Deus Ex Machina: Auto Theft, Fabulation and the Bounds of the Political
Peter Lagerqvist

In the decade following the outbreak of the first Intifada in 1987 the incidence of auto theft in Israel increased four-fold and was by 1997 the highest in the world, with one in every 12 Israeli cars sold that year being stolen. Palestinian auto thieves behind this phenomenon have been portrayed as “quicksilver criminals” from whom “nobody is immune;” capable of literally anything. However, auto theft is rarely felt to be politically consequential by Palestinians, let alone heroic. Rather, it is often viewed dimly as a theatrical event, tracing the limits not only of the social but also reality as such. Like James Siegel’s Indonesian tabloid criminals, auto thieves would be “sensational but not memorable, exciting without being important.” Yet as such, tales of auto theft can sometimes cast in relief changing Palestinian conceptions of what is doable as such, linked to their transformation into citizen subjects following the establishment of self-rule in 1994. Though fabulation is today viewed with alarm when performed by ascendant right-wing populisms, auto thieves accordingly serve a reminder that at the heart of the political is the question of whether the impossible can become possible.

Peter Lagerqvist teaches in the Department of Social Anthropology at Stockholm University;  the talk draws on fieldwork conducted while a Phd student at the Department of Anthropology at Columbia University.