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Accepted: 7 April 2022
DOI: 10.1111/amet.13110
ORIGINAL ARTICLE
Resistant ecologies
The life of war in South Lebanon
Munira Khayyat
Department of Sociology, Egyptology and
Anthropology, American University in Cairo
Correspondence
Munira Khayyat, Department of Sociology,
Egyptology and Anthropology, American University
in Cairo.
Email: [email protected]
Funding information
Wenner-Gren Foundation, Post-PhD Research Grant;
Arab Council for the Social Sciences Research Grants
Program; Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton;
Rachel Carson Center Fellowship; American
University in Cairo
Abstract
In South Lebanon, war is lived as landscape, environment, milieu. Those pursuing life in
such quarters do what they can to make-live, and their lifelines are often as vitalizing as
they are deadly: tobacco farmers ally themselves with what they call a “bitter crop” that
flourishes in an arid war zone, while pastoralists walk in explosive fields with their mineevading goats. These multispecies alliances flourish because they can survive the deadly
infrastructures of war. Dwelling alongside two steadfast families in the borderlands of
South Lebanon, this ethnography of life in war moves away from tropes of trauma to
grasp a militarized world from within the lived terrain of its operations. Neither greentinged utopia nor total devastation, these resistant ecologies make being possible in an
insistently deadly region. Thinking life from disastrous war zones forces anthropological
theory to reckon with harsh ethnographic realities while bringing to light unsung alliances
of hope for life ongoing.
KEYWORDS
war, ecologies, resistance, landscape, decolonizing war, multispecies, tobacco, goats, South Lebanon, Global
South
South Lebanon is a bucolic borderland that is also a battlefield. It is a biblical landscape of lush rolling hills dotted with
quaint farming villages, one whose inhabitants live alongside
the border and front with Israel, a militarily belligerent state
with which Lebanon has been at war since 1948. Weathering seasons of aerial bombardments, guerrilla wars, massacres,
displacements, invasions, and a 22-year Israeli occupation,
Lebanon’s frontline villagers continued to live off the land,
herding goats, growing olives and various subsistence crops,
and farming tobacco for the Régie Libanaise des Tabacs
et Tombacs, the Lebanese state-owned monopoly. In South
Lebanon, as in many places across the Global South, lives are
lived for generations in environments of war.1 This troublesome reality cannot be theorized as exceptional, and neither
can it be normalized. As both a childhood inhabitant of war
and a grown anthropologist studying war, I throw light on
this analytical quandary by formulating a more grounded and
lively understanding of life in war: an intimate and ecological
one.
In South Lebanon,2 agricultural cycles and seasons of war
together shape the lived world: livelihoods are both yoked to
agricultural seasons (mawasim zira’iyi) and sustained across
war’s seasonal eruptions (mawasim harb), as well as to its
Am. Ethnol. 2022;1–15.
violent longue durée. Through this, war tempers life, becomes
part of its materials and time-spaces, and living beings find
ways to exist with—and thus resist—war’s lethality. Here
both life and war are rooted in the land, and hence landscape is the portal of my inquiry into the life of war (see
Figure 1). Landscape is defined by Ingold (1993, p. 156),
from a “dwelling perspective,” as “the world as it is known
to those who dwell therein, who inhabit its places and journey along the paths connecting them.” Not easily reducible to
any one thing, landscape “patchily” (Tsing et al., 2019) attunes
us to how war is lived and the living worlds that war creates. An always-becoming, landscape is far from a frozen rural
scene (Mitchell, 2002; Navaro-Yashin, 2012; Olwig, 2008).
Landscape embraces places of life—the various ecologies that
survive every season; tangles of affective and vitalizing tasks
and relations; eclectic textures and temporalities; wild, domesticated, and spirited natures; and partisan (Pearson, 2008), allied
(Gregory, 2016) and insurgent terrain (Gordillo, 2018). Landscape thus diversely illuminates the field of analysis without
constraining it. A landscape of war brings into view a clutter
of vibrant ecological assemblages. It offers up life as lived (in
war) to understandings beyond the comfortably privileged, the
ideologically prescribed, the imperially weighted.
wileyonlinelibrary.com/journal/amet
© 2022 by the American Anthropological Association.
