Description
Book SynopsisPalestinian refugees' experience of protracted displacement is among the lengthiest in history. In her breathtaking new book, Ilana Feldman explores this community's engagement with humanitarian assistance over a seventy-year period and their persistent efforts to alter their present and future conditions. Based on extensive archival and ethnographic field research, Life Lived in Relief offers a comprehensive account of the Palestinian refugee experience living with humanitarian assistance in many spaces and across multiple generations. By exploring the complex world constituted through humanitarianism, and how that world is experienced by the many people who inhabit it, Feldman asks pressing questions about what it means for a temporary status to become chronic. How do people in these conditions assert the value of their lives? What does the Palestinian situation tell us about the world? Life Lived in Relief is essential reading for anyone interested in the history and practice of hum
Trade Review"Feldman reminds us, in the context of the current migrant crisis, Palestinian refugees have much to teach us about a migrant politics of presence. This is an exceptional book. It represents an invaluable contribution to scholarship on Palestine, humanitarianism, displacement, and refugee politics from a leading ethnographer of Palestinian life." * Journal of Palestine Studies *
Table of ContentsList of Illustrations
Acknowledgments
Note on Transliteration
Chapter 1 • Punctuated Humanitarianism and Discordant Politics
part one
the humanitarian situation
Chapter 2 • No Exit: Politics and Refugee Status
Chapter 3 • Oscillating Needs and the Aid Apparatus
Chapter 4 • Conflicted Positions: Compromised Action and
Suspicious Relations
part two
the humanitarian condition
Chapter 5 • The Politics of Living as a Refugee
Chapter 6 • Living and Dying at Humanitarianism’s Limits
Chapter 7 • Non-humanitarian Futures?
Chapter 8 • Making Livable Lives in Worlds in Crisis
Historical Timeline
Notes
Bibliography
Index
