Q: Most of our students only flirt with anthropology since they are enrolled in other academic majors and encounter anthropology very briefly. What do you want them to take away from anthropology in any class you might teach?
A: I want them to come to understand the vast sameness and difference of humanity and human experience. That is why I teach ethnographies drawn from different localities, from China to Amazonia. I also want them to appreciate the fluidity of human identities. When I lecture on the anthropology of gender, I show my students Michael Jackson’s 1991 music video “Black or White” to foreground the blurring and morphing of identities – a young black man turning white and female.

1This question I fielded from the search committee during my interview for a tenure-track position in anthropology at the Department of Sociology, Anthropology and Media Studies (SOAM), American University of Beirut, reflects the current shape of anthropology in Lebanon, a discipline that remains at the margins of both the academe and wider society. Moreover, this kind of position becomes available around every seven to ten years, as the department remains quite small and its anthropology faculty counts only three members, excluding its latest hire.¹

2Indeed, anthropology sees a handful of students enroll in its study throughout the country, while the vast majority of students at the university level only pay the discipline a brief sojourn, if at all. Writing in the aftermath of the July 2006 war, anthropologists Diane E. King and Kirsten Scheid found that, in Lebanon, anthropology remains poorly understood inside the academe and outside, and its value largely underestimated (King & Scheid 2006). One of the earliest students and professors of anthropology in Lebanon, Fuad I. Khuri, conceded that being an anthropologist alone elicited laughter among his countrymen, largely because the latter did not know what the study of “comparative cultures” entailed.² They thought anthropology referred to a strange language or a new medicine. Lebanese traders in West Africa, among whom Khuri did part of his doctoral field research, “thought anthropology was a commercial agency for the manufacture of drugs” (Khuri 2007, p. 2).

3This is not unique to Lebanon. The discipline of anthropology has a “very meager presence” in the institutions of the Arab region in the form of university departments, research centers, professional associations, scholarly periodicals and journals (Bamyeh 2015, p. 64). It represents a paltry two percent of social science faculties throughout the region (ibid., p. 21). Anthropology is often coupled with sociology or other social and behavioral sciences as undergraduate degrees. Anthropologists in Arab countries are asked by their colleagues in sociology whether they can actually do anthropology as natives of their countries who do not neatly match the Malinowskian archetype of “the lone, white, male fieldworker living for a year or more among the native villagers” (Gupta & Ferguson 1997, p. 11).³

4While the Lebanese high school system offers a sociology track at the Baccalaureate level, anthropology is not introduced or instructed in any central way.⁴ It remains a footnote in a curriculum focused on sociology theory and practice, the evolution of societies from pre-industrial to post-industrial, the process of socialization and the “problems” of society such as poverty and unemployment.⁵ The themes echo the kinds of social research that function in the service of state and nation-building projects.

5By the time students reach the university level, they are seldom aware of anthropology, its existence as a field of study and its significance in theory and practice. Its institutionalization has been irregular and purposeless, while its students reach the discipline in largely unintended and roundabout ways. Fuad I. Khuri revealed that he happened upon anthropology almost by mistake. In 1956, while enrolled in a group major at the American University of Beirut, he signed up “out of curiosity” (Khuri 2007, p. 8) for an Introduction to Anthropology course in the Department of Sociology taught by Professor Charles Adams, a scholar of Egypt.⁶ For this class, Khuri wrote a paper on cephalic variations among Middle Eastern groups and learned to measure skulls (ibid., p. 9) following the now outdated understanding of physical anthropology. Until today, students come to know about, and turn to, the study of anthropology accidentally, often following prior studies in related or unrelated fields such as archaeology, computer science, political studies, psychology and sociology. This career trajectory is not rare among other Arab anthropologists, who also learn a different trade before discovering their discipline.⁷ At the undergraduate level across universities in Lebanon, anthropology does not figure as a stand-alone degree and largely appears as individual courses taught in sociology and/or general social science programs.

6Alternatively, as an object and site of ethnographic study, Lebanon has lent itself to the rise of studies of the “Arab village” (Benedicty 1992, p. 53) as well as Middle East studies since the 1970s (Caton 2015). These studies have contributed to global knowledge production, with all its global political entanglements and collusions with centers of imperial power (ibid.). In this way, the anthropology of Lebanon as a field of knowledge has been dynamic and productive, in contrast to the very patchy and irregular institutionalization of the discipline in the country. In fact, anthropology has not been offered in a continuous way at any major university in Lebanon since it was first taught in the 1950s. At the same time, however, the discipline has been distinguished by the work of such well-known anthropologists as Selim Abou in the Francophone tradition, Chawki Douaihy in the Arabic one and Fuad I. Khuri in the Anglo American one, who pushed the discipline forward in Lebanese universities through both their research and teaching.

