Between the Local, the Global, and the Aid Economy in Palestine: The Edward Said National Conservatory of Music (ESNCM) at the Christmas Concert for Life and Peace in Bethlehem

This article describes the role of a Palestinian cultural institution—the Edward Said National Conservatory of Music (ESNCM)—in creating national infrastructure and cultural ambassadorship that is part and parcel of the project of legitimizing Palestine, and Palestinian modernity, on the world stage. The focus on cultural production provides the ethnographic basis for analyzing the interface, alongside inherent tensions, occurring between the aid economy set up in Palestine to support international interests in the name of “state building” and “peacemaking,” and local moves and desires—in a context in which state building, colonization and occupation are all happening simultaneously. While postcolonial readings of the aid economy in Palestine view it as a neocolonial intervention detrimental to Palestinian society and its struggle for liberation, this study points to a much more dynamic process that shows how both the accommodation of foreign interests and the assertion of Palestinian agency work (and do not work), in tandem. Moving away from domination-resistance binaries and associated essentialisms, the article analyzes the evolving and changing meanings awarded to music making, locally and globally, in the political and performative moment. The article also ponders the growing role of nationalized cultural production in a context of the ever-shrinking geography within which it can be actualized.