Summary
In Feldman’s account of Gaza, the practice of care — for oneself and for others — that governed relations among people and between people and government, and whose reconfiguration as government service is traced through food and housing provision in the Mandate and the Egyptian Administration (Governing Gaza, PDF p.142-143 / printed p.125-126).
Details
- Feldman takes the phrase from Carol Gilligan’s network of relations, a “nonhierarchical vision of human connection”, but uses it in Michel Foucault’s sense of the Greek care of the self: “ethical in itself; but it implies complex relationships with others insofar as this ethos of freedom is also a way of caring for others” — care that is also “the art of governing” and that was, importantly, hierarchical (PDF p.142 / printed p.125).
- In the Mandate, communal assistance and self-sufficiency were remembered as the primary mechanisms ensuring people had enough food; within a milieu valuing zakat, the landless took vegetables from neighbours’ crops themselves, the owners “happy” to count it as zakat, so care was both interconnected and unequal, and hierarchy was integral to it rather than undermining it (PDF p.148-150 / printed p.131-133).
- When the practice of care was transferred to government in the Mandate — exceptionally, in the 1936-39 revolt, the 1947 drought and wartime rationing — it was self-consciously temporary, contributing to Abeyance (PDF p.150-152 / printed p.133-135).
- After 1948 the sheer numbers needing food overwhelmed communal care, hierarchies were disrupted as former giving landowners scrounged for food, and need was transformed nearly wholesale into service; Gazans reconfigured the practice through a discourse of international obligation, holding that acceptance of aid conferred no legitimacy on its providers (PDF p.152-155 / printed p.135-138).
- As pathways of service became more bureaucratically codified, the practice did not become less hierarchical; certain networks of hierarchical relations became more elaborate, as in the new identifying and distributing power of mukhtars in food relief (PDF p.143, p.157 / printed p.126, p.140).
Related pages
Governing Gaza, Crisis services, Tactical government, Abeyance, Gaza