Down to air. Palestinian memories and practices of weather relatedness

Among Palestinian refugees in the Jordan Valley (Jordan), the memory of a weather calendar called murba’nia, a winter “rainy season”, is resilient in displacement notwithstanding it has become “irrelevant” within the radical changes of intensive irrigated agribusiness. Strikingly, with the loss of their land and villages, refugees brought with them their “weather” as patterns of engagement and knowledge of “the air”, which composed a set of frames in orienting rainfed agriculture in a fragile arid environment as much as a patterns of cultural autonomy of being “fellah”(peasant) in wider marginalization process. In the West Bank, on the hills where this calendar was developed in history and was “rooted” in the air through local farming experiences and perceptions, this meteorological knowledge is seldom spoken about and generally censured within modernization narratives, but still active in skills in family farming, which invest on the relatedness of resources in the circular economy of habba’il (terraced gardens), in the area of Battir (Bethlehem): those savoir faire and techniques, otherwise left aside, are reproduced within these few fields and spaces of autonomy and refer to a relatedness of multiple actors and weather agents within a territory that in the last century has represented a laboratory of intensive patterns of disconnections. Murba’nia composed a complex classification of 90 days of increasing rain/wet/cold periods, a rainsphere, where skills could get engaged at their best in order to save as much humidity for the longer, dry, hot summer season. Facing the historical unpredictability and variability of rain, murba’nia represents a pattern of framing uncertainty, of working with the “air” in orienting land ploughing techniques, in seeding weather with rainfed local seeds’ reproduction (largely substituted now by irrigated seeds), in harvesting water through cistern and landscape organization techniques as a way to “harvest weather”: an effective engagement with weather changes that differs from contemporary rigidity of previsions. In the Occupied Territories, environment is not the main concern facing daily insecurity of military occupation and life uncertainty in one of the most high-tech experiments of land and communities colonization and bordering, of “risk” society and fenced materiality. The common weather has been disconnected as much as water resources on the ground have been bordered. Icon of global patterns of territorial management and idolatries of land, here the aerial dimension has become a detached locus of risk (military visual control, pollution). This local case, based on historical data as much as on contemporary ethnographic analysis of environmental relations “at work”, allows addressing three crucial general and global issues of anthropology facing climate changes. First of all, politics of nature stand at the heart of nationalist perspectives (politics of planting, rooting and de-rooting the self and the others, technofix utopias) with their incapacity to meet climate changes and their challenge for a new shared patterns of knowledge and resource use: notwithstanding border development “on the ground”, Palestinian population and Israeli colons and military forces are sharing the same overheating atmosphere. Secondly, the interdependence between patterns of denial of the human Other and of denial of environmental agents: this leads the attention to the cultural construction of denial and of perturbating collective emotions related to anxiety of the “Others” -whether communities and social borders as non-humans in the management of the material- and its relation with the history of relatedness in sharing land and weather. Finally, this local knowledge of a weathered world challenges our ambivalent model of perception and management of the material, as stable fundament as opposed to the moving immaterial, to the aerial, connected to un/stability, invisibility, confusion or turbulence. Palestinian peasant memories and savoir-faire down to earth in the fields are an invitation for a “down to air” perspective and for practices of relatedness, even more in the midst of increasing human borders.