7This chapter pieces together a his/story of anthropology in Lebanon. Based on interviews with three generations of anthropologists and a close reading of their autobiographies, reflections and published research, this chapter is driven to explore how and where anthropology has unfolded in Lebanon, who its main champions have been, and what research has characterized and preoccupied it. It is also interested in understanding Lebanon’s contribution to anthropology in the world, as both an object and site of the ethnographic gaze. Indeed, since the discipline’s institutionalization in the country has been feeble, knowledge production remains an important window onto the anthropology of and in Lebanon, its methods, interests and actors. The chapter concludes by considering what kind of future can be imagined for a discipline that is marginal and misunderstood. Anthropology in Lebanon might benefit from merging with the other social sciences, in the same spirit as Michael Jackson’s “It don’t matter if you’re black or white”.

The Early Days of Ethnographic Practice in Lebanon

8The earliest ethnographic investigations of the Near East coincided with the birth in Europe and North American of “a new science preoccupied with the laws and structures that ruled the social life of men” (Benedicty 1992, p. 33). As early as the turn of the twentieth century, Lebanese and French clergymen were adapting and deploying ethnography as a research strategy. They were eventually followed by professional anthropologists and other social science theorists and practitioners. This very early generation of ethnographers was engaged in research, rather than in teaching anthropology or a related discipline in a university setting.

9Based on direct observation, “even participant”, Maronite clergymen Bechara Chemali and Michel Feghali carried out “descriptive and empirical” research on family organization, family life and customs in Lebanon (ibid., p. 35). They were especially taken up with describing the Lebanese village. According to the Jesuit anthropologist Robert Benedicty, their studies constituted a first initial phase of “Near East ethnography and anthropology” (ibid.). Their close ties with the French mandate, and their exclusive emphasis on Maronite rituals and mores, help to explain anthropology’s distinct vulnerability to “the Saidean critique of Orientalism and … [awareness] of its potential collusion with centers of imperial power” (Kandiyoti 2015, p. 4). They also serve to elucidate, even partially, why anthropology as a discipline has largely failed to take root, or to be appropriated, by institutions across the country.

10At the turn of the twentieth century, bishop Bechara Chemali published several articles on mores and customs in Lebanon, particularly with relevance to death and marriage, in the journal Anthropos. Revue internationale d’ethnologie et de linguistique (1906–).⁸ The journal was dominated by ethnographies conducted and written by missionaries in several European languages such as German, French, Spanish and English, but remained a privileged forum of international debate among anthropologists such as Arnold Van Gennep and Alexander Goldenweiser. Chemali’s ethnographic research, as well as that of Michel Feghali, circulated among such missionary networks, highlighting their Maronite identity and their inclination toward localism rather than nationalism.⁹ In their research and religious duties, they were both devoted to Lebanese Maronites.

11Lebanese clergyman and philologist Michel Feghali, who is known for a handbook of Levantine Arabic, was a professor at the University of Bordeaux and received a grant to train mandate Lebanon’s bureaucrats in 1924. The mandate authorities targeted young Francophile elites with such “external grants” (Ouahes 2018, p. 108). He also served as rector of the Maronite mission in Paris. Feghali wrote about family life and organization in a book titled La Famille maronite au Liban (1937). He tended to romanticize the Lebanese house and village, and to show that Maronites maintained intact their Aramaic, Syriac, Phoenician, Marada, or even European heritage, untainted by Arab or Ottoman ones (Khater 2011, p. 253). His work on the Aramaic vestiges found in the Arabic spoken in Lebanon is the only one of its kind (Bassal 2015, p. 87).

12During the early 1900s, Chemali and Feghali deployed the ethnographic method to study village life, customs, and rites of passage. It was not until the 1940s that anthropology in both theory and method found life through the articles published by Afif Tannous. Considered “classics” (Benedicty 1992, p. 50), these articles were based on his PhD dissertation in social science about his own native village of Bishmizzine in North Lebanon, submitted to Cornell University in 1939 and titled “Trends of Social and Cultural Change in an Arab Village” (Gulick 1969, p. 3). His research took the village as a structured social unit “whose inhabitants constitute a strong in-group vis-à-vis all outsiders” (Gulick 1953, p. 367), thus echoing the preoccupations of social anthropology and sociology with structuralism at the time. His paradigmatic approach to the study of the village, centering on kinship, religion and devotion to the land in village life, and their essential functions, became very influential and inspired subsequent anthropological studies of Arab villages. Tannous went on to become more of an applied researcher, working and residing in the United States where he spent the largest part of his career in the Foreign Agricultural Service. Thus, his legacy remained bound to knowledge production rather than teaching and training in anthropology theory and method.

