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

Download or read book Border Lives: An Ethnography of a Lebanese Town in Changing Times written by Michelle Obeid and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2019-04-09 with total page 196 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Border Lives offers an in-depth account of how people in Arsal, a northeastern town on the border of Lebanon with Syria, experienced postwar sociality, and how they grappled with living in the margins of the Lebanese state in the period following the 1975-1990 war. In a rich ethnography of ‘changing times,’ Michelle Obeid shows how restrictions in cross-border mobility, transformations in physical and social spaces, burgeoning new industries and shifting political alliances produced divergent ideologies about domesticity and the family, morality and personhood. Attending to metaphors of modernity in a rural border context, Border Lives broadens the sites in which modernity and social change can be investigated.