Eating their god

the contingencies of nationalism and survival in Shatila Camp

Edición de la obra Eating their god

This thesis examines daily life and survival in Shatila, a Palestinian refugee camp on the outskirts of Beirut. Offering a critical analysis of normative theories of Palestinian identity, belonging and politics in the disapora, it considers how everyday material practices of survival and transformations in the political economy of the camp are reconfiguring social and political structures. Much of the scholarship on Palestinian refugees in Lebanon has addressed the question of identity abstractly, as a matter of memory and as a relation to the past. Camps are often presented as "mnemonic communities"--as temporary spaces where refugees ready themselves for return. Emphasizing the continuities of cultural forms in exile obscures the transformations in the way collective identity and belonging are conceived and practiced locally, and the conflicting loyalties that have developed after sixty years; just as the emphasis on historical restitution obscures the complexities of what it might mean for generations born in exile to return to a place they never left. This focus on conceptual orders of ideology and nation has also tended to gloss over the practical matters of economy, health and homemaking. Identity, however, is not something that refugees merely narrate, inherit or imagine; it is also something that they live and practice. My research in Shatila Camp has sought to shift sympathetic and analytical attention away from the discursive continuities of nationalism towards the contingencies of everyday experience and practice in their local environment. I examine how conditions of ongoing provisionality and deepening poverty are restructuring the social and political. Analyzing everyday material practices--saving associations, electricity bartering, ritualized dream interpretation, and emigration--I explore how dynamically evolving networks of solidarity are reconstituting traditional structures of kinship and political belonging. The emergent forms of attachment, subjectivity and agency I examine cut against the grain of officially sanctioned nationalism by complicating the alignment of refugees and the territories in mandate Palestine from which they, or their relatives, were forcibly expelled in 1948.