Current Sociology

Please welcome our Sociologist of the Month for February 2021, Suhad Daher-Nashif (Assistant Professor of behavioral sciences in The College of Medicine at Qatar University). Her article for Current Sociology, Colonial management of death: To be or not to be dead in Palestine, is Free Access this month.

Suhad Daher-Nashif

Could you please tell us about yourself? How did you come to your field of study?

S. Daher-Nashif: I am working as an assistant professor of behavioral sciences in the College of Medicine at Qatar University, and passionate to dismantle the intersectionality between science, society, politics and bureaucracy in medical settings.

Throughout my Bachelor studies in occupational therapy, I was trained in psychiatry, where the seeds of questioning life, death and dying began to grow. It was the period where all the philosophical and existential questions surrounding being or “not to be” actually began to be part of my obsessions. The interest to inquire the human behavior continued along my master studies in sciences, and ended by my transition from the medical discipline to the social discipline. By this transition, I aimed to learn more about the social-political body, rather than the biological and scientific conceptions of the human body.

Death, and the dead body as arenas for socio-cultural and political inscriptions, attracted me from the beginning of this transition. Choosing the Palestinian forensic medicine context as my PhD ethnographic field work, came after several visits to the field, and continuous conversations with Prof. Meira Weiss, who was the first to examine these inscriptions over the Palestinian dead body within the Israeli forensic medicine system. This decision was also encouraged by the potential contribution of such research to the existing body of knowledge on the social and political dead body.

What prompted you to research the area of your article, “Colonial management of death: To be or not to be dead in Palestine”?

S. Daher-Nashif: The research on withholding the Palestinian dead bodies was part of my postdoctoral research, which was parallel to the latest “Jerusalem Uprising” in 2015. At that time, Israel began its policy of withholding and freezing Palestinians’ dead bodies. Although I could catch the social-political agency of the dead body within the forensic medicine context, here I was fascinated by the agency and power of the dead body in re-structuring the whole colonized-colonizer relationship. Witnessing the negotiations over the Palestinian dead bodies, challenged me to dismantle the structure of using it as an apparatus for furthering Israel’s sovereignty, and empowering the Palestinian national collectivism.

Furthermore, the paper gives families a voice, and present their experiences. This is of importance because the majority of the academic writings and the media coverage focus more on the Palestinian dead, rather than understanding the lived/left behind, the pain they experience, and the social power they gain.

What do you see as the key findings of your article?

S. Daher-Nashif: While many theoreticians and researchers highlighted the social abjection towards the corpse, the dead body as polluting and deconstructing social and political order, as a rejected and continuously excluded object, this paper found that all these assumptions are frozen parallel to freezing the withheld bodies by the sovereign. When the dead body is a site of paraphrasing political and social relations, it becomes desired body, subjectified, with continuous attempts of both sides to contain it within their space-time. Furthermore, the paper calls for looking at necropolitics in this case, as not only the sovereign’s decision on who deserves to live and who deserves to die, but it’s the decision upon how to let the colonized die as dead, and how to let the bereaved mourn. Necroviolence in the case presented is by muting, suspending and freezing death, i.e., not letting the dead die.

What are the wider social implications of your research in the current social climate? How do you think things will change in the future?

S. Daher-Nashif: The paper calls for looking at letting die within death state itself. Most of the writing on letting die, discuss it as a transitional phase from being alive to being dead, and the governmental contribution in making it faster and “easier” for vulnerable populations such as refugees and asylum seekers. Furthermore, most researchers and human rights activists focus on the living humans prior to their death while they try to prevent this death. This paper calls for looking at post death phase, as a social political state of being, of which the structure of letting die is an essential part. While I’m discussing the Palestinian case and present a case of colonial management of death, if we look wider even on decolonized or “free” states, the quality of death is neglected, while it should be considered as important as the quality of life. Indeed, we could witness such importance during mass deaths in conflict zones and even during the latest COVID-19, when death has become a “new normal” and consistent part of life.

Do you have any links to images, documents or other pieces of research which build on or add to the article? Or a suggested reading list?

S. Daher-Nashif: Prior to this paper, I published several academic articles and essays in English and Arabic on BEING dead in the Palestinian context. The most linked and important one is a paper published in 2018 that focuses on three cases of withheld Palestinian women’s corpses. It can be accessed at the following link https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/23802014.2018.1502050.