Embodying The Nation: Maha Saca"s Post-intifada Postcards

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Embodying the nation: Maha Saca's post-intifada postcards Annelies Moors Online Publication Date: 01 September 2000 To cite this Article: Moors, Annelies (2000) 'Embodying the nation: Maha Saca's post-intifada postcards', Ethnic and Racial Studies, 23:5, 871 — 887 To link to this article: DOI: 10.1080/01419870050110940 URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/01419870050110940

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Embodying the nation: Maha Saca© s post-intifada postcards Annelies Moors Abstract This article deals with the cultural politics of nationalism. It is argued that both the production and display of embroidered dresses and the particular ways in which these are presented on one set of picture postcards are part of the material formation of the Palestinian nation. Whereas the dresses on these postcards draw attention to a rural heritage that stands for territory and rootedness, the women-bodies presenting these dresses, both in their appearance and through the act of public presentation, express urban modernity. Such a style of representation avoids associations of the rural with “backwardness” and enables the inclusion of elements of the rural in the modern national project. Keywords: Cultural politics; nationalism; dress; postcards; gender; Palestine.

Introduction Cultural politics is central to the nationalist project. Although the members of a nation often see themselves as bound by primordial ties, the nation is not a natural entity. As Anderson (1991) has argued, the nation is actively produced; it is a particular style of ‘imagined community’, built on new notions of language, time (simultaneity) and place (territory). In a similar vein, Hobsbawm (1983) points out that the national project asks for an investigation of ‘invented traditions’, that is, newly created national symbols and rituals that are none the less seen as present since time immemorial. In this article I deal with the symbolic meaning of embroidered dresses – in some sense an ‘invented tradition’ – for the imaginings and material grounding of the Palestinian nation. More speciŽcally, I focus on how these dresses are presented on one set of picture postcards, an important medium through which such imaginings are disseminated and become generalized. By the mid-1990s Maha Saca’s postcards and posters had become a highly popular genre of Palestinian-produced imagery.1 Many hotels and restaurants in places such as East Jerusalem, Bethlehem and Beit Jala (on the West Bank) displayed these colourful images of lovely women in Ethnic and Racial Studies Volume 23 Number 5 September 2000 pp. 871–887 © 2000 Routledge Journals, Taylor & Francis Ltd ISSN 0141-9870 print/ISSN 1466-4356 online

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lavishly embroidered and decorated dresses. Many Palestinians and foreigners bought them, as they liked the bright colours and the beauty of the embroidered dresses and of the women displaying them. They could also be found on the walls of Palestinian and Arab organizations abroad. Especially for Palestinian audiences, these images are, however, not simply beautiful and pleasing to the eye. Their evaluations of these postcards and posters are framed by the ways in which embroidered dresses have become a key symbol of Palestinian national identity. The politics of dress is a much-debated subject among historians, anthropologists, and other social scientists.2 Clothing styles have not only been instrumental in the reproduction of speciŽc statuses in such different periods and places as, for instance, the Ottoman empire (Quataert 1997) and late twentieth-century Oman (Chatty 1997), but elements of dress and cloth in themselves may embody power, as Bayly (1986) and Cohn (1989) have pointed out for pre-industrial India. Colonial administrators and missionaries attempted to ‘dress the natives’, and new rulers of independent nation-states often propagated new dress codes as a form of cultural politics. For instance, soon after establishing the Turkish Republic, Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, in an attempt to bring about cultural Westernization, banned the wearing of the fez, promoted the donning of hats, and strongly encouraged women to unveil (Göle 1996). In Iran, Reza Shah proclaimed similar reform programmes, and even went as far as to forbid women to wear the chador, an order that remained in force from 1936 to 1941. In a counter move Ayatollah Khomeini, after coming to power, obliged all women to wear hijab (Islamic dress) in order to stress the Islamic character of the new Republic (Paidar 1995). But it was not only rulers who engaged in the politics of dress; subaltern groups also have often employed speciŽc styles of dress as a form of resistance. This may entail more or less subtle subversions, as Comaroff and Comaroff (1997), for instance, elaborate on when discussing how Tswana subjects have been fashioned in colonial South Africa, and Macleod (1991) when she deŽnes the new veiling of lowermiddle-class working women in Cairo as ‘accommodating protest’. In other cases issues of dress led to direct confrontations with the (colonial) state, as with the swadeshi (home production) movement in Bengal during the Žrst decade of this century (Bayly 1986) and the khadi (hand woven) movement, which aimed at uniting the Indians against the increased Westernization of Indian dress (Tarlo 1996). These sartorial debates and struggles point to the centrality of clothing styles in the construction, maintenance and transformation of collective identities. Women’s dress has become the hallmark in this Želd of cultural politics. As some of the examples above indicate, during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries changes in male dress were also dealt with in debates on whether progress is to be equated with Westernization or should be built on notions of cultural authenticity. As wearing some form