13In this way, the socially bounded unit of the Lebanese village came to the fore as the focus of several monographs during the 1950s and 1960s. American anthropologist John Gulick conducted doctoral fieldwork in a largely Greek Orthodox coastal village between Beirut and Tripoli in 1952 and later published his findings in a book titled Social Structure and Culture Change in a Lebanese Village (Gulick 1955). This book clearly reveals the influence of Tannous’s work (Benedicty 1992, p. 53). Following Tannous, he considers that the three major aspects of Arab village culture are village, kinship and religion, in line with social anthropology theory of the interwar period, namely descent theory and segmentary lineage theory more specifically (ibid.). Around the same time, Toufic Touma and Helene Damaa Saab wrote ethnographic and descriptive monographs in the vein of the burgeoning Lebanese village studies. Toufic Touma, a Lebanese sociologist “of the French school of thought” (Benedicty 1992, p. 57), studied his native Hadeth el-Jobbe, a highland Maronite village, in his book titled Un village de montagne au Liban (Touma 1958). The study also relied on the three thematic axes previously discussed (Benedicty 1992, p. 57). Touma obtained his PhD in France and represented Lebanon in its negotiations with UNESCO to establish an institute of social sciences at the Lebanese University. He led the second branch of the institute between 1977 and 1978 where he also taught. It is noteworthy that the institute was established for the social sciences and not for anthropology per se.¹⁰ It speaks to the diffusion of ethnographic practice and anthropological theory throughout the social sciences, further revealing that anthropology as an exclusive academic discipline or field of study did not make itself felt. Other monographs followed Touma’s study of Hadeth el-Jobbe such as that of Helene Damaa Saab who studied the coastal village of Anfeh in her book Fenêtres sur la Méditerranée. Étude sociologique d’Anfé, communauté villageoise du Liban-Nord (Damaa-Saab 1988). Titled a sociological study, it similarly underscores the salience of sociology even with the deployment of an ethnographic practice.

14This initial phase of ethnographic investigation reveals the extent to which anthropology was confined to ethnological studies, folk studies and more noticeably village studies. The deployment of ethnographic practice by French-allied clergymen like Chemali and Feghali, dedicated to the Maronite identity, points to anthropology’s early association with the centers of power. Their focus on the village, its folks, rites, and structures, contributed to the embryonic Lebanese village studies, which were en vogue during the heyday of structuralism in Europe and North America where anthropology departments and institutes were flourishing. Yet these studies did not give rise to an identifiable school of thought or an anthropology department at a Lebanese university nor did they enjoy institutional reverberations.

On the Eve of the Civil War and After: The Ebb and Flow of Anthropology in Lebanon

15As an object and field site of the ethnographic gaze, Lebanon has lent itself to the production and circulation of anthropological knowledge within global hierarchies since the turn of the twentieth century. The discipline of anthropology, in the form of university departments, research centers, associations and journals, however, has not fared as well. By exploring the careers, institutional relationships and roles as well as the research of three of the most established and prolific anthropologists in Lebanon before the civil war and on, this section reflects on the ebb and flow of the discipline in the country. Fuad I. Khuri (d. 2003), Selim Abou (d. 2018) and Chawki Douaihy taught and carried out research in Lebanon for decades, making names for themselves not as anthropologists of Lebanon, but as anthropologists in Lebanon. Yet it is noteworthy that their work did not give rise to the emergence of national ‘schools’ or traditions in anthropology nor institutionally strengthen the discipline in the respective universities where they taught. This speaks to the question of the wider institutionalization and relevance of anthropology in Lebanon as an academic discipline.

