Monday, October 29th, 12noon
WLH Rm 309
Temporary Star Crossings: Reflections on Sectarianism and Intermarriage in Lebanon
Intersectarian and interreligious marriages frequently provoke strong social opposition from Lebanese of all sects and faiths. In this talk, Lara Deeb will describe her new research project that takes this social opposition as a lens to shed light on social sectarianism in Lebanon. The talk will describe the stakes of this project and its driving questions, and share some preliminary observations based on field research thus far. Deeb highlights the role of family in reproducing sectarianism and explores its impact on people at the personal level, outside the formal realms of law and politics. In doing so, she considers sect as a form of intersectional social difference and explores its relationship to gender, class, and regional location.
Lara Deeb is Professor of Anthropology at Scripps College. She is the author of An Enchanted Modern: Gender and Public Piety in Shi‘i Lebanon (Princeton University Press 2006), co-author of Leisurely Islam: Negotiating Geography and Morality in Shi‘i South Beirut (Princeton University Press 2013), which won the British-Kuwait Friendship Society Book Prize given by the British Society for Middle East Studies, and co-author of Anthropology’s Politics: Disciplining the Middle East (Stanford University Press 2015). Deeb has published widely on the politics of knowledge production, gender and Islam, piety and morality, Hizbullah’s cultural production, and transnational feminism. Her current book project analyzes social responses to intersectarian and interreligious relationships and marriages in Lebanon in order to better understand social sectarianism and sect as a form of social difference.
For more information on this year’s WGSS Speaker Series, Kinship in Times of Suspicious Citizenship, click here.