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of Western dress, be it a business suit and tie, or T-shirt and jeans, has become increasingly commonplace among men in the course of the twentieth century, women’s sartorial practices have become more and more central in the creation of boundaries between particular ethnic, religious or national groups and in their symbolic representation.3 In this article I shall complicate matters further by partially shifting the focus from Palestinian women’s sartorial practices to the ways in which elaborately embroidered dresses are presented as a national signiŽer on picture postcards. In doing so, I shall take issue with some commonly held assumptions about the relation between group identity and women’s dress. A focus on dress styles in a narrow sense (as clothing) may overlook the importance of the women-bodies wearing these items of clothing and the act of presenting them. In order to understand how dressing styles are employed as a marker of an ethnic or national group, I shall argue that it is imperative to take into consideration the ways in which women present these dresses, including their personal appearance in terms of body language, comportment, make-up and so on. By paying attention to the possible tensions and contradictions between the dresses and the bodies, I shall modify the notion that women are constructed through their dressing styles, and, more speciŽcally, the assumption that the adaptation of Western dress by men, while women continue to wear traditional clothing, is an indication of women’s exclusion from modernity (Wilson 1985, p. 14). When not only the dresses, but also the bodies wearing these dresses and the act of presentation are taken into account, it becomes evident that these women are not excluded from modernity, but are promoters of a particular notion of modernity, a notion that, in the case of these postcards and posters, actively connects urban middle-class bodies to a rural sartorial heritage. The politics of material culture Maha Saca links her activities, that is collecting and exhibiting dresses, and, in particular, producing posters and picture postcards, to developments in Palestinian politics. Whereas during the intifada activism often took the form of direct political action, Žghting the Israeli military presence by all means possible, the demise of the intifada has contributed to a disillusionment with political activism and to a growing interest in culture as a form of resistance, also in more individual and commercial projects. Still, neither a focus on culture as a way of strengthening Palestinian national identity nor the centrality of embroidered dresses, as an emblem of rural heritage is new. As Swedenburg (1990) has argued, at the very moment that the livelihood of a large number of Palestinian peasants was taken away – Žrst in 1948, when the state of Israel was established, and then after the 1967 war – this peasantry became a central signiŽer in

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Palestinian nationalism. In various art forms, such as literature and painting, typically rural elements, such as the land, the olive tree, the orange tree, tabun bread and wild thyme (za’tar) were employed to symbolize Palestinian national identity. To this argument needs to be added that rural women were particularly implicated in this discourse. Peasant women were foregrounded as they had become both the mainstay of agricultural subsistence production and were seen as the reproducers, biologically and socially, of the Palestinian community and culture. To symbolize the centrality of the peasantry in nationalist discourse, women representing the nation are often depicted wearing long, owing embroidered dresses.4 Maha Saca’s post-intifada picture postcards also depict women in richly embroidered dresses. Both dresses and postcards are not only a form of cultural production, but are also, more speciŽcally, a form of material culture. Discussing the politics of her project, it is the very materiality of the dresses that Maha Saca strongly underlines. For this materiality gives them a political impact that is different from such cultural products as songs, sayings, poetry and so on. These dresses function as material proof of a Palestinian historical presence and document the existence of a Palestinian cultural heritage. More precisely, as previously different areas of Palestine had their own styles of modelling and embroidery, dresses in such different styles may be seen as evidence of a former Palestinian presence in these particular areas.5 By collecting dresses from these different areas, Maha Saca then reclaims these areas, including those located where the state of Israel was established in 1948, as territory belonging to the Palestinian nation. Women’s rather than men’s dress is employed to claim a particular territory, because differences between geographical areas were much more prominently visible in women’s dress.6 For material culture to work as a convincing argument for territorial claims, the ‘nationality’ of these cultural products needs to be securely anchored. Struggles are waged on several fronts, since some Israeli institutions have attempted to appropriate Palestinian dress as Israeli costume. For instance, under the title Crafts of Israel Dayan and Feinberg present many examples of ‘traditional Bethlehem dress’ (1974, pp. 100, 125 ff.) without any acknowledgement that these are part of a Palestinian sartorial heritage.7 This book also shows how Israeli designers made use of ‘traditional designs’ (1974, p. 102) that were obviously based on Palestinian embroidery patterns; these were marketed through Maskit, the Israel Center of Handicrafts’ international outlet.8 To stress that the dresses on her postcards are part of a Palestinian national heritage, Maha Saca ensures that these cards all have the word ‘Palestinian’ in their captions; at times she also uses a strong visual symbol, the Palestinian ag, to claim a speciŽc item. A postcard entitled ‘Palestinians in traditional dresses, eating Palestinian traditional food

