cinema, or to the shops of neighbouring Lebanese suburbs. No Dbeyeh household had television then. There were no parties, no singing or dancing. Only weddings were celebrated with any show, and among Christian Palestinians these often took a Western form, with bride and bridegroom disappearing in a taxi for one or two nights in a seaside hotel. There weren't even recreation areas for children, except what they made for themselves. But visits were highly entertaining; it was in Dbeyeh that I first began to enjoy the Arab language. As spoken by rural Palestinians it had the aura of a performance, pungent, lively, humourous - another language from 'fuss-ha' (classical Arabic) which I found too formal. In those days I didn't have a recorder, so I just sat and listened to stories of the peasant past and refugee present. At the time I thought of this as 'participant/observation'; later I realized it was just a beginning of living with Palestinians.

It was Umm Joseph who told me about life in al-Bassa before the Nakbah. Her stories were far from nostalgia for a lost Paradise, they had the sharp edge of social realism. Though her father-in-law owned a lot of land, and had a large house by village standards, she and her husband slept in the 'dar' together with his three brothers and their wives, with the animals close by on another level. Only the family patriarch, a widower, had a separate room. At a late age he had shocked them all by marrying a much younger woman. Fearful that their inheritance would be diminished, the sons' wives schemed how make their young rival infertile through a potion in her coffee, but ended up doing nothing - the old man's age was enough to prevent more children. Quarrels between kin over sharing the products of their jointly owned land were quite frequent, and relations between sisters-in-law were often bitter. Umm Joseph believed that one of them, out of envy, had put a scorpion in her baby son's cradle. Next to land, children were precious, and of course sons most of all. Losing children in infancy was a common experience among rural Palestinians - infant mortality rates were extremely high - and Umm Joseph had lost two baby sons from sickness or accident. Desire for sons had dominated her life. Though frequently pregnant, she had ended up with only one son, the absent Joseph, and two daughters.

Attached though I was to Umm Joseph, I couldn't help disliking the way she favoured her two grandsons over the four girls. Both boys, it seemed to me, could get away with murder without punishment, whereas as soon as the girls began to walk they were harnessed into housework, starting with sweeping the floor with small feathery brooms. It was over her favouritism towards the boys that Umm Joseph and I suffered a setback in our relationship. I was going back to Beirut and had invited her to come with me and bring her oldest grand daughter, Sanaa, to stay with us. Sanaa was the same age as my daughter, Joumana, and I thought they would get on well together. As we left the house to walk to the 'service' taxi, I saw that she was bringing her grandson Jad instead. I reproached her. She answered me with an unusual fierceness, "We don't want freedom for our girls". It was a moment of insight. A line had been drawn. Whatever gifts I offered, reception was to be on Umm Joseph's terms. Like the villagers who had used the leaves of the Bible to roll their cigarettes in, Palestinian refugees scrutinized western goods and customs selectively, taking what suited them and rejecting what did not. Fine as theory. But what about Sanaa standing sadly at the door, watching us disappear towards Beirut? Should I yield to 'traditions' that I knew had somehow helped Palestinians bear exile? Or defend values I believed in, such as gender equality? This dilemma is a familiar one to anthropologists, and would recur continually throughout my life as a researcher.

Umm Joseph died before the Civil War started, very suddenly, of lung cancer. I felt her death keenly, especially because it came so quickly after the diagnosis that there wasn't time to stay with her before the end. I suppose she represented for me an archetype of a Palestinian peasant woman -- close to the earth, practical, forthright in her opinions, and forceful in her ways. Though she was very different from Umm Yusif, the gentle mother-in-law I never met, she also performed a mother-in-law's role towards me, telling me stories about al-Bassa and about my husband's family that otherwise I shouldn't have known. Much later I recorded my husband's memories of