16At the same time as their colleagues based abroad, Khuri, Abou and Douaihy were turning to anthropology as an answer to the dilemmas they faced in their own micro-societies. Their political realities and personal and professional commitments or aspirations were often subjected to the dynamics of families, patron-client relationships, rural-urban exodus or identity politics, which in turn constituted the focus of their research. Khuri, who self-identified as a native anthropologist in his autobiography An Invitation to Laughter: A Lebanese Anthropologist in the Arab World contended that “anthropology in the developing world cannot afford to concentrate on the exotics of other cultures. The pressure exerted upon native anthropologists to deal with current issues facing their societies is enormous” (Khuri 2007, p. 80). Abou’s study of the right-wing Maronite leader Bechir Gemayel was an answer to the polarizing debate raging prior to, and during, the civil war about Lebanese identity. The book, titled Bechir Gemayel ou l’esprit d’un peuple (Abou 1984), reads like an anthropology essay rather than a biography. Prior to this, he addressed and came to the “defense” of Arab-French bilingualism in Lebanon (Sayigh 1965, p. 122) through his earlier work on plurilingualism and cultural identity. As for Douaihy, he noted that the “terrain” pushed him towards anthropology rather than starting from a discipline to seek out a field site to study. He felt that the methodological and theoretical tools helping him to understand his hometown of Zghorta in North Lebanon were available in the discipline of anthropology.¹¹

17From the start of his career as an anthropologist to its end, Khuri did not confine himself to research within Lebanon alone. Yet his research abroad –whether in West Africa or Bahrain— continued to be inflected by his interest in, and relationships with, the Lebanese and their homeland. As a doctoral student of anthropology at the University of Oregon (1960-1964), he became familiar with African studies, which was more popular among his contemporaries than studies of the Middle East. For his dissertation, he decided to undertake fieldwork among the Temne of Sierra Leone knowing well that more than a hundred thousand Lebanese emigrants lived in West Africa, and that Lebanon might have an official interest in African affairs (Khuri 2007, p. 29). Over 1962 until 1963 he studied the Temne and their beliefs and practices in the city of Magburaka, until he was awarded a research grant by the Wenner-Gren Foundation to study the Lebanese community in West Africa. Confident that he had collected enough data on the Temne and especially their “big men”,¹² he moved on to study the Lebanese immigrants in West Africa, many of them his old friends and neighbors from his hometown of Baino in Akkar. During this time, he reunited with his brother whom he had not seen for 15 years after the latter left Lebanon for West Africa, and he was moved to write and publish a novel in Arabic on the Lebanese in West Africa in order to draw in, and draw on, his own personal details and reflections (ibid., p. 56).  This kind of engagement with issues of a public and political nature in addition to writing and publishing in both Arabic and English have distinguished Khuri as one of the most prolific Lebanese anthropologists.

18Around ten years later, Chawki Douaihy earned a scholarship to do a PhD in anthropology at the René-Descartes University in Paris. During his earlier studies at the Institute of Social Sciences, Lebanese University, where professors were not familiar with anthropology in theory and practice and offered one course combining structuralism and functionalism, he was compelled to peruse the anthropology literature more thoroughly. He saw his hometown of Zghorta in North Lebanon as defined by families, kinship ties and violence. In his understanding of Lebanese society, he gave predominance to the family-tribe, and found that the state and its institutions existed only insofar as the za‘im of the family or the head of the tribes allowed them to. Thus, he pursued higher studies in anthropology first and foremost as a means to unpack his terrain.¹³

19Besides undertaking research as demanded by their local political, social and economic realities, both Khuri and Douaihy returned to Lebanon following higher studies in order to teach at their respective almae matres where anthropologists, and particularly Lebanese anthropologists, were in shortage. According to Khuri, around the time of his application to AUB, anthropology was restricted to a few courses taught through the Department of Sociology, “which was in shambles” (Khuri 2007, p. 63). When the dean of Arts and Sciences, Dr Farid Hananiya, invited him to apply for a teaching job at the university, he told Khuri: “Won’t it be nice to have a native anthropologist on board!” (ibid.). Although Khuri received two job offers while in Oregon before graduation, he was happy to choose AUB, “back to his kith and kin” (ibid., p. 70). Khuri taught anthropology at AUB for over twenty years (1964-1987) until he was diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease and resigned his position. As for Douaihy, and following the Lebanese University’s wartime division into different geographic branches, he returned to teach at the Institute of Social Sciences during the late 1970s where he remained, with slight interruption, until retirement. Douaihy taught students enrolled in the bachelor’s degree in social sciences such courses as Introduction to Anthropology, Domains of Anthropology, Kinship and the City. Today, he teaches Introduction to Anthropology at Saint Joseph University (USJ).