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“Falafel and Humos” at Ifteim’s restaurant, established 1950, Bethlehem “originally from Jaffa” ’ not only links traditional dresses with traditional food, but through the small Palestinian ag stuck in the falafel, reclaims falafel, often seen in the West as an Israeli dish, as Palestinian food.9 In this struggle for deŽning the ‘national belonging’ of material culture, Maha Saca’s project has had a remarkable effect. The Museum of Music and Ethnology in Haifa included, with her permission, some of her postcards in its catalogue From the Kumbaz to the Kaftan: Jewish and Palestinian Costume (1995) and did so under the heading ‘Palestinian women in traditional costumes’.10 Tradition and heritage: the cultural economy of embroidered dresses The central place of embroidered dresses in Palestinian heritage invites a closer look at the notions of tradition evoked. The earliest information available about Palestinian embroidered dresses dates from the latter part of the nineteenth century. In her seminal study of Palestinian costume, Shelagh Weir (1989) emphasizes that Palestinian embroidery was, and is, very much a living tradition, with rural women actively engaged in including new materials and motifs in their work whenever the occasion arose. Around the turn of the century, for instance, new motives were introduced in missionary schools, which attracted girls by offering them instruction in needlework. Whereas there were, and are, regional differences in styles of dress and embroidery, especially with the development of motor transport in the 1920s, interregional influences became more pronounced and, in particular, the highly appreciated Bethlehem styles of embroidery gained popularity elsewhere. 11 By the 1940s, when DMC thread had largely replaced floss silk, European copybooks were widely used, with women incorporating new floral motives in older geographical patterns. In some parts of the West Bank, especially in the central and southern areas, and in some of the refugee camps in Jordan, rural women still embroider their own dresses, include new motives, and continue a living tradition (Weir and Shahid 1988, pp. 18–19). Among rural Palestinian women in Israel, on the other hand, embroidery is no longer common; in fact, in regions such as the Galilee, embroidery had already ceased to be widely practised by the turn of the century. And in the Nablus area, women seemed never to have been engaged in embroidery, at least not in living memory. The establishment of the state of Israel in 1948 (in Palestinian historiography the nakba or disaster) which led to the exile of the large majority of the Palestinian Arab population, created a new national signiŽcance for embroidered dresses. This was further stimulated when after the war of 1967 nationalist institutions started embroidery programmes in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, in Lebanon and in Jordan,

