Description
Book SynopsisWhat 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.
Trade Review"The staying power of this book is how it models a way to think outside accumulated disasters as discrete events, how to use ethnography to render life under a constant state of precarity and violence. Khayyat’s approach, ethnographic sensitivity, and relentless focus on “living with” rather than “living despite” scale up and apply broadly to accumulated crisis in both other locales and on a planetary scale." * International Journal of Middle East Studies *
"
A Landscape of War is a rich and daring ethnography. Ethically and politically committed to honoring the terms through which her interlocutors understand their vital and lethal environments, Khayyat conceptualizes war as a place of life and reclaims resistance as political action, highlighting its ordinary and relational nature. . . . a powerful and necessary meditation on the domesticity of war: war as something that is managed and that can be (to a certain extent) tamed, as well as a space that is inhabited, that bitterly becomes home." * Current Anthropology *
Table of ContentsContents
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
