Summary
Clinical psychologist and co-author, with Rafiqa Othman, of Three Mothers, Three Daughters: Palestinian Women’s Stories (1996), whose Preface records his move from clinical practice into ethnographic fieldwork in Israel/Palestine and the disagreements with his co-author that shaped the book (Three Mothers, Three Daughters: Palestinian Women’s Stories, lines 93-123).
Details
- Gorkin began fieldwork in 1989 for his book on a Palestinian family, Days of Honey, Days of Onion (1991; reprint 1993), in which he records that he had not adequately portrayed the lives of women, a problem he also mentioned in the afterword of the 1993 paperback edition (Three Mothers, Three Daughters: Palestinian Women’s Stories, lines 93-123, 188).
- He met Othman in spring 1989 when she became his Arabic tutor; their discussions of his field experiences, held largely in Hebrew, led to joint fieldwork on traditional psychotherapeutic healers and then to the book on Palestinian women (Three Mothers, Three Daughters: Palestinian Women’s Stories, lines 93-123).
- With Othman he wrote “Traditional Psychotherapeutic Healing and Healers in the Palestinian Community”, Israel Journal of Psychiatry 31 (1994): 221–31, stated in the Preface to be the first journal article to appear in Israel written by a Jewish man and an Arab woman (Three Mothers, Three Daughters: Palestinian Women’s Stories, lines 93-123).
- In the Preface he records that in planning the book he imposed his views on Othman because part of him felt it was his prerogative “because I was older, more experienced, and yes, because I was a Western male” (Three Mothers, Three Daughters: Palestinian Women’s Stories, lines 93-123), and that he wanted to pursue sexual topics and a faster pace of interviewing than Othman did (lines 93-123).
- The Abu Ghosh pair were interviewed by Othman alone; Umm Khaled herself opposed visits by Gorkin, though she was apprised of his role in the book (Three Mothers, Three Daughters: Palestinian Women’s Stories, line 220).
Related pages
Three Mothers, Three Daughters: Palestinian Women’s Stories, Rafiqa Othman, Umm Mahmud, Marianne