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both in order to preserve Palestinian heritage and to provide incomegenerating projects for refugee women. The Association for the Development of Palestinian Camps [ADPC], for instance, founded in 1969 in Lebanon and still active, refers in its yer to ‘the necessity of preserving the heritage of traditional Palestinian embroidery which would also bring means of Žnancial support to many needy families in the camps’. While such nationalist welfare associations build upon the Palestinian embroidery tradition and aim at preserving Palestinian national heritage, there are nevertheless major differences in the process of production, the market targeted and the style and use of the dresses. In the Žrst half of this century most women embroidered for their own personal use, in preparation for their trousseau; but there were some women, especially in the Bethlehem region, for whom embroidery was a source of income. The women working for these nationalist institutions, in contrast, are on the whole impoverished and need some form of income-generating activity, such as embroidering at home. These women may well be from areas, such as the Galilee, that do not have a living embroidery tradition. One of the founders of the ADPC was confronted with this problem when she set out to start an embroidery project in the camps in Lebanon. Having bought lavishly embroidered dresses from Palestinian women in Jordan who had ed there from the West Bank during the 1967 war, she went to show these to the refugee women in Lebanon, most of whom were originally from the Galilee. The younger women did not recognize these dresses as being Palestinian; one of them actually asked her whether the dresses were from India. When older women were invited, some of them remembered that women in other parts of Palestine used to wear such dresses.12 The market for dresses consists largely of Palestinian middle-class women, usually urban women, often part of the more prosperous Palestinian diaspora in the United States, Europe, or the Gulf countries. Among rural women dresses with relative little embroidery were for everyday use, and the more elaborately embroidered dresses were kept for special occasions such as weddings, religious festivals, and city visits. The urban middle-class women, who in everyday life wear Western dress, put on embroidered dresses for a different kind of special occasion, that is, at political gatherings, diplomatic receptions and so on. This different market has also implications for the styles preferred. The cut is adapted to what is deemed suitable for contemporary times, that is, the style of dress is not too far removed from modern, Western fashion. As a result, sleeves are no longer wide but narrow and often inserted, the side panels are omitted, and the cut generally follows the body shape more closely (Seng and Wass 1995). Rather than predominantly red, softer colours are used and new combinations of embroidery styles are created. The nationalist associations themselves point to such transformations

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with some ambivalence. While the ADPC has a small library of books published about Palestinian embroidery, the women in charge of design pointed out that they had attempted to produce exact copies of ‘traditional dresses’, but had soon given this up because there was no demand for them. The ways in which this invented tradition is innovative is also evident from Palestinian Folk Dresses: Traditional and Modern published by The Family Care Society in Amman, Jordan. The author, Hanan Ghosheh al-Hassan, distinguishes between the ‘replicated’ dresses (‘to keep Palestinian folk dresses lively and vibrant, forever, and to maintain a bright image of them for present and future generations, the society replicated these dresses in accordance with their original image’) and the ‘modernized’ dresses (‘those which the modern woman would wear nowadays. These carry the Palestinian characteristics, i.e. the form and shape of the motifs as well as the patterns . . . The society takes pride in converting the taqsireh to a modern jacket which a woman can wear for all occasions’) (1996, p. 5). In addition, as embroidery is the central Palestinian element of these dresses, Palestinian identity can also be expressed through other, new items with embroidery, such as cushions, which may be displayed in a guestroom, or other smaller decorative items. Cushions are a major hand-embroidered product of the ADPC. As its yer states: ‘Just as these dresses, still worn today, have acquired a new signiŽcance as expressions of a Palestinian National Identity, the cushion, in its turn, has become another symbol of a nation’s National Heritage’.13 Palestinian embroidery, then, is both a living and an invented tradition (Hobsbawn 1983). It is a living and ever-changing tradition through the work of the women in rural areas, who still continue, in whatever form, the embroidery traditions of their regions. It is also an invented tradition with nationalist institutions reinventing embroidery as part of a nationalist project, providing needy women with a source of income and producing a national symbol, Palestinian embroidery. Yet, there are no sharp lines of demarcation between these living and invented traditions. Precisely because embroidery has become such a national symbol, rural women have taken up elements of these new styles in their own work. And whereas the nationalist institutions set out to preserve traditional styles of embroidery, they have had to adopt their products to market demands. Picture postcards: tensions between dresses and bodies Maha Saca’s postcard production is the next step of a project that began with collecting and exhibiting embroidered Palestinian dresses. Starting with her grandmother’s dress and the headdress of her husband’s grandmother, and adding to these some dresses from traders in East Jerusalem, she began to organize exhibits, both locally, and later also abroad: in

