2025 Workshop

Dima Saad

PhD candidate in Anthropology and History at the University of Michigan

Clothing and the Palestinian Refugee Experience, 1948-1968 

In the aftermath of the 1948 War, church voluntary organizations in the UK and the US held  mass clothing drives for Palestinian refugees. Though there was doubtlessly a practical need for  shirts, shoes, and blankets among an abruptly dispossessed population, the momentum by which  cloth was provisioned over other forms of relief raises several questions. This paper examines  the rationale, logistics, and local reception of the clothing drives, asking: How were Palestinian  refugees clothed, and what constituted an adequately clothed refugee? 

Drawing on archival documents, photographs, magazines, and memoirs, my analysis takes up a  multivocal approach.I begin by exploring the perspectives of missionaries-turned-aid workers,  who sorted, bundled, and distributed the second-hand clothes that arrived in the camps. I suggest  that they understood the task of clothing the Palestinian refugee body not only as a practical  responsibility, but as a moral project, as an opportunity to forge rationed individuals and ideal  gift recipients. 

Equally, I weigh Palestinian responses to clothing aid. Far from passively accepting their rations,  I show how most refugees undertook “rituals of possession” to personalize the garments they  received.They washed, dyed, cut, patched, and rebuttoned. They emptied the clothes of their  previous owners and made them anew, reenchanting them with their own desires and meanings.  And they did not waste a weave. They employed the items that were beyond salvage as material  for patching, quilting, and stuffing. They turned the ubiquitous flour sack into tents, curtains,  bedding, pajamas, and underwear. For Palestinian refugees, making do meant finding ways to  live with a prescribed set of things. I position their practices of repair and transformation as  political acts of world-building, of “making livable lives” in conditions of dire material lack.

Through the lens of cloth, I survey the material environments of the refugee camp, center the  everyday lives of Palestinians, and foreground their bodily experiences of dispossession. These  experiences—of warmth and cold, comfort and pain, pride and indignity—did not leave paper  trails for us to follow. Instead, they offer us a history “beyond words,” glimpses into the  unspoken deliberations of survival, the visceral entanglements of self and other, and the changing dynamics of gender and family. Attending to them, I argue, allows us to nuance  humanitarian categories of need, transcend the volubility of national narratives, and trace the echoes of the past in the present. 

Dima Saad is a PhD candidate in Anthropology and History at the University of Michigan. Her research examines Palestinian history through the lens of clothing and presents an ethnography of traditional embroidery work today.