A Palestinian String Theory? On Ethnographic Engagements across Multiple Dimensions

In the past three years, life in Palestine has been an up-close encounter with mass death—and more than ever, these deaths have their origins in high-tech military technologies that are imperceptible and faraway while being precise and devastating. This talk begins from a theory from one Palestinian astronomer who understands this science fictional (yet very real) situation through quantum theory: political empire sneakily operates as a string in a dimension above our own, with Palestinians left unable to sense that dimension yet intimately experiencing the murders and injuries that it propagates—its vibrations. In this talk, I dwell on the recitation of political life through a story of science, and particularly through a new theory of science altogether. What does it mean to take this story seriously, and what might it assume or foreclose? What can science as a story of life and death offer ethnography to narrate political life in all its density? This talk is an experiment in ethnographic closure, wondering with the stakes of capturing the texture of everyday life through certain genres, epistemologies, and vocabularies.

Jake Silver is a political anthropologist whose work revolves around Palestine, the ever-transforming dimensions of settler colonialism, outer space, and epistemology. Through 4+ years of engaged work with Palestinian astronomers and others who engage the sky in the West Bank, his work unearths not only the political realities unfolding along the y-axis for those living on the ground in Palestine, but also the politics of doing science and searching for interstellar knowledge in one of the most discursively overdetermined territories on our planet.