1
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Received: 5 February 2020
AMERICAN ETHNOLOGIST
F I G U R E 1 The full moon rises in South Lebanon, summer 2019, above a frontline village sandwiched between its tobacco fields (foreground) and an Israeli
military outpost on the borderline (background). (Munira Khayyat) [This figure appears in color in the online issue]
This article draws on my engagement with the Lebanese borderland since 2000, but especially on years of fieldwork in
frontline villages in the immediate and longer aftermath of the
most recent war that raged across Lebanon for 34 deadly days in
July and August 2006 (Achcar & Warschawski, 2007; Alagha,
2008; Exum, 2006; Harel & Isacharoff, 2008).3 Like all wars,
this war continues to reverberate (Navaro et al., 2021) years
after its final cease-fire. I want to tell a new story about war—
in the Middle East and in general—by shifting the focus from
melancholic frames of death, destruction, trauma, and abjection
to enlivening practices forged in the midst of recurring conflict.
In my work and my world, war is no metaphor: it is a living
environment.4
The 20th century simultaneously brought industry and warfare into the processes of life on this planet (Sloterdijk et al.,
2009), yet war, as a major site of capitalist and state violence (Alliez et al., 2016), has been insufficiently theorized as
a place of life. This is because it is methodologically difficult
to research war up close, and because, since 1945, war (like
other industrial processes) has been outsourced to far-off elsewheres in the Global South, safely removed from the scope of
ordinary experience and the easy grasp of theory. Because of
this, as Lubkemann (2008) has pointed out, war has been predominantly conceived as identical with its most mediated and
tactile dimension: violence. Of course, war is violent, destruc-
tive, and deadly, but for the many who inhabit it, war is, vitally,
the place where life must go on. Building on anthropological
scholarship on life amid the violence of colonialism (Gordillo,
2014; Taussig, 2004), capitalism (Tsing, 2005, 2015), nationalism (Shoshan, 2016), industrial disaster (Bond, 2021), and
the ravaged worlds these have created and within which we
must continue to somehow live, I want to add war to the list
of capitalism’s habitable ruins. Far from being a singular force
of destruction for too many beings on this planet, war is also
a place of life. Echoing Das (2007, p. 6), whose seminal work
on violence infuses mine, I ask, What is it to pick up the pieces
and to live in this very place of devastation? For the dwellers
of the enduring battlefields of South Lebanon and other elsewheres, the catastrophe is not yet to come—it is already here
and has been for some time. And these seasoned dwellers of
wars (and other human-made disasters) have found ways to live
in it. And thus I argue that anthropologists must think of war as
a lively place, a generative milieu, a fertile, cultivatable ground
for resistant thought and action, because that is what it is to
those who must live it.
This article condenses around what I call resistant ecologies,
multispecies “survival collectives” (Tsing, 2015) that sprout
around agricultural practices sustaining life in frontline villages through seasons of conflict. South Lebanon’s “ecologies
of practice”—a hopeful and open-ended attention to subaltern
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2
life and its radical possibilities that I borrow from Stengers
(2005)—include practices such as cultivating the “bitter crop”
of tobacco and traipsing with goats through deadly (and delicious!) borderland minefields.5 Resistant ecologies describe
how some life-sustaining practices “become-with” (Haraway,
2016, p. 12), and thus unexpectedly thrive within, the deadly
environments of war. While many in anthropology are reluctant to name such collectives and practices as resistant, I insist
on resistance because that is what those waging life in this
landscape of war do. Sahel, my friend who lives in a frontline
village, tells me,
It is the same here as it was in Vietnam: the farmer
who is planting his rice is also carrying his gun.
When he finds it is time to use his gun, he uses it,
and when he finds it is time to continue planting,
he continues planting. The farmer considers that
the planting of rice and the gun are twin weapons.
And in South Lebanon it is the same.
By twinning guns and agriculture, Sahel tells us something
important about resistant life in war: fighting for a livable life
in an unlivable world is muqawama (resistance).
