In this essay I examine two contexts of mobility in Beirut. First, I discuss navigations of security by Beirut's residents during the 2004–2006 period of political crisis. Second, I consider how talk about driving revealed interpretations of the state, national identity, and social class that engaged, in different ways, the notion of fowda (chaos). Through these contexts of mobility, I explore how power is constituted through spatial movement. I argue that mobility plays a critical role in processes of social differentiation in Beirut. Drawing on recent scholarship about security and spatial segregation, my research provides insight into class dimensions of Beirut's geography of difference and contributes to our understanding of the ways in which urban citizenship is produced through mobility.
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In this article, I investigate the embodied, class, and political relations of Syrian delivery workers on motor scooter who forge a livelihood by moving through the space of Beirut, Lebanon. I develop an argument about how the work lives of these delivery drivers are characterized by various conditions of insecurity. Rushing around the city, these workers face certain bodily risks, as they are physically vulnerable in vehicular traffic, but they encounter still other forms of precarity as an outcome of both their position in the city's migrant labor regime and a fraught Lebanese political climate in which sentiment against the Syrian regime spills over into the mistreatment of ordinary Syrians. At the same time, I consider how delivery drivers understand their jobs to be constituted by certain forms of freedom and opportunity that make their work distinctive from that performed by most Syrian laborers in Beirut. Drawing inspiration from anthropology's increased attunement to the particular and multiple forms of insecurity that shape labor and life in our contemporary age, the geographies of work I examine here are both urban and transnational, and thereby highlight the stakes involved in experiences of spatial movement at multiple scales. IntroductionMotor scooters provide more than just an efficient and economical means of transportation for individuals, pairs, and even entire families to get around Beirut; these vehicles are also a pillar of commerce in a dense urban landscape of multistory buildings and congested roadways. 1 While motor scooters are relied upon for the point-to-point delivery of a range of on-demand consumer goods -25-lb. propane gas tanks used to fuel kitchen stoves, packs of cigarettes, five-gallon bottles of drinking water, argileh tobacco pipes with accompanying glowing red-hot charcoals -they are perhaps most commonly seen making deliveries from fast-food or "snack" restaurants. 2 Sometimes wearing an insulated backpack or driving a scooter with an attached food storage box, young men working in fast-food delivery press these
In this essay, I provide a different perspective on the Syrian conflict by examining how the war’s reach can also be located amid the losses, interruptions, and experiences of those Syrians who have until now largely escaped its incredible violence. By looking closely at how the war has altered the life trajectories of and produced distinct modes of vulnerability for military-age men, I develop an argument about how, although they avoid fighting by going to work in Qatar, the lives of a group of Syrian men remain defined by conscription. Through my investigation of how these men are located in a landscape of conscription that extends beyond the borders of Syria, I build on anthropological knowledge of how masculinity is shaped by and through contexts of political destabilization. I demonstrate how, in fulfilling their end of the patriarchal bargain through political obedience and economic production, these men lose a particular stage of manhood and the aspirations, projects, and affective promises it holds. ملخص في هذا المقال, أنا أقدم وجهة نظر مختلفة حول الصراع السوري من خلال دارسة واقع الحرب وسط الخسائر, و الانقطاع, و تجارب السورين الذين نجو من العنف, من خلال النظر عن كثب في كيفية الحرب التي غيرت مسارات الحياة التي انتجت انمطاطا مختلفة من الظعف بل النسبة للعسكرين. أنا اطور نقاش حول هولاء الشباب الذين تجنوبو القتال في سوريا من خلال الذهاب الى قطر. حياة هؤلاء الرجال الذين من خلال تحقيقي في مشهد التجنيد الاجباري الذي يمتد الى ماوراء حدود سوريا الى حياتهم كعمال في قطر. أنا أعتمدت على المعرافة الانثروبولوجية حول كيفية تشكيل الرجولة من خلال زعزعة الاستقرار السياسي. أنا أشرح كيف الوفاء من ناحيتهم يتمركز من خلال الطاعة السياسية و الانتاج الاقتصادي. أما الرجولة بشكل خاص تبقى تطلعاتها و مشاريعها و وعودها العاطفية بعيدة الانظار في ظل استمرار الازمة السورية
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