What worlds take root in war? In this book, anthropologist Munira Khayyat describes life along the southern border of Lebanon, where resistant ecologies thrive amid a terrain of perennial war. A Landscape of War takes us to frontline villages where armed invasions, indiscriminate bombings, and scattered land mines have become the environment where everyday life is waged. This book dwells with multispecies partnerships such as tobacco farming and goatherding that carry life through seasons of destruction. Neither green-tinged utopia nor total devastation, these ecologies make life possible in an insistently deadly region. Sourcing an anthropology of war from where it is lived, this book decolonizes distant theories of war and brings to light creative practices forged in the midst of ongoing devastation. In lyrical prose that resonates with imperiled conditions across the Global South, Khayyat paints a portrait of war as a place where life must go on.
A Landscape of War Ecologies of Resistance and Survival in South Lebanon
About the Book
Reviews
"This book is an original and engaging ethnography of life in a war zone conceived as an entanglement of worlds formed around tobacco, land mines, nature, and borders. The author's social and affective enmeshment in the field makes for a particularly well-written and gripping text."—Ghassan Hage, author of The Diasporic Condition: Ethnographic Explorations of the Lebanese in the World"Eloquently written, beautifully evocative of the mundane and the extraordinary forms of violence, endurance, and liveliness in the southern villages of Lebanon, Munira Khayyat's book is an invaluable ethnography of survival in the 'gray zone' of a more-than-human landscape that has seen decades of war and occupation. This book provides a highly original and critically important contribution to anthropological literatures on Lebanon and on studies of war and conflict, memory and space, and life under occupation."—Joanne Randa Nucho, author of Everyday Sectarianism in Urban Lebanon: Infrastructures, Public Services, and Power
Table of Contents
Contents
List of Illustrations
Prelude: Warlight
Acknowledgments
Note on Language and the Text
Introduction: War, from the South
1. A Brief History of War in South Lebanon
2. Battle/field
3. The Bitter Crop
4. How to Live (and Die) in an Explosive Landscape
5. Maskun, or Nature’s Resistance
6. The Gray Zone
Conclusion: Life as War
Coda: A Marriage in Galilee
Notes
Bibliography
Index
Related Books
Giving to God
Amira Mittermaier
Life Lived in Relief
Ilana Feldman
Paradoxes of Green
Gareth Doherty
Food and Power
Nir Avieli
Sacrificial Limbs
Salih Can Aciksoz
Istanbul, City of the Fearless
Christopher Houston
Breaking Ranks
Matthew C. Gutmann
The Powerful Ephemeral
Carla Bellamy
Government of Paper
Matthew S. Hull