Sourced from my experience of life in war and drawing on
years of fieldwork and friendship in the enduring war zone
of South Lebanon, I think of war as a habitable place. I do
so because for those who live in it, it must be. By insisting
on war as a lived environment, I foreground the vital dimensions of worlds of war while recognizing war as a violent event.
The confounding and continuous copresence of the forces of
destruction and creation generates the peculiarities of life here
in South Lebanon—and Palestine, Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria,
Somalia, Mozambique, South Sudan, Sri Lanka, Colombia, and
other war-ridden locales across the Global South—where wars
have simmered and exploded across generations, affecting life
and land even in times of calm.
THE HANDS OF FATIMA
The hands of Fatima are stained black (see Figure 2).6 She sits
in the heat of a July morning in a pool of bright shade under
a makeshift canopy outside her home in a village in South
Lebanon, one year after the last war, threading tobacco. On
July 12, 2006, Fatima was sitting where she is sitting now, as
she does every morning at this time of the year, when suddenly the air was pierced by the blaring of the village mosque’s
loudspeakers. As she continued threading, Fatima thought the
speaker would announce the results of the state school exams.
Instead, he proclaimed that two Israeli soldiers had been captured that morning by Hizbullah. This event sparked what is
now known as harb tammuz, the July War. Soon after, bombs
began to rain down as the Israeli Air Force took to the skies.
Fatima’s husband, Hussein, was at pasture with his goats, as he
was every morning, when he suddenly found himself lying on
the ground, his animals scattered. Picking himself up, he gathered his herd and returned home with them, only then realizing
that his hand pained him. Washing the soot off his blackened
limb, he found a small piercing in the skin that continued to
F I G U R E 2 The hands of Fatima are stained black by the tar that seeps
out of the green tobacco leaves she is threading, South Lebanon, July 2007.
(Munira Khayyat) [This figure appears in color in the online issue]
burn his flesh even after he had cleaned it. Hussein and his goats
at pasture had been hit by a white phosphorous bomb, familiar
to locals as harraq, “the burner,” an incendiary weapon that
is banned by international conventions for use against civilian
populations or in civilian areas. Despite his peculiar injury and
the bombs that continued to fall, Hussein and Fatima did not
leave their home. Fatima could not leave her tobacco plants,
which were in high season and required daily picking and
threading, and Hussein would not leave his 55 goats, which
needed his pastoral care. The couple had weathered many war
storms before, having lived in the village all their lives, farming tobacco and keeping goats while bringing up six sons. The
lively pull of their homestead, which formed the entire basis of
their livelihood, outweighed the push of the deadly violence that
had just reappeared in their lives. Along with so many across the
borderland once again turned battlefield, they remained where
they were. Weathering another war.
There are no bomb shelters across the South, despite decades
of recurrent Israeli aerial bombardments, and so like everyone
else, Fatima and Hussein sheltered from the shelling in their
single-level, flat-roofed village home, which, like many structures in gentle climates, is built to embrace the environment.
Since it was a white phosphorous wound, the hole in Hussein’s hand continued to smolder and ceased consuming him
only when he held it underwater. The couple cowered in their
home under the constant shelling. “Every bomb that fell, we
couldn’t see or breathe from the smoke and dust. We didn’t have
any windows or doors left to close! We crouched behind the
cracked walls of our home as the war went on outside. Divine
power is what kept us,” Fatima recalls, pausing a moment in
her threading to point with a tar-blackened finger straight up
toward the heavens and lifting her eyes skyward. “There was no
light, no food, or water. It was sweltering summer, mosquitos
ate us alive, and we were unable to step one step outside. By
the end of the second week of war, we were soaking semolina
and tea from our larder in cold water from the well and drinking
it to stay alive.” During a brief lull in the fighting on July 23,
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3
RESISTANT ECOLOGIES
the couple left their home in search of medical help for Hussein, who was in constant, desperate pain and getting weaker.
By then the tobacco was withering on the stalk, and the goats
would have to fend for themselves. “We left thinking we were
dead,” says Fatima. Indeed, it was only when they had given
up on life itself that Fatima and Hussein decided to abandon
their plants and animals—their sources of life. The old couple
walked along blasted roads and eventually reached the nearest hospital, where they found that the white phosphorous had
burned Hussein’s arm down to the blackened bone. “His body
was poisoned, and after a few days, he died. His time was up,”
Fatima says, sighing deeply, with unfathomable sadness. She is
very tiny, and her black-socked feet look like those of a child.
