Border Lives: An Ethnography of a Lebanese Town in Changing Times

Michelle Obeid, Ph.D. (2006), London School of Economics and Political Science, is Lecturer in Social Anthropology at the University of Manchester.

"Michelle Obeid poetically captures the ardor and anguish of how Lebanese “yu-maddu”, daily manage in an isolated marginal rural town on the alternately porous and securitized border of Lebanon and Syria. Her subtle and sympathetic account offers a window to the transforming, at times violent, reality as the inhabitants seek normality, recount the laughter and familiarity of the past, are upended by the vicissitudes of social life, and push through borders and boundaries, grasping at a modernity they alternately mock and seek. Obeid offers a vivid and riveting story of life lived at the periphery."Suad Joseph (Distinguished Research Professor of Anthropology and Gender, Sexuality and Women’s Studies, University of California, Davis)

• AcknowledgementsList of FiguresNotes on Names and Transliteration1 Introduction: Border Lives in Changing Times1 Figuring Out Border Lives2 Remoteness and Marginality at the Border3 The Ambivalence of Two States4 Rural Modernities2 Sociality between Movement and Space1 New Capacities for Sociality2 The Workings of ʿIshra3 Domestic Spaces, Gender and Consumption3 Living Well: Experiments in Livelihoods1 Livelihoods as an Ongoing Experiment2 Livelihoods in the Shadow of an ‘Evil State’3 Contested Moral Economies4 Pastoralists: Living the Past in the Present1 Transhumance and Political Change2 Spatial and Human Organisation3 Herding Dilemmas4 Conflicts of Interest5 Envying ‘the Comfortable Woman’5 Marriage between Love and Fate1 The Befalling of Nasīb2 The Vocabulary of Modern Marriage3 Intergenerational Negotiations4 When Negotiation Fails6 Suspicion and Scorpions: The Morality of Kinship1 Ensnaring Brothers and Suspicious Sisters2 Of Failed Bargains3 The Morality of Kinship7 Local Elections: Politics at the Margin1 1963: Familism, a Divisive Force2 1998: ʿĀʾila Redeemed3 Familism Strikes Back4 Corruption that Compromises National Pride5 The 2004 Lists: ‘Old Wine, New Bottles?’6 New Council, New Directions8 What the Future Hides1 A Visit in Post-Syrian Time2 Is it Possible to Move Backwards?BibliographyIndex