Grups de Recerca

Narayan, in her critique of the classification of the native anthropologist, notes a

difference in the researcher’s starting point when she is studying her own society; a critique that resonated well with my own experience in approaching this research:

‘In some ways, the study of one’s own society involves an inverse process from the study of an alien one. Instead of learning conceptual categories and then, through fieldwork, finding the contexts in which to apply them, those of us who study societies in which we have preexisting experience absorb analytic categories that rename and reframe what is already known.’ (Narayan 2003:

678)

Although not of Lebanese origin, I have lived in Lebanon for the best part of my life including ten years during the civil war as a child, and consider Beirut my home city. At the outset of research I was in search of conceptual explanations that would help me analyse the fractures and changes taking place in the already fragmented Lebanese socio-political situation - changes that I expected to make a direct impact on my day-to-day life and future. Engaging in this research was thus motivated by the need to make use of academic literature to disambiguate a long, personal, and intense experience of living through conflict. While this aim echoes the ideas of Narayan, my personal motivation involved an additional emotional layer, meaning that my quest was not purely cognitive, but heightened by a sense of urgency and importance which was driven by the growing possibility of Lebanon returning to civil war.

Before I focus more closely on the particular concerns that have shaped the formulation of my research questions, it might be useful to briefly situate the incident described at the start of this chapter within the broader political dynamics in Lebanon at the time. As I will explain in Chapter Three, the country was divided politically between two camps; firstly, the March 14political camp, represented by Hariri, leader of Future Movement, and secondly, the March 8camp led by Hezbollah.

On the afore mentioned Saturday night, Hariri’s speech was unexceptional and his TV appearances were not scarce. Fireworks and bullets as a show of force on almost every street corner where Hariri had supporters had been the usual accompaniment to each of his speeches. Parallel sets of bullets accompanied the speeches of his political opponents, fired by their own supporters. On my street there was yet another group – a dozen young men who lived down the road and cheered for Nasrallah, Hezbollah’s chairman, whenever he appeared on TV. With the tightening of the political debacle, the competition between the political groups and their supporters’ shows of force became worse.

On the narrow streets of Beirut, firing in the air was only one of many manifestations of the re-militarisation of the city. Young men dressed in civilian or military clothes, some

openly and some covertly carrying weapons, occupied every corner. There were check-points at every intersection manned by the army, the internal security forces, and by private security firms around the houses of political leaders. Every day I passed two army tanks on my way to an internet cafe which was a mere five minute walk from my house. My friends joked that one day, they would wake up to find a check point between their bedroom and the bathroom; a joke that shows just how intrusive and imposing that militarised presence felt.

In that same period early in 2008, and for about a year previously Beirut had also been witnessing street clashes between - and at times within - the conflicting political factions.

While some escalated into gunfights and caused death and injury that papers reported, many never made it to the news. Militarisation of the streets and ensuing street clashes meant that discussion in that period was dominated by speculation about how and when a new civil war would break out, and if it did, who would control which area of the city²⁹. Especially important were the questions of which party would control the area where you lived, and whether or not your political or sectarian allegiance coincided with that of that party. To answer such questions people examined the sectarian composition of their neighbourhood’s population and the militias that dominated it during the war. More current factors were the allegiance of the armed groups on its streets, and if they were many groups, which of these groups fired more loudly and / or prevailed when street clashes occurred. Also of prime importance was the visual marking of the space, and the examination of which zaʿim’s, or faction’s, graffiti, banners and pictures prevailed on the street. Posting a picture of a certain zaʿim or removing that of another was often enough to spark a clash.

Ironically, the public discourse of all political parties was against militarisation. At the core of the political conflict ravaging the country was the dispute as to who had legitimate authority to hold arms, particularly after the 2004 UN Security Council resolution 1559 which centred around Hezbollah disarmament. Hezbollah’s public message was that its arms were justified as they were only for the ‘legitimate resistance against Israel’. Hezbollah claimed that the Israeli occupation continued in the disputed Chebaa farms, and that past experience with Israel made a military presence near the mostly Shiite border areas

29 See for example Ghaddar, Hanin (2008). “A Recipe for War?” NowMedia

https://now.mmedia.me/lb/en/commentaryanalysis/a_recipe_for_war - Accessed 9/11/2014.

necessary for its own protection - a task they rightly argued that the Lebanese army had never been able or willing to take responsibility for. The political argument used by the pro-Hariri camp was that since the withdrawal of the Israeli army from South Lebanon in 2000, there was no longer a need for any armed resistance in Lebanon. They argued that one party holding on to its weapons undermined the sovereignty of the state and endangered civil peace and members of other sectarian groups. Hezbollah pledged that its arms would never be used internally, but accused the Future Movement and its March 14allies of secretly attempting to form a militia. In a similar way, Hariri and March 14denied such accusations and maintained a rhetoric that affirmed state sovereignty and emphasised both the history of the Hariri establishment in social and educational philanthropy and its non-involvement in the Lebanese civil war.

It was from this context of escalation and increased militarisation of the Lebanese conflicts that my research questions emerged. My questions were motivated by ‘personal anguish over social and political conditions’ in the country I normally called home (Altorki and El-Solh 1988: 10). The situation instigated my quest for answers, and as questions emerged, I was at that stage not looking conceptually at writing on clientelism, power, and corruption and I could not readily identify that this was the body of literature best suited for my inquiries - nor could I see how my research might contribute to this literature. I was, as Narayan points out, in the middle, looking from the opposite direction; looking out from a live and fluid situation and searching for conceptual frameworks with which to understand it. This process though was not a linear one with a conceptual starting point and an empirical end point – or vice versa - but a dialogical one that continues to vacillate between the two poles in anthropological scholarly work.

The sections below further explain some of the background for this research, providing a sense of the context from which research questions emerged. I shall explain how I engaged with events, and show how events themselves shaped my enquiry.