20When he started teaching at AUB, Khuri recalls that: “The few people in Beirut who knew about anthropology tended to equate it with the theory of human evolution, which was somewhat embarrassing” (Khuri 2007, p. 75). Seteney Shami, who hailed from Jordan to study anthropology as a foreign undergraduate student at AUB during the 1970s, similarly explains the reaction of her parents when she revealed to them her choice of anthropology as a major, “My parents were like ‘What’s that? We looked it up in encyclopedias … my mother said there was something scientific about it, measuring skulls.” She described how unconventional the choice was: “All my friends made fun of this major. It was weird. You were weird. No one understood what you were doing. You didn’t understand.”¹⁴

21Indeed, and until today, anthropology at all the major universities in Lebanon is less appreciated and understood than sociology. Since it has been offered at AUB, it has tended to be under the umbrella of sociology and dominated by its faculty. When Khuri began teaching in 1964, two courses of anthropology were offered through the Department of Sociology. Five years following his appointment, a complete program in anthropology, including BA and MA degrees, became available. This was intended to “parallel and enhance” (Khuri 2007, p. 72) the sociology program. The department, which included psychology, was then named the Department of Social and Behavioral Studies (ibid.). During the 1970s and 1980s, however, war conditions gave rise to endless intimidation of faculty, unparalleled political intervention and severe budgetary cuts, crippling all the programs at AUB (ibid., p. 73). The anthropology program continued to exist “only in print” (ibid.).

22In the aftermath of the war and later, students at AUB were obliged to fight for anthropology courses. When Kirsten Scheid enrolled at the Department of Social and Behavioral Studies in the spring of 1993 explicitly to obtain an MA in anthropology, she was informed that sociology was the only option although anthropology existed in print.¹⁵ Around ten years later, Samar Kanafani enrolled at the same department as a sociology student, although she took anthropology courses and wrote her MA thesis in anthropology under the supervision of an anthropologist, Diane E. King.¹⁶ She eventually petitioned to obtain her master’s degree title in anthropology, as opposed to sociology. Other students were told by successive chairs to enroll as sociology students by default and change to anthropology later if they wanted.¹⁷

23From the early 1990s until 2005, anthropology faculties were half-appointments, meaning that they taught both anthropology courses and civilization studies courses. In 2005, Kirsten Scheid was the first full-time appointment dedicated to anthropology. ¹⁸ This coincided with the enrollment of foreign student Susan Barclay in the MA program in anthropology. Once more, Barclay was advised to take courses in communication or sociology when she did not find any graduate anthropology courses to take. Consequently, she was left with no choice but to file a petition along with a handful of other students and lead a sit-in for a graduate course in anthropology. ¹⁹ As additional students, especially undergraduates, expressed interest in studying anthropology, demand for the discipline grew. In 2006-2007, the department obtained a budget line for another full-time anthropology faculty member and hired Livia Wick. Currently, the department, renamed the Department of Sociology, Anthropology and Media Studies (SOAM), offers a combined BA in sociology and anthropology, and a stand-alone master’s degrees in either field.

24The public Lebanese University privileges the social sciences as a general discipline. While its Institute of Social Sciences offers courses in anthropology at the undergraduate level and an option to specialize in anthropology at the graduate level (MA and PhD), the title of the degree offered across levels remains social sciences. According to Moheb Chanesaz, assistant professor at the Institute of Social Sciences, the institute espouses a Durkheimian approach to the social sciences with its commitment to the science of sociology.²⁰ Accordingly, anthropology figures as an “annex” to sociology, with courses in sociology far outweighing those in anthropology.²¹ Students at the undergraduate level are offered a hodgepodge of courses across philosophy, history, psychology, economics, sociology and anthropology. Students are not immersed in any one particular discipline and are trained in the methods of sociology. The few students who go on to pursue an MA or PhD in anthropology are then surprised to find themselves with an inadequate understanding of, and training in, the discipline.²² Hiba Morcos, currently a doctoral student and teaching assistant in anthropology at the University of British Columbia, did her initial studies in social sciences at the Lebanese University. Thereafter she started her master’s in anthropology at AUB and seriously considered quitting, since she felt completely unequipped and unprepared for the program.²³ In the words of Chanesaz, anthropology is like the “roasted chickpeas of Lebanese mixed nuts”, which are the least desired and the last to be consumed.

