Anthropologists Must Answer the Call from Palestinian Civil Society: a Conversation with Nadia Abu El-Haj and Sami Hermez

In November 20, 2015, a resolution presented to the members of the American Anthropological Association for a boycott of Israeli institutions narrowly missed adoption (2,384 in favor and 2,423 opposed; 49.6% - 50.4%). Responding to the new petition members submitted on March 3, the American Anthropological Association has scheduled a vote on the boycott of Israeli academic institutions from June 15-July 14. 

In this episode of Speaking Out of Place we talk with two of the main scholar-activists involved in the campaign, who tell us why the American Anthropological Association must follow other academic organizations such as the American Studies Association in answering the call from Palestinian civil society for a boycott of Israeli institutions.

Nadia Abu El-Haj is Ann Whitney Olin Professor in the Departments of Anthropology at Barnard College and Columbia University, Co-Director of the Center for Palestine Studies, and Chair of the Governing Board of the Society of Fellows/Heyman Center for the Humanities at Columbia University. She also serves as Vice President and Vice Chair of the Board at The Institute for Palestine Studies in Washington DC. The recipient of numerous awards, including from the Social Science Research Council, the Wenner Gren Foundation, the MacArthur Foundation, the Harvard Academy for Area and International Studies, the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton, and the Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation, she is the author of numerous journal articles published on topics ranging from the history of archaeology in Palestine to the question of race and genomics today.

Sami Hermez is director of the Liberal Arts Program and Associate Professor in residence of anthropology at Northwestern University in Qatar.  His forthcoming book will be released in February 2024 with Stanford University Press titled, My Brother, My Land: A Story From Palestine, which is a creative nonfiction that chronicles the life of a Palestinian family living through ongoing Israeli occupation and dispossession. His first book published with Penn Press, War is Coming: Between Past and Future Violence in Lebanon (2017), focused on the everyday life of political violence in Lebanon and how people recollect and anticipate this violence. He obtained his doctorate degree from the Department of Anthropology at Princeton University.