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Spain, the United States of America and the Gulf countries. These dresses which Maha Saca has depicted on picture postcards are not the contemporary adaptations of older styles; they are dresses produced during the Žrst half of this century. That is, they are ‘museum pieces’, comparing well with those depicted in Weir’s Palestinian Costume.14 A major motive for Maha Saca to produce postcards was to reach a wider public, both Palestinian and foreign. Palestinians, ‘some of whom had become embarrassed to wear their village dresses’, were to be made aware of and appreciate their own cultural heritage. Foreigners were to be informed about the Palestinian cultural heritage in order to be convinced of the historical presence and national rights of the Palestinian people. Yet, as Maha Saca pointed out, the ways in which these two audiences appreciate the cards differ. Palestinians like to see dresses from their own area; they like to see a lot of dresses, and then look to see whether their ‘own’ dresses are also represented.15 Foreigners, on the other hand, are more interested in the historical and religious sites; they do not like cards showing a large number of girls, but prefer only a few girls to appear in the foreground of these sites. The more than seventy different postcards that Maha Saca had produced by 1995 included those showing larger groups of women posing in embroidered dresses and those showing only a small number of women. Most of the images depict scenes in Bethlehem, but there are also cards of women wearing dresses from the Jerusalem, Jericho, Jaffa and Aker (Acre) regions. If, as already argued, the dresses function as material proof of previous Palestinian presence, the images produced are evidence of the existence of these dresses, a double positivist move as it were. These postcards and posters, reproductions of photographs, are part of the photographic discourse that claims to produce a mirror image of reality. Most of the images are photo-technically so constructed, through camera angle, shot size, lens type, focus, lighting, composition and so on, as to create maximum clarity, transparency and visibility. The settings and style of representation are, however, much closer to a theatrical performance than to documentary realism, or rather, these postcards can be seen as documenting theatrical performances. This theatre is very much historical theatre, with the museum-like quality of the dresses enhanced by the settings in which they are presented. In many cases the women are photographed at historical sites, such as at the Herodion fortress near Bethlehem, at the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem, at Hisham’s palace in Jericho, in front of Damascus Gate in Jerusalem, and on the steps of the palace of Sulaiman Jasser in Bethlehem. In addition, some are depicted at places with biblical connotations, such as Shepherd’s Field, or at a museum, that is, the Islamic museum in Jerusalem, or simply at an ‘old cistern’. Other images link the dresses to the past by presenting other historical items, an essential part of Palestinian heritage, such as the ubiquitous earthenware

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water jugs and wicker baskets. This mode of representation is condensed in a small number of postcards that depict women in a Palestinian house. Here a highly theatrical setting is created by including as many elements of Palestinian heritage in the image as possible: embroidered panels as wall hangings and embroidered table covers, sofas with colourful coverings; numerous embroidered cushions; hand-woven rugs; standards displaying varying styles of headdress; a water pipe; a Bedouin style coffee-pot with coffee cups; mother-of-pearl boxes; mirrors, a wooden chest, a stone hand mill; trays made from straw; an old hand-sewing machine; glass; lamps; jewellery in a glass case; and other paraphernalia. Presenting these dresses in historical settings or together with other handicrafts emphasizes their particular value as heritage. A different relation between those depicted and the setting is apparent in the case of the photographs taken in the coastal cities in Israel. On a card depicting Žve women in a park in Jaffa (Plate 1), with one of them holding an earthenware water jug, the high rise buildings of Tel-Aviv are clearly visible in the background. The political message here is underlined in the caption on the back: ‘Palestinian women near Jaffa in the traditional costumes of Majdel, SaŽriyyah, Beit-Dajan, Yabnah and Yazour’. These are all Palestinian villages, destroyed in 1948, or emptied of their inhabitants. Some of the ‘Palestinian house’ cards also express the nationalist connection in a more direct way. By including a Palestinian ag among the heritage objects packed into the picture, the historical presence of the Palestinian nation is directly linked to an imagined future of Palestinian statehood. Captions, such as the last one mentioned above, refer to the ubiquitous unity-in-diversity theme, which is enhanced by the divergent ways in which the dresses, on the one hand, and the women-bodies, on the other, are represented on the postcards. In the case of the dresses, differences in style, colour and so on are highlighted, with the captions pointing to the various areas of origin, yet the women are invariably deŽned in national terms, as Palestinian only. There are no links between particular styles of dress and particular women-bodies. Such a way of presenting ‘women in costume’ is very different from that used on turn-of-the-century postcards of Palestine. The latter were strongly inuenced by nineteenth-century notions about the ways in which exterior appearances reect inner states of being. Photographs of individuals came to represent particular types, to stand for a speciŽc category, be it religious (‘Muslim women’) or locational (‘girls from Bethlehem’). This nineteenth-century discourse was strongly racialized, with religious categories also framed in terms of descent.16 In the case of Maha Saca’s imagery, the relation between categorization and appearance is different. Diversity is constructed by means of dressing styles; the women wearing these dresses are, as Palestinians, each others’ equivalents and fully interchangeable. 17

