This paper offers an analysis of how Palestinian wives of detainees are made into examples, both by themselves and by the people they are intimate with, whilst considering also the context of these women's awkward place in Palestinian narratives of national becoming. The main objective is to examine the burden of being an example, and what that implies for those who aspire to or are subtly coerced into inhabiting the position of an 'exemplary' woman in Palestine. Particular modalities of being an example are expected from Palestinian wives of detainees in order to sustain a shared version of the ordinary under military occupation. Not surprisingly, the emotional labour it takes to appear exemplary is necessarily eliminated from public as well as intimate registers of speech in order to keep up the collective aspiration to maintain a so-called 'ordinary life' during ongoing conflict.

This article argues that over the course of the past three decades a mood change has occurred in terms of how Palestinians relate to the ideal of an independent Palestinian state. During the first Intifada, from 1987 to 1993, which constitutes the golden age of Palestinian resistance towards Israel's occupation, the Palestinian resistance movement was characterized by a passionate belief in the possibility of a revolutionary transformation. Due to the consistent stalemate and even worsening of the conflict that have followed in the wake of the Second Intifada, from 2000 to 2003, this passionate belief in the realization of a Palestinian state has been replaced by ambivalence toward that ideal. Based on insights from my intermittent fieldwork with families of Palestinian political prisoners from 2004 to 2011, this article suggests that the contemporary ambivalence surrounding the revolutionary project can be meaningfully analyzed using Freud's notion of melancholia. In Freud, melancholia accounts for the relation between a feeling of indeterminate loss and ambivalent attachment. The notion of melancholia thereby provides anthropology with a concept that can be used to name and explore the frayed attachment to the ideal of a Palestinian state in the context of an ongoing colonial occupation. The passionate politics of the First Intifada enabled a fusing of Palestinian personhood with the overall political project into a subject characterized by active resistance. In contrast, the ambivalent attachment that marks the link between self and state project in the Palestinian territories after the Second Intifada leads to a mood of melancholia. By analyzing the attachment to the political project as an indeterminate loss in the melancholic's ego, I argue that the Palestinian political project is part of the self and keeps its adherents in a repetitive temporal fold from which they are unable to escape, because they are obliged and compelled to keep fighting for a state that does not seem to materialize. Conceptually, melancholia has the capacity to elucidate the emotional and deeply intersubjective toll it takes to live and aspire to an ideal that seems further from realization by the hour.

On the 5th of May 2020, a group of modellers, epidemiologists and biomedical scientists from the University of Edinburgh proposed a “segmenting and shielding” approach to easing the lockdown in the UK over the coming months. Their proposal, which has been submitted to the government and since been discussed in the media, offers what appears to be a pragmatic solution out of the current lockdown. The approach identifies segments of the population as at-risk groups and outlines ways in which these remain shielded, while ‘healthy’ segments would be allowed to return to some kind of normality, gradually, over several weeks. This proposal highlights how narrowly conceived scientific responses may result in unintended consequences and repeat harmful public health practices. As an interdisciplinary group of researchers from the humanities and social sciences at the University of Edinburgh, we respond to this proposal and highlight how ethics, history, medical sociology and anthropology - as well as disability studies and decolonial approaches - offer critical engagement with such responses, and call for more creative and inclusive responses to public health crises.

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This article contributes to an understanding of the existential character of confinement by directing attention to the interlinked concepts of tiredness and foreboding. Through juxtaposition and analysis of material gathered among people whose lives are lived under compromised circumstances in Sierra Leone and Palestine we illuminate the way time-not only space-confines. Our analytical concern is with the way in which futures are anticipated by people confined in space and time, where conditions of possibility are materially and sometimes corporeally suffocating. To anticipate fragile futures, or to mourn futures terminated early is exhausting. Tiredness, from this perspective, is a ubiquitous and overwhelming sentiment suffusing what it means to live in confining sites. It is an expression of foreboding understood as a 'being towards death' (Stevenson 2014).