No Place for Grief - (Ethnography of Political Violence) by Lotte Buch Segal (Hardcover)

About the Book

Through a detailed ethnographic account of the everyday lives of detainees' wives in the occupied Palestinian Territory, No Place for Grief reveals the ways in which the normalization of these women's distress is intrinsically and painfully linked to the collective struggle for freedom from the occupation.

Book Synopsis

Advances an understanding of loss, mourning, and grief in contemporary Palestine

Westerners 'know' Palestine through images of war and people in immediate distress. Yet this focus has as its consequence that other, less spectacular stories of daily distress are rarely told. Those seldom noticed are the women behind the men who engage in armed resistance against the military occupation: wives of the Palestinian prisoners in Israeli detention and the widows of the martyrs. In Palestine, being related to a detainee serving a sentence for participation in the resistance activities against Israel is a source of pride. Consequently, the wives of detainees are expected to sustain these relationships through steadfast endurance, no matter the effects upon the marriage or family. Often people, media, and academic studies address the dramatic violence and direct affliction of the Palestinians. Lotte Buch Segal takes a different approach, and offers a glimpse of the lives, and the contradictory emotions, of the families of both detainees and martyrs through an in-depth ethnographic investigation.

No Place for Grief asks us to think about what it means to grieve when that which is grieved does not lend itself to a language of loss and mourning. What does it mean to "endure" when ordinary life is engulfed by the emotional labor required to withstand the pressures placed on Palestinian families by sustained imprisonment and bereavement? Despite an elaborate repertoire of narrative styles, laments, poetry, and performance of bodily gestures through which mourning can be articulated, including the mourning tied to a political cause, Buch Segal contends that these forms of expression are inadequate to the sorrow endured by detainees' wives. No Place for Grief reveals a new language that describes the entanglement of absence and intimacy, endurance and everyday life, and advances an understanding of loss, mourning, and grief in contemporary Palestine.

Review Quotes

"

[No Place for Grief] invites us to think about other understudied Palestinian families who share
similar experiences of continuous suffering due to forced separation...[A] unique, informative, and highly readable ethnography.

"-- "Journal of Palestine Studies"

"[A] highly sophisticated ethnographic analysis, ....With rare sensitivity, Buch Segal probes the painful experience of Palestinian women that is largely elided by both universalized psychiatric discourses and anticolonial nationalism."-- "Journal of Anthropological Research"

"Dealing with a most sensitive, politically charged, and grave reality, Buch Segal delivers a delicate and nuanced ethnographic account that is as committed to sophisticated anthropological inquiry as it is sensitive to the hopes and needs of the women whose stories her book tells...[A]n essential contribution to medical anthropology's longstanding effort to make suffering narratives comprehensible. [Buch Segal's] careful analysis of the political, social, linguistic, and psychological mechanisms that disallow the recognition of these women's suffering makes their stories intelligible, ethnographically and theoretically."-- "Medical Anthropology Quarterly"

"No Place for Grief is simply breathtaking. This harrowing ethnography of lives barred from hope and yet seeking an ordinary existence in occupied Palestine is permeated by political urgency and a captivating poetic hesitancy. Lotte Buch Segal's intense listening and probing analysis brings these characters and their demolished households out of obscurity, letting them shatter and recast our understanding of political violence, chronic suffering, and human endurance in the twenty-first century."-- "João Biehl, author of Vita: Life in a Zone of Social Abandonment"

"Imaginatively conceived and written with great compassion and grace, No Place for Grief makes a rich contribution to our understanding of social suffering and the folding of violence into everyday life."-- "Veena Das, Johns Hopkins University"

"Lotte Buch Segal's No Place for Grief is not just another addition to stories of suffering and trauma among the Palestinians-rather, it shows how the relation between gender and violence is paramount to the way in which political violence might be understood in long, drawn-out conditions of war and occupation. As such, No Place for Grief is relevant not only to psychologists and anthropologists, but also to global and public health readers who seek to understand what life is like in a context of protracted and ongoing exposure to political violence."-- "Rita Giacaman, Birzeit University, Palestine"

About the Author

Lotte Buch Segal is Senior Lecturer in Social Anthropology in The University of Edinburgh's School of Social and Political Science.