Longing for a nation : cross-sectarian publics and ethical activism in Lebanon
Keywords: Anthropology.

This study examines how "cross-sectarian publics, " as both an imagined and practiced project, became central to how Lebanese with diverse backgrounds related to other communities, their families, the state, the larger nation, and finally themselves in the unique confluence of postcolonial struggles for nation-building, post-Lebanese civil war anxieties about conflict resolution, and the Syrian civil war and the consequent refugee crisis. Based on 24 months of ethnographic research in Beirut between 2012 and 2015 with a wide-ranging set of actors such as low-income or unemployed NGO volunteers, middle-class social entrepreneurs, advocacy activists, the returning Lebanese diaspora, Lebanese politicians and bureaucrats, and Western aid workers, this dissertation argues that cross-sectarian publics was a middle-class-led project of ethical activism for transforming individuals in order to rebuild Lebanon and the Lebanese independent of sectarianism. Diverse forms of ethical activism that took place in cross-sectarian publics proliferated competing moral visions, discourses, and practices on "Lebanon, " its problems, and its future. Ethical activism articulated an affective longing for a national identity, a shared culture, and an autonomous individuality that were believed never to have properly existed in Lebanon. The aspired figure of the ethical activist was constructed (i) vis-à-vis the state and society, which were imagined as corrupt and sectarian, and (ii) vis-à-vis the precarious others of the city, who were imagined as disruptors of the public order. Employing an intersectional analysis that attends to how categories of class, urbanity, age, gender, kinship, sect, and religion interacted to shape everyday affective and temporal experience, this dissertation bridges the study of the experiential and the structural. In contrast to most anthropological work, which has typically separated the political and the ethical, this work documents entanglements of the political and the ethical by demonstrating that the ethical activism that articulated political participation as a virtue unexpectedly transformed a grassroots movement into a leading political actor. More than other types of activists, the figure of the entrepreneurial activist was believed to be a role model of an autonomous citizen and an effective political actor for its combination of professionality and passion. Participation in cross-sectarian publics such as hiking-trips, movie theaters, university classrooms, TEDx talks, NGO offices, and cosmopolitan cafés was entangled in class-based, sect-specific, and gender-based anxieties about being recognized as an autonomous citizen through both self-transformation and political activism. Thus, this study suggests that local framings of activism cannot be understood only through lenses of the history of the liberal human rights discourse or neoliberalism, but were also tied to diverse postcolonial aspirations and practices about becoming a "non-sectarian" and nationalist Lebanese who could build a future nation-state. This historically grounded anthropological study, which unpacks the complex layers of cross-sectarian publics and civil society activism in Lebanon, ultimately questions the existing scholarly work on political subjectivity, civil society, and activism that either optimistically focuses on imaginations of "alternative futures" by romanticizing political activism as subversive, or dismissively concludes that the emergent mobilizations "reproduce" neoliberalism, sectarianism, or existing power relations. It shows that cross-sectarian publics were constitutive of upward social mobility, meaning-making, hoping, dreaming, and cultivating friendship and care in a place where violence, fear, and uncertainty had become part of everyday life. Yet, it also reveals that ethical activism was a space for domination and exclusion by silencing other problems and sufferings, such as those of Syrian refugees and other urban poor.