Anja Kublitz

From Revolutionaries to Muslims: Liminal Becomings across Palestinian Generations in Denmark

Exploring generational changes and continuities among Palestinian families in Denmark, this article investigates why the children of the fidāᵓīn (fighters) and many of the fidāᵓīn themselves have turned their backs on secular politics and embraced Islam. The Palestinians who arrived in Denmark from Lebanon in the wake of the Lebanese Civil War were members of the Palestinian Liberation Organization and were known as the generation of the revolution ( jīl al-thawra ). Extending Karl Mannheims approach to generations, I argue that in order to explain the transition among Palestinians in Denmark from revolutionaries to Muslims we can rely on neither genealogy nor historical context alone, but need to pay equal attention to the structural continuities that crosscut generations. I suggest that rather than conceive of revolutionaries and Muslims as oppositions, we should think of them as substitutions, as liminal becomings that are actualized across historical generations.

Escalations: Theorizing sudden accelerating change

In this article, we explore what happens in qualitative terms when a social phenomenon accelerates in quantitative terms. We do so by introducing escalation as an analytical concept through which to understand sudden processes of accelerating change. Using the Danish cartoon controversy as the ethnographic prism, we show that accelerating dynamics may not only imply the quantitative growth of “things” but also that the qualitative scales underpinning and measuring change are themselves changed in the process of growth. We take escalation to refer to this “change of change” within processes of sudden accelerating growth. By introducing a new theoretical concept, we aim to contribute to discussions of social and cultural change in anthropology and elsewhere and to enable and encourage future comparison between different ethnographies of accelerating change.