BOOK REVIEWS

Book Reviews in this Article: Danielle Jacquart and Claude Thomasset, Sexuality and Medicine in the Middle Ages,. David Levine, Reproducing Families. The political economy of English population history. Mikiso Hane, Reflections on the Way to the Callows: Rebel Women in Pre-war Japan. Sandra M Gilbert and Susan Gubar, No Man's Land: The Place of the Woman Writer in the Twentieth Century. Nancy F. Cott, The Grounding of Modern Feminism. Brian Harrison, Prudent Revolutionaries, Portraits of British Feminists between the Wars. Birgit Sawyer and Anita Goransson (eds), Manliga strukturer och kvinnliga strategier. Susan Bridger, Women in the Soviet Countryside: women's roles in rural development in the Soviet Union. Veronica Strong-Boag, The New Day Recalled: Lives of Girls and Women in English Canada, 1919–1939.     

Killing with kindness: funding the demise of a Palestinian state

This article sets out to show the widening gulf that has emerged between the international community's professed diplomatic endgame to resolve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict following a two-state paradigm, the aid strategy it has put forward since 1993 in support of this political goal, and the developments on the ground in East Jerusalem, the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. Within the context of a volatile Oslo peace process and the intifada, aid to the Palestinians has mainly been used as a substitute for international political will and to compensate for the lack of genuine bilateral negotiations between the parties. Aid, however, cannot buy peace. Not only has the international community's 'aid for peace' strategy failed to attain its stated political and socio-economic objectives, but it is also the central contention of this article that such international intervention has actually been harmful. Donors have ended up financing Israel's continued occupation of the Palestinian territories and its expansionist agenda at the expense of international law, the well-being of the Palestinian population, their right to self-determination, and the international community's own developmental and political goals. Looking ahead, despite the widespread current optimism generated by Gaza disengagement, this does not bode well for the emergence of a viable Palestinian state or the individual and collective security of the Israeli and Palestinian people.     

Chile,October and November 2019: ‘Feel’ and field-work in times of crisis

One of the most important social upheavals in Chile since the end of the dictatorship started in October 2019, and continued until the coronavirus outbreak in March 2020. The event affected the ethnographic fieldwork that we, four anthropologists, were conducting at that time. This article draws on the recognition that, while being in different geographical locations, our respective experiences involve similar affects. Drawing on feminist epistemology, we have utilized these emotional experiences as a methodological tool to spark curiosity and open up a space for reconsidering fieldwork as ‘feel-work’. Our respective positioning, in terms of national and emotional feelings of belonging as well as physical location, created affective dissonances that raised uneasiness while at the same time opening up a productive space to think about fieldwork as an experience of ‘out-of-place’ bodies and ‘out-of-place’ feelings.