Inventing Home: Emigration, Gender, and the Middle Class in Lebanon, 1870-1920 - Softcover

Khater, Akram Fouad F.

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0520227409 ISBN 13: 9780520227408

Verlag: University of California Press, 2001

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Akram Fouad Khater is Associate Professor of Middle Eastern History at North Carolina State University.

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Inventing Home

By Akram Fouad Khater

University of California Press

Copyright © 2001 Akram Fouad Khater
All right reserved.
ISBN: 0520227409
A Departure from the Ordinary

There were 72 of us, we went to Beirut where we remained for eight days, living outdoors. . . . Finally, one night the Beirut agents came and said “let's go.” They directed us through a small canyon and we continued walking until we got to the sea. There were three Turkish officers there whom they bribed. Then they put us in an open boat and took us to Cyprus which was under British rule. And they got us tickets for a French ship.

– Michael Haddy, interview, 1962.

This is how Michel Haddy described his journey to the United States. After a circuitous voyage through Beirut (where the passengers did not disembark) and Alexandria, the ship deposited the villagers from ‘Ayn ‘Arab in Marseilles. From there they traveled to Le Havre, where they and “about 250 Syrians from Zahlé, from Matn, from everywhere” boarded another steamboat for New York. Eighteen days later they emerged from amidst the “cattle, pigs and other animals and the terrible smell,” terrified that they would be turned back. “But thank God no one from ‘Ayn ‘Arab was rejected.”1

There are over two hundred thousand such stories of predominantly Christian peasants who left their villages in Mount Lebanon to travel to the Americas in the twenty-five years following 1890. Their departures from their quotidian lives into a world unknown to them, except through a mist of physical and mental distance, are remarkable. Yet few historians have chronicled these extraordinary voyages, and those who have recount only part of the story.2 Their books tell not always accurately of the reasons which prompted peasants to leave their mountainous villages. They speak of the voyages and the arrivals in the mahjar, the money they sent back, and the “assimilation” of those who stayed.3 But nothing is said about a host of other matters, the most critical of which is the story of return. Except for a sprinkling of passing remarks, we never encounter those many who went back to the Mountain. We learn nothing about their experience of return, what they brought back with them, how they were received, and their role in the making of “modern” Lebanon.

This book is intended to remedy such oversight by tracing the journeys of these villagers from the ranks of the peasantry into a middle class of their own making. I wish to write of the struggles of Lebanese peasants to control their destiny amidst the swirling forces of the world capitalist system. And I wish to remedy the scholarly silence about the social history of Lebanon between 1860 and 1920. Most important, however, and in addition to these two issues, I believe that the journeys of peasants have much to tell us about the historical dynamics which made “modern” Lebanon. Embedded in these travels are the stories of how new notions of gender, family, and class were articulated and of how “modernity” was invented in the process. My intent is not to draw a linear and inevitable line between a peasant start and a middle-class end along which these peasants dutifully marched into a spot in history. Instead, I will try to map out the jagged and uncertain paths which the fellahin from Mount Lebanon carved through time and space in their attempt to control their future and their destinies. Along the way, this narrative will shed much needed light on the impact of emigration and immigration on “nations,” it will explore new areas in the history of Lebanon, and it will delve into the complex relationships among gender, family, and class.

More specifically, in unpacking these narratives I wish to elucidate how a class was formed both socioeconomically and culturally. This analytical duality is essential, yet it has been largely missing from studies about the Middle East. Studies about “modernity” in the Middle East have tended to concentrate on the cultural construction of this imagined state of being. This cultural emphasis has been a most welcome addition to the field, one which has helped shed significant light on seemingly well-worn subjects and has as well introduced new images into our historical vision. However, the great majority of these works set about deconstructing “modernity” without explaining how a “middle class” came into existence in the first place. Constructing such an explanation is necessary not merely to satisfy curiosity; it is rather a critical step toward a more sophisticated and organic understanding of the making of the “modern.” This additional analysis is necessary because the processes through which a class forms in classical socioeconomic terms shape the construction of its particular ethos, even as that culture helps to maintain and shape class boundaries. Or, as Kumkum Sangari and Sudesh Vaid note for the case of India, “the relation between classes and patriarchies is complex and variable. Not only are patriarchal systems class differentiated, open to constant and consistent reformulation, but defining gender seems to be crucial to the formation of classes and dominant ideologies.”4 Thus, our comprehension and explanation of the rise of “modernity” will remain lacking unless we incorporate into our narratives an examination of the socio-economic journeys of the middle class, which embodied and exuded “modernity.” Only then can we possibly overcome the circularity of the middle-class narrative which places it outside history.

Finally, through exploring the journeys of these peasants, I want to elucidate how the “traditional” past of this new class was integral to the making of its own “modern” — xa set of ideas and a material culture that its members subsequently used to distinguish themselves from their peasant heritage. In consciously tracing the links between the two historical times and groups, we can discover that the culture of the peasant past remained ever-present in the modern lives of middle-class men and women. This past was not a mere residue but a powerful factor which contoured the shapes of the “modernity” that many ex-peasants were engaged in constructing as they remade themselves into a middle class. Only by taking this mental step back and looking at the larger process can we fully appreciate its engineering complexity. Beyond marveling at accomplishments, through this retreat from a narrow historical focus we can discard the artificial bipolarities of “modern” and “traditional” because it renders them meaningless.

In order to further elaborate the premises of this book, I will proceed in the remainder of this chapter to discuss “modernity” and the ways that class, gender, and family were used to construct this state of being. Additionally, I will define what I mean by these terms through a discussion of their theoretical employment in current scholarship, as well as by introducing my own extensions of some of those definitions. In a subsequent section I will explore the relationship between emigration and the making of “modernity.” I will conclude by presenting a sketch of the contents of the book.

A Local “Modern”

“Modernity” is an elusive term. Yet, ever since the Industrial Revolution, “modernity” has figured prominently in...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: University of California Press
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2001
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0520227409
• ISBN 13: 9780520227408
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 274
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