51. Feldman: Governing Gaza: Bureaucracy, Authority, and the Work of Rule
- Author:
- Rochelle A. Davis
- Publication Date:
- 07-2009
- Content Type:
- Journal Article
- Journal:
- Journal of Palestine Studies
- Institution:
- Institute for Palestine Studies
- Abstract:
- Governing Gaza: Bureaucracy, Authority, and the Work of Rule provides a fascinating and sophisticated examination of the foreign governing systems enacted by civil servants in the Gaza Strip during the periods of the British Mandate over Palestine (1917-48) and the Egyptian administration of the Gaza Strip (1948-67). The mainstay of Ilana Feldman's book is what she calls "the tenuous domain of the everyday that was never entirely lost" in the "ruptures of Palestinian history" (p. 2). Feldman is both an anthropologist and a historian, and thus her book, an "ethnographic history," examines both the "government at work" and what it meant for people to "work for the government." Her analysis encompasses historical material currently held in archives in four different countries, enriched with oral histories of civil servants, and made sense of by her own experiences of living in Gaza amid the modern-day bureaucracy of the Palestinian Authority (PA) and the Israeli occupation authorities.
- Topic:
- Government
- Political Geography:
- Gaza and Egypt