Malinowski Memorial Lecture 2026

Undoing a form of life – How knowledge of Palestine became pale 

Dr Lotte Buch Segal, Senior Lecturer in Social Anthropology at the University of Edinburgh.

Thursday, 21 May 2026
6.00pm
Venue details and registration link available soon

In 2024, the Palestinian poet Fady Joudah published his collection about the intensification of destruction of Palestine following October 7^th, 2023. Its title […] (Ellipsis) expresses the loss of words about that destruction. As an ethnographer having worked in and with Palestine since 2004, I take Joudah’s Its title […] (Ellipsis) to express how knowledge about the longstanding undoing of the Palestinian form of life evades our vocabularies of disaster, tragedy, and possibly even genocide.  The argument I wish to make is that the catastrophe unfolding in Palestine, not after October 7^th, 2023, but since the signing of the Balfour declaration in 1917, amounts to the intentional undoing of a form of life, including, the undoing of the language available to name what is happening - catastrophe, disaster, and genocide too. Not because the words are not there, but because when spoken from within or about the Palestinian form of life, words seem to have lost their weight. 

As an anthropologist I am trained to consider my ethnographic descriptions to be my evidence. Yet, across 20 years with intense periods of fieldwork in Palestine between 2004 and 2011, what in my ethnography offers evidence that the undoing of the Palestinian form of life amounts to a fact rather than a personal conviction driven by graphic imagery of affliction, mainly from Gaza? 

Trying to untangle this knot of knowledge, language, and ethnography, the question anchoring this lecture is why I, along with the Palestinians, was not surprised about the current escalation. In anthropological terms, the lecture ponders the imponderabilia of a genocide in the making.

Lotte Buch Segal is a Senior Lecturer in Social Anthropology in the School of Social and Political Sciences, University of Edinburgh. She works on political violence, kinship, torture, knowledge, care and ethics with ethnographic foundation in Palestine and in Denmark. Her book No Place for Grief. Martyrs, Prisoners, and Mourning in Palestine investigates how the families of Palestinian political prisoners sustain the ordinary in the wake of not only imprisonment but Israel's occupation at large. This work has also been published in JRAI, Ethnos and Ethos as well as the recent book Details that Matter (eds Andrew Brandel, Veena Das, Sandra Laugier  and Perig Pitrou). In addition, Dr Segal's current research investigates how torture marks the relational texture around the singular survivor among migrants from SWANA now living in Denmark. This work is published in Medical Anthropology as well as Brandel and Motta's volume Living with Concepts. Anthropology and the Grip of Reality. In the latter years, Dr Segal's work is increasingly shaped by interdisciplinary conversations between anthropology and philosophy. Across her scholarship, Dr Segal has been embedded in practice communities offering care to people marked by political violence, in Denmark and Palestine alike.