Rosemary Sayigh
روزماري صايغ
Anthropologist and oral historian
For half a century she recorded Palestinian refugees in Lebanon's camps in their own words, arguing that a people's history had to be built from below or it would not be built at all.
Rosemary Sayigh was born Rosemary Boxer in Birmingham, England, on 15 March 1927, and took a degree in English language and literature at Oxford in 1948. She later trained as a social scientist in the region she had come to live in, taking an MA in sociology and anthropology at the American University of Beirut in 1976 and a PhD in social anthropology from the University of Hull in 1994. Her scholarly life has been spent almost entirely on one subject: the Palestinians of Lebanon, and what happened to them after 1948.
Palestinians: From Peasants to Revolutionaries, published in 1979 with an introduction by Noam Chomsky, was built out of long interviews conducted in the camps around Beirut. Its argument was structural — that the Palestinian national movement of the 1960s had grown out of the specific class experience of dispossessed villagers turned camp refugees — but its method was what made it unusual: it let refugees narrate the sequence themselves, in a period when Palestinian testimony was rarely treated as historical evidence. Too Many Enemies: The Palestinian Experience in Lebanon followed in 1994, covering the years of the Lebanese civil war and the camp wars.
Her later work turned increasingly to women’s narration and to the archive itself. Palestinian Women Narrate Displacement is a web-based oral archive built from recordings she made across historic Palestine between 1998 and 2000: some seventy Palestinian women and a few men, in Gaza, the West Bank, Jerusalem, and inside Israel, describing their own displacement. The interviews are kept in Arabic, with English introductions and opening lines, and the audio is published alongside the text so the speaking voice is not edited out. From 2000 she taught oral history and anthropology at AUB’s Center for Arab and Middle Eastern Studies, supervising doctoral students working on Palestinian social history. In January 2024 she received the Palestine Book Awards’ Lifetime Achievement Award for 2023.
Selected works
- Palestinians: From Peasants to Revolutionaries; A People’s History (1979)
- Too Many Enemies: The Palestinian Experience in Lebanon (1994)
- Palestinian Women Narrate Displacement (web-based oral archive)
Sources
Further reading
An external biography or archive holding more on this life than the entry above.