No Place for Grief

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

Preface Introduction Chapter 1. The Grammar of Suffering in Occupied Palestine Chapter 2. Domestic Uncanniness Chapter 3. Enduring Presents Chapter 4. On Hardship and Closeness Chapter 5. Solitude in Marriage Chapter 6. Enduring the Ordinary Conclusion Notes References Index Acknowledgments

"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) "[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) "[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) "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." (Joao 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)