Thesis brings secondary victims into focus

The thesis "Uncanny Affect: Relations, Enduring Absence and the Ordinary in Families of Detainees in the Occupied Palestinian Territory" may be downloaded here.

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Palestinian wives of men who are detained indefinitely in Israel live with violence and suffering as an almost everyday manifestation in their lives. In a Ph.D. thesis, which was defended at the University of Copenhagen in June 2010, anthropologist Lotte Buch has investigated how the families as well as the surrounding society and international NGOs perceive suffering and act accordingly.

- It is a common assumption that suffering is a linear sequence with a beginning, a culmination and an end. Wounds heal, they say. And yes, they probably will in cases of a single trauma or for instance the loss of a husband in martyr-death. But in cases like this where women live in a kind of indefinite limbo, with their husbands being both present and absent at the same time, suffering becomes part of their everyday life. The ordinary becomes both ordinary and not-ordinary at the same time, says Lotte Buch.

Lotte Buch describes a language of suffering, not only among the Palestinians themselves, but also among internationally oriented treatment centres. The language is incomplete, however, as it includes only linear suffering and not the suffering that is continuous and indefinite. The surrounding world has for instance a clear framework for understanding the suffering of widows of martyrs, but not the suffering of wives of detainees.

- The suffering of these women is not recognized and attended to - neither by their families who are supposed to take care of them, nor by well-intentioned Palestinian or international organisations. They do not manage to see that what is really affected when living in a continuum of conflict is the everyday life. The question is how to rehabilitate "everyday life", asks Lotte Buch.

For nine months Lotte Buch collected data on families in the occupied Palestinian areas, and for four months she did field work among international donors and relief organisations.