Practicing Sectarianism

Archival and Ethnographic Interventions on Lebanon

Lara Deeb, Tsolin Nalbantian, Nadya Sbaiti

• Publisher: Stanford University Press
• Year: 2022
• Print ISBN: 9781503633865, 9781503631090
• eBook ISBN: 9781503633872
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Middle Eastern History
• Index: History

Practicing Sectarianism explores the imaginative and contradictory ways that people live sectarianism. The book's essays use the concept as an animating principle within a variety of sites across Lebanon and its diasporas and over a range of historical periods. With contributions from historians and anthropologists, this volume reveals the many ways sectarianism is used to exhibit, imagine, or contest power: What forms of affective pull does it have on people and communities? What epistemological work does it do as a concept? How does it function as a marker of social difference?

Examining social interaction, each essay analyzes how people experience sectarianism, sometimes pushing back, sometimes evading it, sometimes deploying it strategically, to a variety of effects and consequences. The collection advances an understanding of sectarianism simultaneously constructed and experienced, a slippery and changeable concept with material effects. And even as the book's focus is Lebanon, its analysis fractures the association of sectarianism with the nation-state and suggests possibilities that can travel to other sites. Practicing Sectarianism, taken as a whole, argues that sectarianism can only be fully understood—and dismantled—if we first take it seriously as a practice.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Note on Transliteration
• Introduction: Practicing Sectarianism in Lebanon
• 1. No Room for This Story: Education and the Limits of Sectarianism during the Mandate Era
• 2. Negotiating Citizenship: Shiʿi Families and the Jaʿfari Shariʿa Courts
• 3. The Archive Is Burning: Law, Unknowability, and the Curation of History
• 4. Donating in the Name of the Nation: Charity, Sectarianism, and the Mahjar
• 5. Along and beyond Sect?: Olfactory Aesthetics and Rum Orthodox Identity
• 6. From Murder in New York to Salvation from Beirut: Armenian Intrasectarianism
• 7. Inequality and Identity: Social Class, Urban Space, and Sect
• 8. When Exposure Is Not Enough: Sectarianism as a Response to Mixed Marriage
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Contributors
• Index