Adonis Diaries

The Center for Arab and Middle Eastern Studies (CAMES) at American University of Beirut invited Sami Hermez to give a lecture on Jan. 30, 2014 on the topic of

“Understanding Dignity in Political Struggle in Lebanon and Beyond”

And “On Why People Kill: On the Perpetrators of Political Violence”

Freedom, dignity and social justice have been the basic demands of the revolutions that swept the Arab world since 2011.

This lecture is to explore one of these demands: karameh or dignity.

People have been screaming this across the region, and calling for a return of dignity by seizing it from the state.  What happens when we take dignity as an analytical category to think through political mobilization?

And what can anthropology tell us about the micro-workings of dignity (its everyday practices, embodiment and emotions) in political struggle?

By focusing on the context of Lebanon, the first question is the use of honor as a trope by which to look at political engagements within the modern state system, and instead ask that we more closely explore dignity as a structure of political emotion that gives people and their lives meaning and power.

Second, through ethnographic fieldwork that looked at how people in Lebanon live everyday with instability and a coming war, it is  shown how dignity becomes contested and conflicted in times of instability, and consider the way people use this notion in their political struggles.

Note:  Sami Hermez is a Visiting Scholar in the Department of Anthropology at Harvard University.

He has taught at University of Pittsburgh and Mt. Holyoke College, and was Postdoctoral fellow at the Centre for Lebanese Studies, St. Antony’s College, Oxford University.

He holds a PhD in Anthropology from Princeton University (2011). He has published in PoLar (2012), Cultural Dynamics (2010), and Studies in Ethnicity and Nationalism (2011).

Dr. Hermez is a candidate for the CAMES position in Middle East Studies with a focus on the contemporary Arab world.