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Plate 1. Postcard caption: Palestinian women near Jaffa in the traditional costumes of Majdel, SaŽriyyah, Beit=Dajan, Yabnah and Yazour [also in Arabic]. Prepared and produced by Maha Saca, Bethlehem, P.O. Box 146; copyright reserved for Maha Saca; postcard printed by H. Abudalo.

Plate 2. Postcard caption: Bethlehem ‘Thob’ between the past and present [also in Arabic]. Prepared and produced by Maha Saca, Bethlehem, P.O. Box 146; photo. Nabil Diek; copyright reserved for Maha Saca; postcard printed by H. Abudalo.

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These dresses are not simply presented as elements of material culture, as is often the case with museum catalogues; they are worn by a total of at least some sixteen different girls. Turning to these women-bodies, the actresses in the theatre as it were, tensions abound. Whereas the dresses stand for a rural tradition, the women wearing them are not older peasant women, but women depicted as modern, urban and civilized, who use fashionable make-up, such as lipstick and nail polish, and whose modern shoes and watches are occasionally visible. They do not use hair coverings to express modesty, but to playfully draw attention to their attractiveness. In short, whereas these embroidered dresses represent a Palestinian rural tradition, the dresses are worn by women, who express through their body language, make-up and hair styles, middle-class urban modernity rather than the lifestyle and activities of a rural past. One example, a postcard of a Palestinian woman in colourfully embroidered dress is particularly interesting as it includes a number of framed family photographs (Plate 2). The largest photograph on the wall is that of Maha Saca’s husband’s grandmother who wears the very same headdress as the one the woman is modelling. The inclusion of this particular photograph in the postcard works as a strong and convincing argument for the authenticity of the latter’s outŽt and underlines its historicity. The caption on the back of the card, ‘Bethlehem “thob” [dress] between the past and present’ also invites the audience to make this link. Yet, at the same time, the different ways in which the women in the old family photographs and the woman model present themselves, create a discontinuity between the past and the present, for their comportment, manner of posing and facial expressions differ considerably. Whereas the women in the family photographs look straight ahead in a serious and restrained manner, appear not to wear make-up, and have their coin headdresses completely covered with their veils, the present-day model smiles at the camera, wears eye make-up and lipstick, and has her veil draped in such a way as to show off the coins of her headdress. The women depicted on Maha Saca’s postcards also remain far removed from certain types of women’s work. The ways in which they hold the obviously unused earthenware water jugs displace the notion of them carrying water with earthenware as prop or ornament. A postcard showing six women in their embroidered dresses at the Damascus Gate in Jerusalem brings this to the fore (Plate 3). There are striking contrasts between the women posing and the women who are ‘accidentally’ present, as part of the scenery. Virtually all of the latter have their hair covered in a much more modest way than the models. More important for the issue at stake, there is also a strong contrast between how the one peasant woman wearing an embroidered dress carries a load of (probably) vegetables or fruits on her head, wrapped up in a plastic bag inside a bright turquoise plastic shopping bag, and how one of the models holds (rather than carries) a wicker basket in front of her.

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Plate 3. Postcard caption: Palestinian women in their Jerusalem traditional costumes: ‘We shall stay as the everlasting Walls of Jerusalem’ [also in Arabic]. Palestinian Heritage Group; designed and produced by Maha Saca, Bethlehem, P.O. Box 146; copyright reserved for Maha Saca; postcard printed by H. Abudalo.

