Activism as ‘Part-Time’ Activity: Searching for Commitment and Solidarity in Lebanon

Hermez, Sami

doi:10.1177/0921374011403353

Cited by 7 publications

(9 citation statements)

References 8 publications

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“…Aspirant professional subjectivity offers a useful analytical lens to observe everyday local contestations for symbolic capital, respectability, and class mobility more broadly. Even though, in line with civil society actors in some other ethnographies of Lebanon (Hermez 2011;Musallam 2020), many of my interlocutors criticized NGOs for being co-opted by the system and not bringing substantial change, they continued to rely on them to help navigate Lebanon's economic crisis. Aspirant professionals' lived experiences of protracted conflicts, unemployment, and 'weak' families were inextricable from their class-making practices.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 94%

Bala wāsṭa: aspirant professionals, class‐making, and moral narratives of social mobility in Lebanon

İpek

2022

Royal Anthropological Inst

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While there is a growing anthropological interest in professionals as experts and powerful actors, there is little ethnographic inquiry into invocations of professionalism by less privileged communities. This article examines how professionalism in Lebanon was increasingly appropriated by low‐income communities in ways not referring to any particular profession or occupational domain. As a locally defined category, professionalism indexed an urban middle‐class subjectivity of performing specific sets of symbolic capital, moral dispositions, and cross‐sectarian relationalities. Lebanese civil society, led by middle‐class cultural elites, promoted professionalism as a moral alternative to reliance on wāsṭa (intermediary connections through family or kinship), a practice associated with a corrupt sectarian political system. What I call aspirant professionals – young, low‐income, university‐educated Lebanese – increasingly participated in empowerment NGOs to learn professionalism in pursuit of social mobility and respectability. Aspirant professionals did not simply emulate the middle‐class culture of professionalism; rather, their class‐making process generated its own moralities, subjectivities, and practices. Through a critical examination of aspirant professional subjectivity, this article contributes to anthropological studies on professionalism, NGOs, and class.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 94%

Bala wāsṭa: aspirant professionals, class‐making, and moral narratives of social mobility in Lebanon

İpek

2022

Royal Anthropological Inst

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“…Beyond this general perspective, my study of love and loss in Jewish Israeli left‐wing engagement reveals the troubled ways that a subversive affective politics can also be tied up in the forms of power it aims to confront. It therefore complements other ethnographies that situate solidarity and activist commitment as difficult, flawed, and reliant on a pursuit of the sentiments, attachments, and desires that keep activists going even as they often feel compromised (Hermez ).…”

Section: Conclusion: a Violent Ethicsmentioning

confidence: 90%

Palestine, my love: The ethico‐politics of love and mourning in Jewish Israeli solidarity activism

Wright

2016

American Ethnologist

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Jewish Israeli left‐wing activists engage in a subversive affective politics when they express love for, and mourn the loss of, Palestinian life. But the affects of love and mourning also bind these solidarity activists to Israeli state violence and sovereignty in various ways, entangling them in the very forms of power they aim to challenge. Loving and mourning the Palestinian Other involves an ambivalent ethics in which the activist subject objectifies the Other, and this objectification is a kind of violence that emerges in the affective becomings of solidarity activism. Activist loving and mourning thus call into question the nature of solidarity and alert us to the difficulty of ethics as troubled relations enmeshed in the violence of politics. [love, mourning, solidarity, ethics, political subjectivity, activism, Israel/Palestine]

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“…I therefore aligned myself with Hermez's 'radical posture for solidarity ' (2011) in the effort to advocate for Syrian refugees who had repeatedly expressed to me their feeling of being depoliticised bodies in a space of survival. Such an approach tends to preserve solidarity with the participants when fieldwork is over (Hermez 2011). The 'deep-seated affinities' between research and humanitarianism (Guilhot 2012, p.87) resonate with the way I experienced the 'doing' of ethnography and the desire to witness (Behar 1997).…”

Section: Ethnography As a Personal Form Of Advocacy And Witnessing In...mentioning

confidence: 99%

On ethnographic confidence and the politics of knowledge in Lebanon

Carpi

2020

Contemporary Levant

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Fieldworkers in politically sensitive spaces traditionally need to negotiate their presence in the field with local (in)formal authorities and epistemic power-holders. I illustrate how attempts at both holistic politicisation and neutralisation of the research space can question ethnographic knowledge production. Drawing upon the anthropology of silence and agnotology, I interrogate the whats and hows of ethnographic authority and local validation of ethnographic research when political and epistemic powers complexly and discontinuously overlap. By examining how knowledge is boasted about, concealed or questioned by political and humanitarian actors, I examine the ways in which a lack of political protection, as well as overt advocacy, shape different modalities of access -or lack of access -to the field. Against the backdrop of a growing body of literature on the ethics of research in settings affected by political transformations and emergency crises (such as today's Arab Levant), I try to upend ethnographic confidence as a self-centred process of knowledge production. I instead rethink it not only as an ethical but also an inter-subjective effort towards a more effective integration of the counter-epistemologies of field interlocutors into our own research.

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Activism as ‘Part-Time’ Activity: Searching for Commitment and Solidarity in Lebanon

Cited by 7 publications

References 8 publications

Bala wāsṭa: aspirant professionals, class‐making, and moral narratives of social mobility in Lebanon

Bala wāsṭa: aspirant professionals, class‐making, and moral narratives of social mobility in Lebanon

Palestine, my love: The ethico‐politics of love and mourning in Jewish Israeli solidarity activism

On ethnographic confidence and the politics of knowledge in Lebanon

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