From the Pages of the Defter (ص 123)

غرض

عنوان

From the Pages of the Defter (ص 123)

المحتوى

residences #11 and #16, valued at 750 and 500 kurus. And Hamdan’s daughter and son,
Sabha and Mustafa, each registered a residence. Hers, structure #18, was valued at 500
kurus. Her brother’s, structure #21, was assessed at 750 kurus.
Conclusion
Information culled from the Esas-: Emlak has permitted us in this chapter to sketch a picture
of late-Ottoman village structure in the southern Palestinian hills that is immeasurably more
concrete than has been possible to date. Yet, as pure indicators of relative wealth and
economic stratification we must treat these numbers with caution. Firstly, and most
obviously, housing values are only one possible indicator of wealth. For example, one not
infrequently finds in the Hebron villages that people bearing the title “shaykh” are not those
with the highest-valued residences. Of course, shaykhly status is also not necessarily an
indicator of wealth, even though the conventional narrative explained in the Introduction to
this study would have it so, particularly in the wake of land-tenure reform.
Secondly, and more importantly, as the example of Wadi Fukin has demonstrated,
the Esas-1 Emlak register was not a statistical register. In the sample image from the register
shown in Appendix 1 of this study, you, the reader, will likely focus primarily on the columns
of numbers. The frontispiece image to this study is cropped in such a way that, hopefully,
your eye was drawn to the most important data in the register: the names of the individuals.
The social scientist’s instinct is to crunch numbers, abstract percentages, and to identify
106

هو جزء من

From the Pages of the Defter

تاريخ

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المنشئ

Susynne McElrone

مجموعات العناصر

Generated Pages Set

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