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University of California Press

A Landscape of War

Ecologies of Resistance and Survival in South Lebanon
by Munira Khayyat (Author)
Hardcover Paperback eBook
Price: $95.00 / £80.00
Publication Date: Nov 2022
Edition: 1st Edition
Title Details:
Rights: World
Pages: 286
ISBN: 9780520389984
Trim Size: 6 x 9
Illustrations: 25 b/w illustrations
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About the Book

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.

About the Author

Munira Khayyat teaches Anthropology at the American University in Cairo.
 

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

Reviews

"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
"A Landscape of War is a rich ecological and historical study that also blends into the text the emotional imaginary of Munira Khayyat. It would be of interest to scholars and graduate students of anthropology, history, and war, sectarian, and cultural studies." 
— Arab Studies Quarterly
"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
 

Awards

  • Edie Turner Prize for First Book in Ethnographic Writing 2023 2023, Society for Humanistic Anthropology, of the American Anthropological Association