Palm Sunday - الشعانين

Church is packed full today, and despite extra seats being made available, many are standing in the aisles and narthex. As usual, people arrive at mass in dribs and drabs, but by around 10am, an hour into the mass liturgy, clerics are barely audible above the chatter of children and families, many of whom don't attend church regularly.

The usual mass is augmented with three circumambulations of the hykala (nave) processing a large olive branch, off which people pull a smaller branch for themselves and their families.

This is generally articulated as simply a commemoration of the entry of Jesus into Jerusalem, but one man tells me afterwards that he will keep the "holy branch" until the next mass to "keep away evil things".

The first lesson

Olive branches attached to a marvahtho (fan)

Olive branches attached to a candle

The olive branch is brought into the azhikakam (holy place) during a recitation.

 The branch is processed around the hykala.

Abuna Butros

As usual, people come up to pay their respects to the bible, and today also to an elaborate cross and book.

Fisk: Exodus

Robert Fisk's article in the last Independent on Sunday shows how Christian emigration from the Middle East, already an existential concern even ten or twenty years ago, has accelerated. American intervention in the region has of course been something of a catalyst. However, he relates it more generally to the simultaneous othering of Christians in the region by Muslim majorities, who may view them as part of Western imperial Christendom, and by Westerners for whom the 'Christian' designation means little in any case. This is most obviously the case in the Holy Land where Israel, arguably at the front-line of Western we-feeling, views Palestinians with indiscriminate hostility, while Palestinian Christians may experience the focussed suspicion of Muslim compatriots.

Western Christian culpability in this is nothing new. At least since Leo I, the counter-intuitive notion that the West is the legitimate guardian of Christianity, and then of civilisation, has often been aggressively asserted. Indeed, the success of this notion is evidenced not only in our general ignorance about the range and depth of early Christian activity east of Jerusalem as far as China, but also in the often reluctant identification Eastern Christians sometimes have with the West because of domestic hostility. Indeed, the Church of the East is now based in Chicago.

Latin Patriarch Fouad Twal is quoted by Fisk describing Arabic-speaking Christians as a bridge between East and West, but it seems that in representing Eastern Christianity the epistemological concessions have been made by Easterners. I hope it is not too ambitious to view my research as politically significant in this regard at least. Framing Eastern Christianity in Western categories, as representations of 'Palestinian' Christianity tend to, may do violence to particular ways of seeing the world that could, with a bit of work on our part, radically transform the engagement Westerners have with the Middle East, drawing us closer to a mutual comprehension based on intellectual hospitality. Better representing the perspectives of Christians at a further remove from a Western objectification of texts is just one way of doing this.

An Anthropologian?

Parables and Images will be my intellectual man drawer where I'll store fragments that seem meaningful, interesting, or just somehow hard to dispose of.

I have positioned myself here, a little playfully, as an 'anthropologian'. Unlike theologians who would recognise that their object of study is impossible to confine to a Petri dish, social scientists sometimes seem to imagine human life to be an object we can study at some kind of remove. In fact, calling ourselves 'social scientists' in the first place seems quite arbitrary bearing in mind the range of approaches to knowledge it allows for, reflecting perhaps a contemporary tendency to place scientific knowing above all other knowings. By way of contrast, we could quite easily reclaim the earlier designation of those interested in the physical world as 'natural philosophers'.

In fact I prefer this archaism. Maybe we are social philosophers, or as Tim Ingold would have it, simply practitioners of philosophy "with the people in". Human life is immanent to us as researchers, and indeed transcendent in its complexity and range. And like theologians we can recognise our task, attempting to map that which we cannot rise above, as a necessary impossibility, necessary because navigating through this immediate unknown of Us is the only way to prevent mystery becoming mere uncertainty, hope becoming frustrated desire, and our irresistible relativism becoming interminable drift.

Thinking of the researcher as an anthropologian is my way of reminding myself that I am cosubject with those whose lives I want to represent through ethnography. Academia can bestow a dubious authority on its own, but we can use this authority as a host would, to allow others into one's domain, at risk to our comfort - an elegant symmetry with the fact that we are simultaneously guests in the field subject to others' hospitality.