building interests. What I show in this chapter is that in this tribal culture, this engineered tribal culture, or even in an engineered tribal. Even in an engineered tribal culture, Rumanese have found a place in political life with certain Rumini political actors refashioning themselves as one of the tribes among tribes. And this political participation is distinct from a strictly nomadic mode of pluralism that one finds in Palestine. At the same time, the actual localities in present day Jordan, and especially in the north, are ancient towns and villages that have historically hosted the same pluralistic alterity as elsewhere in the region. One thing that really stands out to me, or stood out to me in Jordan, in contrast to Palestine, is that Jordan, especially Amman, has been a refuge country in the modern period, taking in Palestinians, Iraqis, Syrians, Sudanese, migrant workers from South Asia. There's also the Rohingya community in Roussefa. Amman itself was of course, founded as a Circassian refugee settlement in 1878, ironically, the same year the first Jewish colony was founded in Palestine. All of this is in contrast to a Palestine that is shut close to migration. Except, of course, Jewish colonial settlement since 1948. At the same time, Jordan as a refuge country is very much consistent with the history of what we call the Bilad Hasham, or the Arab Levant, to which Palestine, of course, belongs. The There's a recent book by the anthropologist Don Chatty. It's a very moving book in which he makes the case that one of the most underappreciated layers of the Syrian tragedy is that Syria, before the war, was the mother of all refuge countries. It had been the preferred destination for all kinds of refugee populations for centuries. That it was Syrians themselves who had to search for refuge in all corners of the world and under the worst humanitarian conditions. So it's also in this natural trajectory of movement, displacement, settlement and pluralism in the region that in Jordan, Remedy Life thrives in a way that it can't under colonial suffocation and enforced homogenization, which is what happened in Palestine. This is one of the ironies of Israeli colonialism that, on the one hand, Israel accentuates sectarian difference for political manipulation not only in Palestine, but also Lebanon, Syria and elsewhere. But it actually destroys the pluralistic fabric of Palestine and the region by curtailing the established ways of life in these places. But as I argue, it's not that difference itself disappears in Palestine. It doesn't thrive publicly as Jordan. Instead it recedes into what I call the mnemonic register of kinship.
- [39:56]
B
Now let's go back to some methodological discussions about your work. And you draw on a deliberately eclectic theoretical toolkit. Levi Strauss, Deleuze, Anna Arendt, psychoanalysis, phenomenology. But you're also quite explicit about turning to Indian theories like and you mentioned that before Ashish, Nandi, Menkad, Rao, rather than defaulting to the usual Euro American canon. So in the afterword you criticize how American frameworks of race and European frameworks of religion get inappropriately universalized onto the Palestinian experience. And I know that because probably even my work as historians were claiming to be far away from that. I probably did it. What does a perspective from the Global south at that those frameworks miss?
- [40:50]
A
So this is a project that's very dear to me. I'm very invested in my work in taking seriously theory from the Global south, not as theory from the Global south as such, but as theory like any other and from anywhere else, and making it portable across contexts. In the book I engage with Nandi and Rao, as you mentioned, along with classical anthropology and continental philosophy. I don't know if this is still the case, but for a while there used to be this trend in American universities to teach decolonized syllabi that focus exclusively on non Western authors. In my view, I'm trying to do something different because in my view this further pathologizes the Global south as something outside of or extraneous to the established order of things. I'm trying to read them alongside the usual suspects, so to say. In any case, there are certain things that by way of which certain traditions develop, one can't help but get from a particular epistemology. Anthropology as a discipline, as is well known, began as a colonial discipline in the early 20th century, mostly in France, Britain and the United States, that asked very poignant etiological questions about certain aspects of the social, like magic and religion, kinship and the family, money and exchange, hierarchy and social organization, and so forth. And it did so using certain methodologies, namely participant observation and comparison. Now, during the first year of my PhD in 2015, the late Marshall Sahlins ignited a rather rambunctious debate on Facebook. He made a post, and it was a thread of comments from a who's who of anthropology at the time, in which he argued that there are some concepts that anthropology gave birth to and that only anthropology can further develop in the contemporary world, like exchange and the gift and and cognition and so forth. Kinship of course, I basically concur writing a book about kinship. Even with a project that looks to integrate Global south theory, one can't ignore a century of rigorous theoretical work in anthropology on this very topic. In my opinion, at least at the same time, thinkers from the Global south like Nandi have developed their own theoretical systems, their own theoretical systems for understanding the postcolonial condition, and these are largely independent from those developed in North American universities. So theories of race and racialization, for instance, have a particular and important context in North America that might resonate in certain parts of the world, but they don't necessarily resonate in the far older post colonial societies that Nandi calls demonic cultures. Or at least not all of them, take them as a case by case basis, not as a universal fact. So what I aim to do in this book is bring together the anthropological canon on kinship with a particular experience of the social that emerges from the Global south, especially from thinkers like Nandi, who lived through the India, Pakistan partition, the Sikh Massacres in the 1980s, the Babri Masjid episode, and more. All of which resonate, I think, in remarkable ways with Middle Eastern experiences like the Lebanese civil war or the Syrian war, or indeed Israeli colonialism in Palestine.
- [44:33]
B
You spent more than three cumulative years in Jerusalem, Ramallah and Amman. Mentioned that earlier, between 2016 and 2024, living at one point in a 13th century Indian Sufi lodge, buying a huge Chevrolet to give your interlocutors rides, which I think it was unwanted, or perhaps not expected at the beginning. And then you attended weddings, weeks and hospital visits. What does that kind of deep hanging out, as you call it, give you that formal interviews cannot? And how did you navigate the ethical challenges of writing about communities that are already so marginal and so easily stereotyped?
