Projectes desenvolupats al llarg del màster

Saturday night, during the first week of February 2008. Saad Rafic Hariri was on TV mobilising his followers to join the demonstration planned to take place a few days later in the central Martyr Square. As had been the custom since 2005, huge demonstrations were planned for February 14 to commemorate the third anniversary of the assassination of late Prime Minister Rafic Hariri.

This was one of the ‘ordinary’ Saturday nights of that turbulent time in Beirut. I was planning to go out with friends for a drink, but I delayed leaving to listen to the televised speech by the young wannabe zaʿim.

From less than 100 meters away outside, I could hear gunshots being continuously fired into the air by supporters celebrating their leader’s on-screen appearance: a practice which was becoming a standard accompaniment to every speech of every Lebanese political leader.

The politico-sectarian allegiance within the neighbourhood I was living in was not clearly defined at the time;

we, the residents, expected bullets to be fired not only when Hariri spoke, but also when his political opponent Nasrallah appeared on TV. Qanṭari, my neighbourhood which borders downtown Beirut, had a

27 Poem by Palestinian poet Mourid Barghouti is originally in Arabic – translation is mine.

mostly Christian Armenian and Muslim Sunni population before the war. As in many west Beirut neighbourhoods, a significant percentage of the Christian population was displaced, by will or by force, during the civil war and the space they abandoned was subsequently taken over by predominantly Shiite families who had also been displaced from their own southern Lebanese villages by the war with Israel (Beyhum 1991). While the majority of the Shiite families left after being compensated during the post war period, the Christian population did not return. Instead, most of the members of the Christian community sold the now valuable town centre properties to developers who replaced small scale antiquated buildings with hideous new residential apartment blocks now inhabited by mostly Sunni and Shiite Muslim families.

On one side of the street I lived on stood the run down houses of mostly Sunni Muslims; inherited humble dwellings whose sites could offer the residents a chance of prosperity if sold for high rise residential redevelopment. On the other side of the street were houses still inhabited by a small mostly Shiite population who remained in the shabby houses whose owners never reclaimed them after the war²⁸.

Heavy firing continued after the speech was completed, its sound oppressing the neighbourhood residents who had endured many years of civil war. For them the sound of bullets and fireworks in Beirut inevitably reawakened the memories and fears of many past wars. I heard the sounds immediately audible that moment as well as remembered sounds that lingered in my memory from the Lebanese civil war which ended in 1990. That February night in 2008 I heard the cacophonous rhythmic firing, caught the smell of gun powder, felt the acuteness of the silence of everything but the bullets once the firing started, and was aware of the increase in my heart rate. All my other senses joined in the listening, and I heard the bullets not through my ears alone, but through my whole body.

After suffering this auditory agony for more than fifteen minutes, one of my neighbours went on to her balcony and shouted at the exultant young men: ‘Do you not have any manners, don’t you know that there are people who would be troubled by the firing?’ The young men took this as an opportunity to further establish their authority by asserting their masculinity: ‘Do you not have any men who could come and talk to us? Is it only women who speak in your household?’ Those firing the bullets won, as the single young woman retreated to her empty house.

I left the house after the speech ended, and came back late that night to find the same group of men, who were in their early twenties, standing at one of the corners as is the habit of young men in Beirut who have little else to do. Yet this time I felt their dominance and the threat of their presence. In a few months they had transformed from the familiar young kids of the neighbourhood to become its menaces. They had

28 While the description of the neighbourhood is based on my personal observations and conversations with residents, it is in line with literature on the demographic changes in Beirut, particularly in areas adjacent to Beirut Central District. See for example Gebhardt, et. al (2005) and Sawalha (2010).

succeeded in putting the neighbourhood under their control, using the authority of weapons even if not firing at any particular person; they dominated the place by displaying violence and masculinity. Much of their power was achieved through the production of noise, just as a police car gains power through the sound of its sirens.

The war’s memory gave potency to their intimidating gunfire despite local peoples’ implicit knowledge that none of the neighbours in particular were direct targets. The fear people lived with then was not of the bullets themselves or of the threat of being subjected to violence then and there, but more of the growing power of those trigger-happy young men on the streets and the possibility that the country might descend into chaos, again.

Introduction

I describe this incident which took place early in my field work so as to give the reader a glimpse of the political scene on the streets of Lebanon when I embarked on this research.

Although not an incident directly related to football or one where I had a central role, the events of that evening are useful in introducing the key elements that have shaped how I defined my research and how I have approached it methodologically.

