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On a temporary visit to London, a Palestinian family found themselves unable to return to Gaza during Israel’s 2008 war on their city. Understanding their stay in London as an act of ‘anchoring’, the family opened a Palestinian café and sought to make their lives – as individuals, as a family and as a community – viable in the face of uncertainty. By following the stories of various family members as they struggled to recreate a sense of home, this moving ethnography introduces the concept of anchorage as a novel lens to understand migration, home and place, highlighting the fluidity, temporariness and serendipity of these experiences.
“This is a moving and beautifully written account of the making of home in the face of uncertainty, adversity, and persecution.” • Ramy Aly, The American University in Cairo
Michelle Obeid is a Senior Lecturer in Social Anthropology at the University of Manchester. She is also the author of Border Lives: An Ethnography of a Lebanese Town in Changing Times (Brill, 2019).
List of Illustrations
Acknowledgements
Note on Transliteration of Arabic Terms
Introduction: ‘Now, we are Here:’ Anchoring in the Meantime
Chapter 1. Home and Nation in the Palestinian Kitchen
Chapter 2. Family Business and the Business of Family
Chapter 3. Encountering British Bureaucracy
Chapter 4. ‘Discombobulated’ Subjectivities
Chapter 5. On the World Stage: Performing Palestine in London
Conclusion: ‘For Now, we are Still Here’
Glossary
References
Index