Promoting Palestine: women performing the nation-gender nexus Maha Saca is outspoken about her choice of women who are to model these dresses. ‘I choose beautiful girls to present these beautiful dresses, to show our culture,’ she pointed out. ‘We do not need to show backwardness, because the West has already done that.’ The mainly elderly women who may still wear some variety of embroidered dresses are not deemed suitable to present such dresses on picture postcards. Maha Saca not only strongly dislikes Israeli postcards depicting Arab women carrying Žrewood, baking bread, and so on, as they link Palestinian heritage with primitivity, dirt, backwardness and, generally, with living in the past. She is also critical of the Palestinian-produced imagery, which, in a more documentary mode, shows elderly women engaged in activities such as baking bread or washing clothes. In her eyes, it is only too easy to read these in a similar vein. Her postcards, then, clearly depict the women because of their very appearance. Rather than focusing on women’s activities, they show women engaged in presenting both the dresses and their bodies. In this sense, these images are similar to advertisements, part of a campaign to promote Palestine.

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But is it, indeed, so easy to differentiate between photographs of women’s activities and those of women presenting themselves? It is true that these women are selected because of their appearance, yet they are involved in the activity of presentation, the work of producing and performing not only gender, but the nation-gender nexus, as it were (Butler 1990). In doing so, they transgress Palestinian cultural conventions on photography and visibility, which strongly condemn the public, uncontrolled circulation of images of women. This becomes evident in the ways in which Maha Saca had to recruit her models. When she started it was difŽcult to Žnd girls willing to be photographed for picture postcards. The girls who Žnally agreed to do so are daughters of her friends. She convinced them by including her own daughter, her mother and herself on the Žrst postcards, and by saying that ‘whatever is done to a postcard, even if someone steps on it, does not affect the value of the person depicted, just as with a picture of the Dome of the Rock, or the Church of the Nativity’. This is an additional reason why most of Maha Saca’s postcards show three or more women; strength in numbers made it easier to persuade them to appear on postcards. By agreeing to have their image circulated in public, these women, then, are involved in a highly modern activity. Uncontrolled circulation can only be allowed if a speciŽc notion of self is employed, the notion that whatever people do to a photograph cannot affect the value of those depicted. Maha Saca’s postcards may be seen as presenting a speciŽc postintifada Palestinian femininity. A femininity that is part of the national project, but does not transgress gender boundaries through representing women bearing arms, as in Lebanon in the early 1970s, or as engaged in resistance against the occupying power, as was the case with much intifada imagery from the late 1980s. It produces a femininity that brings together, but does not merge, two temporally and spatially disparate styles of body politics. One of these is represented through the rural embroidered dresses, not contemporary products, but ‘museum pieces’; the other by young modern urban middle-class women-bodies. Such a style of representing women creatively connects a rural sartorial heritage that has become a symbol of national identity with urban modernity as a national project. But tensions remain. It is not simply that the very women who present these dresses are not the ones who wear them in daily life. These ‘museum dresses’ are different from the simpler embroidered dresses that peasant women still wear in some parts of Palestine, and from the modernized versions that urban middle-class women may wear on special occasions. Presenting these dresses, then, is in itself a truly theatrical performance. This act of presentation brings to the fore the gap between, on the one hand, the discourse of femininity that these dresses embody, part of a kin-oriented system with controlled visibility of women’s bodies,

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and, on the other, the depiction of women-bodies on picture postcards that circulate among an unknown public. What seems to be at stake here is part of a post-intifada shift in the hegemony of particular notions of femininity. The heroines of the intifada were not women who tried to look attractive. On the contrary, as part of the all-encompassing intifada culture of austerity, women who did so ran the risk of being verbally and occasionally even physically attacked (Hammami 1990). Those who were most active at that time tended to be the women from the camps and the rural areas, often also elderly women, wresting their sons away from the military. The new culture of femininity which emphasizes urban modernity, even if clothed in ‘museum dress’, is part of a process that has increasingly marginalized these images and activities. These representations of Palestinian dress highlight a rural heritage that stands for territory and rootedness. Yet, stressing the rural runs the risk of slipping into associations with backwardness and primitivity. It is the urban modernity of the women involved in the act of presenting these dresses that works against such associations. While in this way it is possible to include elements of the rural heritage into the modern national project, this particular style of imagining Palestine also produces its own exclusions. Acknowledgements Research for this publication was funded by the Foundation for Economic, Socio-cultural and Environmental Sciences [ESR], which is subsidized by The Netherlands Organization for ScientiŽc Research [NWO]. I would like to thank Joan Mandell, Henk Schulte Nordholt, Patricia Spyer and Steven Wachlin for comments on an earlier draft of my article. I am greatly indebted to the many Palestinian women who have shared their knowledge about embroidery and dress with me; to Maha Saca, in particular, for discussing her dress and postcard projects with me; and to the associations involved in the preservation of Palestinian heritage, such as Al-Najde and the ADPC (with special thanks to Serene Shahid), for discussing their activities with me. Thanks are also due to the Arab Resource Centre for Popular Arts, Beirut [ARCPA], where Mutaz Dajani kindly guided me through its great library. Notes 1. Maha Saca was born in Beit Jala in the early 1950s, she later moved to Bethlehem, where her shops are also located. Quotations in this article are from an interview with Maha Saca, Bethlehem, June 1998. 2. For a concise summary of debates on the power of dress, see Schulte Nordholt (1997). 3. At times, however, male dress is also implicated in this process. A strong example,

