Department of social anthropology seminar with Moslih Kananeh

The Department of Social Anthropology has the pleasure to invite you to a seminar with Moslih Kanaaneh, Department of Sociology and Anthropology at Birzeit University, Palestine. He will present the following paper:

Sociocide as a Replacement for the Old-fashioned Genocide (The case of Palestine)


Third World scholars have an overwhelming tendency to homogenize European colonialism and the colonial condition it created in the Third World, considering colonialism as a unified phenomenon producing more-or-less similar colonial conditions in the colonized world. I argue that there is an essential difference between “exploitative colonialism” and “settler colonialism”, the former being interested in exploiting the local population whereas the latter is interested in a “land without population”.  I then argue that Israel is a case of settler colonialism, but in an era that does not tolerate obtaining an empty territory through genocide, since committing genocide does not go together with the claim of being democratic, humane, enlightened and “the spearhead of civilization”. I then intend to give examples showing that Israel is trying to achieve its settler objective through “sociocide”; a gradual, obscure, hard to notice but profoundly effective process of society-disintegration, through which the Palestinian society is infected with internal anomalies and malfunctions that will ultimately lead to society break-down.  Subsequently, I argue that Palestinian scholars and academic researchers share with the society and its leadership the unspoken strategy of covering over the society’s severe internal problems and pretending as if they do not exist.

Bionote
Moslih Kanaaneh received his Dr. polit. Degree in social anthropology from the University of Bergen in 1995, was the director of the research center NORDPAS in Bergen from 1997 to 2002, and has been teaching in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at Birzeit University in Palestine since 2003, where he has also been chairman of the department for the last 3 years. Kanaaneh also works as an expert advisor on intangible cultural heritage for the UNESCO and the Palestinian Ministry of Culture. He is also known in Palestine as a writer, with a considerable repertoire of poetry and short stories in Arabic.

All interested are welcome!

Best regards
BSAS Comittee