Governing property, making the modern state - PSI424

Part three | 12
and pillows. The interviews below will reveal what the registers and documents
of government indicate only obliquely: the centrality of the wife and mother in
the household and the dislocation experienced by the children of a family in
the case of the death of a mother. Because of the centrality of the link between
husband and wife in the constitution of the household, a widower or a widow
would often remarry; the manner that this marked children will appear in several
of the individual histories below. People of Kufr ‘Awan agreed that no one could
replace a mother, and so the qarut (the child orphaned of one parent as against
the yatim orphaned of both parents) was more likely to be raised by a maternal
aunt than by a step-mother, a mother’s sister representing the mother lost.
To understand better the organization of production in the village, we shall
turn to the histories of particular persons and families of the village, examining
the content of property right, a share in land of the village. A share of land was
occupied and encircled by the work that rendered it productive. Persons made the
land and the land made persons through dense social exchanges of people and
things. Land was offered in return not only for work in temporary sharecropping
exchanges, but also as property in more permanent exchange for persons at
marriage and for cash in sales. The men and women formed in the process of
production appeared as ungendered legal owners of property in the registers of the
state. How did this legal form enable changes in social relations in what was on
first registration an egalitarian, intensely intermarrying, and little commercialized
village economy?
Life histories
Husna Salih Hamdan: farming in the village
We went to visit Husna Salih Hamdan in December 1992. Husna lived in a
house just behind the two olive trees which had formed her mahr; together with
her were one of her daughters, ‘Arifa, who had married in the village and her
son’s wife, Nafal, from the neighbouring village of Bait Idis. After we had been
presented, Nafal went out to make tea. Being of the august age of 103, Husna
was hard of hearing and had indeed only faint memories of many things. 5 We
asked her of her early life and family.
Before Husna had married, she had lived in a house in the old village site
with her mother and father, her brother Hasan and her two sisters, Hisna and
Tamam. (The house was later sold to a Palestinian family, one old lady of which
continues to live in the same house in what is today a largely abandoned part of
the former village core.) In the 1884 tapu registration Husna’s father had been
recorded as owning 12 qirat of land in an independent holding, but by the time
Husna was a young girl he probably farmed only six qirat. 6 In 1908 her father
went to the land registry to transfer six qirat to his half-brother, and the other
six to his son Hasan. 7 Husna remembers that before her marriage when she was
still living at home they had two plough oxen but no sheep to speak of and no
donkeys. In short they were a family solidly in farming. In their family a woman
worked with her husband at all stages of cultivation, be it of wheat or lentils or
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