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for instance, is the Palestinian male headdress, the kuŽyya, the symbolic meaning of which has shifted depending on the political context of time and place (see Swedenburg 1995). 4. A great variety of nationalist movements, organizations and institutions use embroidered dress as symbol or emblem. See, for instance, postcards and posters produced by the General Union of Palestinian Women in the early 1970s, the logos of the various women committees in the occupied territories in the 1980s, the imagery used by Bir Zeit University at its internet site, and also that used by Hamas. 5. Here the similarities with the politics involved in archaeological debates are striking. Archaeological remains are also often employed to argue for a particular (pre-) historical presence. In the discourse of biblical archaeology, for example, archaeological remains have been used as proof of an original Jewish presence in Palestine and as a legitimation of territorial claims (Silberman 1982). 6. In contrast, the dress styles of men mainly showed differences between urban and rural areas and between different status groups (Weir 1989). 7. In fact, the front ap of the book sets out with: ‘The crafts shown here are fashioned by many people from many distant lands who came together in Israel, bringing with them the folklore and skills rooted in the traditions of their origins – Yemenite, Persian, Moroccan, Bokharan, Indian.’ The native Palestinian population is conspicuously absent. 8. Maha Saca has repeatedly protested when publications presented Palestinian dress as Israeli folk costume (see ‘Ammar 1995). 9. Compare this with a postcard, produced by Palphot, the largest Israeli postcard producer, of a falafel sandwich with an Israeli ag stuck in it. The text on the front of the card reads ‘Falafel – Israel’s national snack’. 10. This may, however, be seen as a mixed blessing. For this catalogue deals very differently with the Jewish and Palestinian sartorial heritage. Whereas in the case of Jewish traditions documentary style photographs are used, often family photographs, Maha Saca’s postcards are used for representing Palestinian dress. 11. Whereas elsewhere cross-stitching was the main embroidery technique, Bethlehem was renowned for its couching with silk and metallic cord. 12. Interview with Serene Shahid, Beirut, June 1999. 13. The Catalogue of Embroidery of Al-Badi’a (started by Al-Najda as an income generating project in 1977 for the widows of the Tell al-Za’tar massacre) shows many smaller embroidered items, such as cushions, wall coverings, table runners, vests, purses and spectacle cases, which are easier to market than the expensive dresses. 14. Some of the dresses in Weir (1989) have been exhibited in the (former) Museum of Mankind in London. 15. There may, however, well be tensions as to how to deŽne ‘their own’. As Maha Saca argued: Girls from Dheisha camp complained that I did not include “Dheisha dress”. I said to them, there is no “Dheisha dress”. Go to your grandmother and ask her what dress she used to wear. There are people from over forty villages in Dheisha camp. These dresses are the material proof of their identity. This quotation at once brings to the fore the importance of locating one’s ‘own’ dresses and the ways in which origin is translated into and restricted to a pre-1948 presence. 16. This is, for instance, evident in the imagery and text of the National Geographic Magazine (see Moors 1996). 17. In his work on India, Pinney (1997) points to a similar shift from racialized essentialism to a disentanglement of inner state of being, appearance and dress.

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ANNELIES MOORS is Lecturer in Anthropology and Religious Studies at the University of Amsterdam. ADDRESS: University of Amsterdam, Department of Anthropology and Sociology, O.Z. Achterburgwal 185, 1012 DK Amsterdam, The Netherlands. email: [email protected]