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" Between the womb and the hour ethics and semiotics of relatedness amongst Palestinian refugees in Tyre, Lebanon "
Sylvain Perdigon
V. Das
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Latin Dissertation
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English
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| Record Number
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1103917
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TLpq902733830
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| Main Entry
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Sylvain Perdigon
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V. Das
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| Title & Author
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Between the womb and the hour ethics and semiotics of relatedness amongst Palestinian refugees in Tyre, Lebanon\ Sylvain PerdigonV. Das
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| College
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The Johns Hopkins University
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| Date
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2011
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2011
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| Degree
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Ph.D.
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| Page No
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251
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| Abstract
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This dissertation explores how the contradictory historical processes set in motion by the politics of empire, nationhood and sovereignty in the Middle East are critically refracted through everyday practices of kinship and self-making in Palestinian refugee communities in Tyre and Beirut, Lebanon. Taking the refugee as a figure central for a critical analysis of modern power, and long-term refugee camps as physical inscriptions of distinctly modern histories of governance, the research focuses on the ordinary forms of obligation, to others and to the self, that endure or emerge diagonally to such regimes of legal and spatial exclusion. The inquiry proceeds from the claim that being a refugee entails a unique form of obligation to `al-rah[dotbelow]im '--a qur' anic notion of the close kin that translates literally as "ties-of-the-womb." Drawing on an array of ethnographic methodologies, the dissertation charts the layered textures of al-rah[dotbelow]im as its pull, play and pulses emerge across materials and temporalities: from the ever changing physical landscape of the camp, and its residents' experiments with the shaping of their habitat; to the harnessing of relatives to the formation of networks of support, wedlock and residency rights in third countries; to the everyday bodying-forth of relationships through exchanging signs in various registers--food, objects, gestures, but also secrets, scriptural fragments, or possession narratives. The dissertation argues that what gives such sway to al-rah[dotbelow]im in the refugee environment are not just dependencies incurred in the struggle for survival. It is also the ethical concern that the numbing harms of refugee life could in turn exile the self from the social--thus rendering a collaborative ideal of the self at peace unachievable. Accordingly, the dissertation demonstrates how the practices of al-rah[dotbelow]im coincide in the camps with micropolitics of language, bodies and things, oriented towards securing the deep enmeshment of the self with others. Such practices and semiotic ideologies of the thickly embedded self allow refugees to define the camp as a moral (as opposed to biopolitical) community. At the same time, they also put them at odds with the narrative of progress that associates human flourishing, under modernity, with participation in a sovereign polity and the disembedding of selves from kin-based dependencies.
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Ethics
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Kinship
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Lebanon
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Palestinian
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Refugees
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Social sciences
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