- [45:17]
A
I love that car and I miss it. I began this podcast talking about anthropology as a science of alterity, but it's a practice that also represses one's own alterity to generative ends. What I mean by this is that ethnographic fieldwork, or at least traditional internal couter based ethnographic fieldwork, in which one is thrown into a particular social milieu, is an opportunity to negate one's own ego. Ethnographers are very often going around following people, getting to situations that they'd rather not be in, waiting for people for hours, days, weeks, only to ask very basic questions. Very often being treated like a child because you know you're asking children's questions. It's a kind of ego. Killing and negating oneself is a tenet of most spiritual traditions. And there is indeed a kind of physical and emotional hardship in doing ethnographic fieldwork, even a certain asceticism. So that's the first thing. At the same time, deep hanging out, this is a term I borrow from Clifford Geertz, is an opportunity for and ethical self making. So on the one hand, it's a negation of the self, but it's also a construction of the self through the other. And this can really only be done if one goes into the field in peace, with genuine curiosity, and in the Palestinian context, in political solidarity. And I think I did that. And I think people respond to this openness. Of course, there's the ethical question in anthropology, and it's an important one. But I want to hear whether ethics in research can really be decoupled from ethics in all our other relations. There's always a risk of a violence of representation, but the question of ethics is much larger than just the ethics in fieldwork.
- [47:15]
B
Now, you completed this book while watching the genocide in Gaza unfold in real time. And the text is marked by that awareness throughout. Some of the people you've read about have lost family members, and the communities are describing us as being decimated. How did that context shape the final form of the book? And what does it mean to write about mnemonic difference and the resilience of kingship when the physical communities that carry those memories are actually being destroyed?
- [47:48]
A
Yeah. So what's there really to say about Gaza? The erasure of Gaza from the map is indeed, as you say, an erasure of kinship. It's an erasure of physical communities, cultural heritage, memories. It's really hard to find something original to say about it. When the genocide started, I was in Palestine. I was in Ramallah on October 7, and I stuck around for almost a month. It was a surreal time. But I also feel fortunate to have been there and to have witnessed this very confusing moment. I spent much of that time with Romani families from Gaza living in the west bank. And the whole family had gathered in the living room and Al Jazeera was on the TV and everybody was on their phones. It felt like being in a control room of a news station or something. Just a lot of action. And I'm really fortunate. I feel fortunate to have been a part of that in that difficult moment. For scholars of Palestine, and I think more so for Palestinian scholars, there were basically two ways of coping with the war and the genocide, and maybe still is. Or one was total paralysis for at least a year where nobody did any work. And the other was carrying on with work as if things were business as usual. Neither one is really healthy, and I think they're really mirror images of one another, of the same shock and sadness. I was the second type. I was able to carry on with making revisions to the book and updating certain sections to make them more relevant to the new paradigm that the genocide had ushered in. In the early months, I felt compelled to write some articles for newspapers and blogs, but after a while I stopped finding interesting things to say. On the other hand, during the genocide I was able to pull it together and work on another project that we had started a few years prior. It's a book that I co edited with my friend and colleague Russell Hatim, called Life Weavings of Palestine. It's an anthology of essays, poetry, memoir, short stories, interviews that tells the story of Palestinian pluralism in a way that's never really been addressed before. I see Nasij as a conceptual pair with Relative Strangers. Nasij was published in March of last year, 2025, and I would say that this project was more radically transformed by the genocide than Relative Strangers, for which I only made edits and revisions during the genocide. Where's Nisij? I actively worked on the introduction and editing the book. So Nasij really became an inventory of a disappearing Palestine. And Relative Strangers, I think also speaks to the genocide. But the bulk of the book had already been written, so maybe not directly.
- [50:54]
B
I have one final question, perhaps deceptively a simple one. You end the introduction with a beautiful thought that the Arabic word for human in son is an anagram of nasi, he who forgets. And that and a quote. If there is anything novel that I'm saying about the family, it is because anthropology has merely forgotten. What has anthropology forgotten? And what do you hope readers will remember from this book?
- [51:24]
A
I mentioned earlier how the ancient Greeks understood politics to be a subordinate endeavor to philosophy. Because a new political generation comes along and forgets everything that the previous generation had accomplished and undoes it. Then you start again, and politics becomes an endless cycle of doing and forgetting. I think it's the same with scholarship. So historians like yourself write new books on old topics all the time. Sometimes they use new sources, but sometimes the new histories don't add anything new, except for maybe a fresher perspective informed by the new times, the novel milieu's. I think anthropology is fundamentally the same. The human condition doesn't change, but our ways of understanding it too. I would love to see an ethnography of Burmese in Palestine in 20 years, but for now, I hope that this book is a snapshot of a particular time and place, and that place is the working class neighborhoods of Jerusalem and Ramallah just before, on the precipice of an absolute tragedy that would change everything.
- [52:32]
B
This was Arpan Roy, author of Relative Romani Kinship and Palestinian Difference, published by University of Toronto Press in 2025. Arpan, thank you so much.
- [52:46]
A
Thank you so much for having me for the great questions. Thank you for listening to this episode of the New Books Network. We are an academic podcast network with the mission of public education. If you liked this episode, please share it with a friend and rate us on your preferred podcast platform. You can browse all of our episodes on our website newbooksnetwork.com Connect with us on Instagram and BlueSky with the handle ew booksnetwork, and subscribe to our weekly Substack newsletter at newbooksnetwork.substrac.com to get episode recommendations straight to your inbox. Uncovered windows can make your home feel up to 20 degrees hotter.
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