Social Science Research Council

"Survival and Normativity: Kin Relatedness among Palestinian Refugees in Lebanon"

This research project explores the making of family norms in the Palestinian refugee community of southern Lebanon. Settling in Tyre, I will examine the suffering and creativity involved in carrying on an ethics of family life in the ever-provisional and ever-shifting environment of refugee camps. Recent philosophical and anthropological works posit the refugee as essential for theorizing the margins of current global politics. In this project, I extend this analytic framework to the fabric of intimacy, relatedness and political subjectivity in the contemporary Middle East, by focusing on everyday patterns of sociality that emerge in such environments of prolonged uncertainty and instability.

In doing so, I seek to bring to light the multiplicity of regimes for being ‘modern subjects’ in the Middle East, while complicating the picture of refugees as solely embodying the horrors of political violence and forced displacement. On a larger scale, I also seek to contribute to a reconceptualization of the Arab family, taking into account the long-term effects of political violence in the area. I will approach the Palestinian family not as a necessarily secure ground for experience and meaning, but rather as a specific mode of delimiting and instituting a viable milieu in conditions of continuing or ever-growing political and social uncertainty. Finally, my project will speak to current debates regarding the normativity of social life—the capacity for newness to emerge, in circumstances of crisis, at the heart of long-established norms—in relation to the task of survival in ecologies of precariousness.