Conceiving Family Relationships in Post-War Lebanon

In: Journal of comparative family studies, Band 35, Heft 2, S. 271-293

Abstract

How family relationships are conceived, both materially and discursively, in the aftermath of war is critical for understanding the processes of construction and reconstruction of the "social" in times of turmoil. The active engagement of families with and response to long-term violence is a trigger for change in the gendered and aged relationships within patriarchal families. Under conditions when the "social" is challenged, social rules are destablized, the expected is less certain, those living the social may see possibilities (for better or for worse) that were not as visible (or extant) previously. The ways in which family members represent family relationships, in these moments, tells a story of emergent changes within families which might not be as evident observationally. Such discourses, which may not correspond to what an anthropologist observes, might be dismissed as misrepresentations or they might be calibrated for later analysis when their meanings are clearer. As family relationships are crucial to social institutions in most Middle Eastern countries, shifts within family relationships have repercussions throughout society. This paper calibrates such registers of emergent change in family relationships in a small village, just east of Beirut, in the immediate aftermath of the cessation of the Civil War which raged in Lebanon from 1975-1990. Discourses of family relationships among the villagers often differed markedly from what I found in my observations among these families. I observed intact families which were intensely involved in each other's affairs and wellbeing. Family members, however, reported stories of the "family" in crisis in Lebanon. The disparity in my observations and their discourses emerges in part from the fact that I was observing "their" families, while they were talking about "the family" in Lebanon. The intensify of family life I observed may be an expression of their will and efforts to hold on to family relationships as they knew them prior to the war, in the face of challenges to those relationships they saw in the society at large.