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

Abstract

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.