In the sections that follow, I make use of the concept of ‘relational positionality’ proposed by Crossa who argues that a ‘researcher’s identities are shaped by multiple mobile and flexible relations’ (2012: 115). My research also recognises that ‘the insider/outsider binary in reality is a boundary that is not only highly unstable but also one that ignores the dynamism of positionalities in time and through space’ (Mullings 1999: 340). While aware of the fluidity of identity and the limitations of a simplified labelling of my position in the field as ‘insider’, I still posit myself as an insider in the research I conducted. I was born in Beirut and spent most of my adult life there and knew the city and its people more than any other place in the world. Critical to my research experience though, were a number of themes that speak to the concept of relational positionality and seek to complicate what this positing entails and the dynamism that it incorporates.

A key theme is that of distance. I knew Beirut well, not only at an intellectual level, but also in an intimate, sensory and emotive way. At different stages of the research I negotiated the distance between myself and the city. I was mindful of the ways in which this distance could either enlighten or obscure my understanding of the place and its people. In conducting research I sought intellectual distance that would allow me insights that might have been obscured by my intimacy with the city, yet I also recognised that my intimate knowledge of the place often contributed directly to my understanding. At other times I

was distanced not through my intellectual effort as a researcher, but by the armed men on Beirut’s streets, or by youths in my neighbourhood as I described at the beginning of this chapter. Beirut then was not the city I perceived as mine, and it often appeared alien and obscure as I was pushed out to its margin. Although less familiar to me then, I found in ethnographic research a path that enabled me to approach the transformed space of the city. Beyond fieldwork, I struggled when I wrote about Beirut. It was difficult to condense my knowledge of the city or choose only a snippet to narrate, in English linear prose as a background chapter for this thesis.

A second theme concerns the temporality of the research. While fieldwork was conducted within a clearly defined time-frame constructed around my need to travel to Beirut to start fieldwork and then to return to the UK to start the writing process, the actual temporality of the research extends well beyond the fieldwork phase itself and touches on both the past and the future. Having lived in Beirut for most of my life, I inevitably drew on a fund of memories which tinged both the research process and my relationship to the city. My knowledge of Beirut and of past events there influenced the way I came to understand the city during fieldwork. Similarly, as an ‘insider’, I was embroiled in the city’s future and present concerns; the perceived consequences of any given event affected how I interpreted and valued it. My insider status therefore guided my choice of topics to

research, and it also influenced my intention that this research might contribute to the city’s future.

A third theme related to my positionality involves the degree to which I, as a researcher, am implicated in the research and the research site. While closely related to both distance – or lack of it in this case – and the historical knowledge, identification with the malaise of and concern for Lebanon highlights an added emotional layer. I had decided Lebanon was the site of my research before I even formulated the questions with which I was concerned.

The knowledge I produced had to contribute to a process of knowledge production about Lebanon and the Levant; it in fact had to provide answers that contribute to its betterment.

As I will explain, in all stages my engagement in this research was highly emotively charged, sensory, and historically laden. It was influenced by an overriding desire to contribute to knowledge relevant to the society I was living in and, more broadly, to understandings of the crises Lebanon has been experiencing. The research was largely shaped by a sense of

‘we-ness’; I lived and experienced this sense of belonging to a collective in which memories

and concerns for the future were shared among a larger community whose parameters are difficult to define.

In his examination of the researcher’s emotions in the field, Hage stresses the importance of subjecting emotions to the ‘rational analytical order’, but without ‘reducing them to

“analysable” data’ (2010: 152). He argues that a process of vacillation needs to take place in regard to emotional immersion, where ‘ethnographers have to continuously negotiate the terms under which emotions are subjected to “observation” and constantly “safeguard them in their savage state” in the very process through which they are experienced’ (Hage 2010: 152). As a researcher and anthropologist, I found it necessary to bring to the surface not only my emotional and temporal involvement with my research community, but for the duration of the research process, to also embrace the process of ‘ethnographic vacillation’

that Hage describes. This process applied not only with regard to emotions, but also extended to the degree of my implication with, and distance from, the context and communities of the people I was researching.

This chapter is divided into three sections which parallel the three stages of knowledge construction proposed by Altorki and El-Solh (1988), namely (i) choice of topic, (ii) acquisition of data, and (iii) data analysis and interpretation. I use this model to elaborate on my own field work experience, to consider my positionality as a researcher, and to reflect on how that positionality influenced the research I conducted (England 1994;

Crossa 2012). The first section explains my motivation for choosing to implement research in Beirut. It outlines the growing antagonism between Beirut’s political and sectarian communities, and describes how my knowledge of the city and its history, as well as my intellectual investment in its future has shaped the research questions I raised. In the second section I explore ways in which the researcher as an ‘insider’ experiences - rather than conducts- the ‘participation’ side of participant observation, participation being a sensory, emotive, and memory-laden engagement. In the third section I consider some of the limitations of writing within a field, and about a region, that continues to struggle with the effects of being the subject of an epistemological orientalist gaze.