25At Saint Joseph University (USJ), the discipline has also seen an inconsistent presence. Since the 1960s, anthropology courses have been offered at the École supérieure des lettres (ESL), the Beirut branch of the University of Lyon, which has taught both ESL and USJ students. Upon the closure of ESL due to the civil war, its well-known faculty members such as Selim Abou and Mounir Chamoun contributed to establishing the Faculty of Literature and Humanities at USJ in 1977. The new faculty, which was headed by Selim Abou until 1992, included a Department of Sociology and Anthropology. Selim Abou was a champion of anthropology and supported students who wanted to study the discipline.²⁴ Although his doctoral training was in literature, philosophy and theology, he pursued many studies in cultural anthropology around questions of plurilingualism, interculturalism, identities and Francophonie.²⁵ He undertook ethnographic fieldwork in Argentina among both Indigenous and Lebanese immigrant communities.²⁶ In 2002, he was awarded the “Grand Prix culturel et scientifique” by the Louis D. Foundation under the aegis of the Institut de France, which allowed for the creation of a Chair of Intercultural Anthropology to organize conferences annually. The department has irregularly published its own journal since 1985, initially titled Annales de sociologie et d’anthropologie and then renamed Communautés et Sociétés.

26Until today, however, anthropology is not instructed in any central way at USJ. At the undergraduate level (license), anthropology is offered alongside and among other social science disciplines, and largely in the shadow of sociology, not unlike at the Lebanese University.²⁷ The title of the program itself is “Licence en sociologie: sociologie de l’entreprise et relations publiques” [Bachelor in Sociology: Sociology of Business and Public Relations]. Students can specialize in anthropology during graduate studies, although the discipline continues to be conjoined with sociology at the master’s level. Annie Tohme Tabet, professor of anthropology at USJ, who earned her PhD under the supervision of Selim Abou, described how she was “fighting alone” to sustain anthropology at the department during the early 1990s.²⁸ Anthropology was seen as a luxury, requiring a great deal of time and perseverance. Around the same time, a group of anthropologists in the country, such as Martha Mundy and Edward Al Qash among others, obtained governmental permission to set up an association of anthropology. For diverse and personal reasons, the association did not take off.²⁹ For Tohme Tabet, anthropology remains a “sensibilité” [sensitivity] and continues to rely on the initiative of individual researchers using their weekends to do ethnographic fieldwork, since their home institutions do not have structures in place to allow for such long-term and in-depth research. In her own words, however, sensibilité alone cannot sustain the discipline.

27It is clear from the above that anthropology has existed in contemporary Lebanon and contributed to unpacking key questions that have been facing Lebanese society since the pre-civil war period, such as those relating to kinship, patron-client relationships, rural-urban dynamics or identity politics. Since its institutional debut, the discipline has always been conjoined with sociology, and continues to persist in its shadow. During this era, anthropology came to be associated with prominent actors such as Khuri, Douaihy and Abou, and less with their respective universities, be they private or public. In other words, anthropology came to be known through these people and their respective publications or courses more than outside of them. In the context of such weak institutionalization, the discipline can be seen as erratic and dependent on disjointed and dispersed knowledge production.

Knowing, or Anthropologizing, Lebanon

28At around the same time that Khuri, Douaihy and Abou were studying anthropology and carrying out ethnographic research, foreign and Lebanese anthropologists based at universities abroad were also engaged in ethnographic fieldwork in Lebanon. Their positions betwixt and between enabled them to have a situated voice and profoundly inform subfields of the discipline based out of centers of institutional academic power abroad. Their fieldwork largely revolved around families, sects and big men, echoing the preoccupation of the early generation of ethnographers in Lebanon, and resounding with social anthropology’s mid-twentieth century concern with the social order and structure of small-scale societies. This section visits their knowledge production, thereby revealing how Lebanon has proven to be a fertile site for the ethnographic gaze of anthropologists rather than a place where the discipline flourished within the academe.

29Suad Joseph began making visits from the United States to her native Lebanon in 1968 as a mughtaribi (expatriate), returning to stay as a graduate student in anthropology at Columbia University.³⁰ Over 1971-1973, she did her doctoral fieldwork in the working-class suburb of Bourj Hammoud in Beirut on the politicization of religious sects. During this time, she obtained and enjoyed an affiliation to AUB as well as access to its library, meeting many graduate students and researchers coming from across the country.³¹ Besides Fuad Khuri, however, she did not meet any anthropologist or student of anthropology based at one of the universities. Drawing on her initial work in Bourj Hammoud, Joseph moved on to write prolifically on gender and family, deeply influencing Arab family studies and challenging Western-centric notions of kinship. She challenged the Western psychological constructs and binaries between self and society that informed the study of familial relations and selves (Joseph 1999). In her seminal article published in American Ethnologist on brother-sister relationships in Bourj Hammoud, Joseph laid out the extent to which selving unfolds in relational matrices characterized by connectivity, love and power (Joseph 1994). Accordingly, she proposed “patriarchal connectivity” to understand the extent to which selving is fluid and intertwined with “gendered and aged domination” (Joseph 1999, p. 12) within Arab families. Joseph’s understanding of connectivity and relationality shaped many studies of gender and self-making that take both the individualized self and the collective into account (see, for example, Jean-Klein 2000, Deeb 2006 and Kelly 2008).

