Overview

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.

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9789004394339

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Michelle Obeid poetically captures the ardor and anguish of how Lebanese yu-maddu , daily manage in an isolated marginal rural town on the alternately porous and securitized border of Lebanon and Syria. Her subtle and sympathetic account offers a window to the transforming, at times violent, reality as the inhabitants seek normality, recount the laughter and familiarity of the past, are upended by the vicissitudes of social life, and push through borders and boundaries, grasping at a modernity they alternately mock and seek. Obeid offers a vivid and riveting story of life lived at the periphery. Suad Joseph (Distinguished Research Professor of Anthropology and Gender, Sexuality and Women's Studies, University of California, Davis)

Author Information

Michelle Obeid, Ph.D. (2006), London School of Economics and Political Science, is Lecturer in Social Anthropology at the University of Manchester.

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