30Around the same time during the early 1970s, in the more distant rural region of Akkar, Michael Gilsenan worked to explore power relationships between the beys and peasants. Gilsenan was faithful to the discipline’s contemporaneous focus, by studying and unpacking the structures of domination between those who have and those who have not. Local informants did not understand what Gilsenan was doing in Akkar nor how Akkar was potentially associated with a foreign university. They claimed “there was ‘nothing’ [in Akkar]” and did not see the value in his study of and in the area (Gilsenan 1996, p. 27). His research followed his earlier doctoral work on a Sufi order in Cairo during the 1960s and preceded a broader study on Islam from the viewpoint of an anthropologist. It culminated in a book published over two decades later in 1996 that would inspire researchers in the social sciences exploring masculinity, violence and state-society relations, whether political scientists or anthropologists.³² A tour de force, Gilsenan’s Lords of the Lebanese Marches: Violence and Narrative in an Arab Society is credited for masterfully elaborating the agency of young men through their narratives, even as these are inflected by the prevalent moral and culture codes (Altorki 2015, p. 53-54). It continues to bear weight on anthropological discussions of violence, subjectivity, storytelling and verbal play in theory and ethnography (see, for instance, Das & Kleinman 2000, Jackson 2002 and, most recently, Hermez 2017).

31The Lebanese Civil War (1975-1990) punctuated or rather “suspended” (Rivoal 2014) the publication of the fieldwork conducted by Joseph and Gilsenan in the country. The bulk of their writing that influenced anthropology and its subfields appeared only following the end of the war. Although they continued to visit and undertake research during the war, especially Joseph³³, it was like “[falling] off the margins of [their] own text” (Gilsenan 1985, p. 27). Following a ten-year hiatus, Gilsenan returned to Akkar for three days only to find “[his] village … abruptly another” (ibid., p. 25). It had come to be defined by the absence of informants who died, emigrated or existed “only as words” (ibid.) and by a different kind of social closeness. Joseph felt her writing increasingly inhibited by the war that engulfed the country. Her loyalties were torn between her devotion to her informants, Lebanese friends, Palestinian friends and natal family, on the one hand, and her “commitment to describe and analyze” on the other (Joseph 1993, p. 22). Writing, teaching courses on the region and presenting public papers on Lebanon became painful, raising suspicions and jeopardizing friendships. Although Joseph admits to changing to the study of women and family in order to alleviate the social and political pressure, this subfield soon became “as charged as the study of religion and politics” (ibid., p. 23).

32The war played a growing material role in the fieldwork of researchers, leading the findings of Australian-Lebanese anthropologist Ghassan Hage to disappear. While undertaking largely interdisciplinary research for his PhD dissertation on Christian identification during the civil war, under the co-supervision of Lebanese sociologist Salim Nasr, he distributed 500 questionnaires among Lebanese Forces (LF) fighters and received confirmation that around 220 were completed. These vanished overnight in 1986 following the attack on the Beirut headquarters of the FL by Samir Geagea.³⁴ With his data wiped out, Hage’s dissertation became “very theoretical, with the last chapter an ethnographic one about the decline of the LF”³⁵. Based in East Beirut where the LF operated during the war years, his academic relationships were restricted to the area. He was unable to cross to West Beirut and had “zero relationships with the academic scene in Lebanon”, including with any anthropologist.³⁶

33Since then, Hage has become a prolific anthropologist writing on issues with a “universal aspiration”³⁷. While he completed his PhD at Macquarie University in Australia and earned public distinction for his work on racism, white supremacy and multiculturalism in the country through the publication of his most influential book White Nation (Hage 1998), he maintained a foothold in several places enabling him both to succeed as an international academic and to remain relevant to anthropology in Lebanon. He visited and taught at Pierre Bourdieu’s research center at the École des hautes études en sciences sociales (EHESS) in Paris, and was profoundly influenced by the former.³⁸ His research projects in Lebanon and Australia continue to be mutually reinforcing and have culminated in a generous research grant from the Australian government to undertake ethnographic research in two Lebanese villages as well as among their immigrant population abroad in order to take seriously diasporic experiences and realities.³⁹ His most extensive and lengthiest project yet, spanning decades, it has seen him make six around the world trips during which he stayed in the same households of the same two extended families, one for each village, in the United States, Venezuela, Brazil, France and Australia.⁴⁰ In his own words, and while he “does not want to be known as an anthropologist of Lebanon, [he] would hate not to be known as such.”⁴¹

34In this way, Hage and Joseph have been positioned to inform the discipline of anthropology internationally while simultaneously striving to speak to Lebanese and wider Arab academic scenes. Their commitments and works remain influential for anthropology in Lebanon. Since 2001, for instance, Joseph has founded and organized the Arab Families Working Group (AFWG), which is a collaborative research group working to improve understanding of and work on youth and families in Palestine, Lebanon and Egypt.⁴² As for Hage, he has a strong desire for his work to be “available and living” in Lebanon, and often returns to meet with anthropologists and share research with public audiences.⁴³ This only became possible in the aftermath of the civil war and well after his work was already well known, particularly White Nation. In 1999, he was invited for the first time to speak at an international conference in Lebanon by the Department of Architecture and Design at AUB. It is noteworthy that he was not invited by the Department of Social and Behavioral Sciences at AUB or elsewhere.⁴⁴ Hage explained that he had developed relationships with anthropologists at AUB and “free-floating anthropologists” since then, yet the lack of disciplinary recognition and collaboration suggests that anthropology in Lebanon has been feeble in building a community around it, both internationally and nationally.

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35The hi/story of anthropology in Lebanon reads like a narrative with loose disconnected subplots rather than a tightly woven narrative with a main thread. This chapter oscillates between the biographies of prominent anthropologists in and of Lebanon and the very patchy trajectories and legacies of anthropology programs and departments. What began at the turn of the twentieth century as the deployment of a descriptive and empiricist research strategy gave way to the deployment of both theory and method for intellectuals looking to reflect on themselves and their societies. It can be said that anthropologists know Lebanon and Lebanon has become familiar to anthropology, but that the Lebanese academe and society at large do not know anthropology. The discipline’s institutionalization has been marked by beginnings and ends, and by discontinuities more than continuities. It has not spawned continuity in an identifiable school of thought or an anthropology department at a university.

36In postwar Lebanon and over the past twenty years, emergent initiatives and themes can be located. Such platforms are increasingly visible and are not organically part of a university setting, but rather run parallel to or outside it. The Anthropology Society in Lebanon (ASIL), for instance, is a platform for anthropology’s practitioners, students and fans to connect in an informal, non-academic setting.⁴⁵ It hosts monthly talks by anthropologists or aspiring anthropologists who present their complete or in-progress research. ASIL does not have a membership and does not collect dues, but it maintains a growing mailing list. Independently run, however, ASIL is associated with AUB as it was founded by graduate students enrolled in the anthropology MA program in 2006 and it tends to host English-speaking anthropologists. It continues to be run by AUB anthropology faculty and students alike. More recently, a group of fresh PhD holders in anthropology that began as a cooperative writing group developed into a working group supported by the Arab Council for the Social Sciences. The Ethnography and Knowledge Working Group is engaged in a collaborative exploration of the critical knowledge that can be generated from the ethnographic endeavor. The six members of the group are both employed within university settings and outside of it, with only one teaching anthropology in a full-time capacity at a university.⁴⁶

37The country is seeing more students enroll in the discipline, particularly at AUB. Others, who only flirt with anthropology at the undergraduate level, eventually pursue graduate studies in anthropology in Europe or the United States.⁴⁷ Emerging themes and trends in anthropology research can be observed among anthropologists in and of Lebanon, echoing many of the topical and theoretical interests observed among anthropological scholarship of Arab-majority societies since the end of the Cold War (Deeb & Winegar 2012). These include themes such as the state, sectarianism and violence, revisited in more contemporary theoretical guises. Recent works in psychiatry, urban regeneration and economic anthropology stand to add to the anthropology of Lebanon and to the discipline more generally.

38What kind of future can be imagined for a discipline that remains at the margins of the academe? Is anthropology’s merger with sociology and the general social sciences detrimental to its institutional existence? The division between anthropology and sociology emerged from a specific historical moment in the development of university education in Europe.⁴⁸ This division is not necessarily relevant to Lebanon or surrounding countries. Rather than bemoan anthropology falling behind sociology, this marriage can be revisited in a more positive or productive light. The emphasis can shift to social theory, incorporating thought from different schools in anthropology and sociology as well as their distinct yet complementary methods and practices. In the same way that gender and racial identities morph in Michael Jackson’s “It don’t matter if you’re black or white”, anthropology in Lebanon might benefit from being fluid.