Her face is smooth and almost expressionless, yet it is suffused
with a mixture of resignation and sorrow.
In 34 days of conflict, with land fighting, mortars, and aerial
bombardment, Fatima’s village was reduced to rubble. After the
final cease-fire was finally agreed, the Israeli Air Force dropped
more than 4 million cluster bombs across the agricultural and
residential landscapes of South Lebanon, 1 million of which
did not explode. Eventually, demining crews came to Fatima’s
village and began to clear the land by priority: first the village
proper and the homes, then the agricultural land. The woodland
and other sparsely inhabited areas were deemed low priority
and were not cleared. But bombs remain in the land. “The deminers keep coming back!” exclaims Fatima. “They say this piece
of land is now clean, and then someone finds a bomb, and so
they return. Fifteen times they have cleared the same piece of
land, but it will never get clean—the bombs are hidden in the
earth! And in order to plant tobacco one has to dig into the soil,
so one never knows … the land is dangerous now! Most of the
land is dangerous now!”
But that doesn’t stop the farmers. Fatima has seen many wars,
but she says this one was the worst because its prime target was
the land that held the sources of her very being. “This war was
much worse than when they reached Beirut!” she says, referring
to the monstrous 1982 Israeli invasion. “Before, they mainly
killed people, but now they target the land, which is far, far
worse!” This time, it is clear, the Israeli war machine was set on
destroying the very ecologies that made life possible here. But
war did not stop those left alive. Fatima found two bomblets
hanging from her apricot tree and harvested them herself, with
her own bare hands. A strange and deadly crop, but Fatima did
not hesitate and did not fear. “Who still has life will not die,” she
says with quiet conviction, her head bowed over her tobacco.
“We, people of the South, whatever happens, we hold on to the
land.” She clenches her blackened fingers into a fist. “We don’t
have anything else.”7
Today, a year after the last war, in which she lost husband,
flock, and field, Fatima is threading tobacco. In fact, within
hours of the final cease-fire she was back in her home, removing bombs from her garden and nursing her dusty and shaken
fruit trees back to life. As she describes their return to health,
her hands momentarily leave off from threading to describe
the movement of supple young branches swaying in the wind,
and her face lights up briefly. When her husband died, she
sold the goats, and now her life—like the lives of many across
this borderland—is devoted entirely to tobacco. This resistant
AMERICAN ETHNOLOGIST
sprout will keep her here and keep her alive. And although
that source of living has been made more difficult, the difficulties are, evidently, neither unnavigable nor insurmountable.
One could say that Fatima has found a way to keep living with
and through seasonal gusts of war, always yoked to the swift,
practiced time and steady income of tobacco.
Now it is one summer after the war, and Fatima is back to
working tobacco as she has all the summers of her life through
wars and wars. During the three-month tobacco harvest, she
gets up before the first light to collect the day’s pickings while
the leaves are still tender with dew. Back home, she sits on the
ground to thread until noon. Fatima nets about half of what the
regie pays her for her tobacco at the end of the year, and this is
what she lives from. But since she supports only herself these
days, she remains mostly self-reliant. The whole time we were
talking, she did not miss a single beat with the maybar, the long,
flat threading needle stabbing at the rubbery leaves. And as I
take my leave, she continues, leaf after leaf, thread after thread,
year after year, war after war, until her time is up.
Fatima’s unheroic and ordinary struggle to stay alive—to
care for her only home in the world and her fruit trees that sometimes bear apricots and sometimes explosives, and to continue
to plant tobacco in the bomb-sprinkled earth—is a resistant
ecology of survival in a landscape of war and devastation.
Fatima and her tobacco embody a resistant ecology, a humanplant alliance, a multispecies partnership that quietly defies the
wars that have made their shared world.
DECOLONIZING WAR
For those who, like Fatima, must live in war, resistant life is
crafted amid the agents, objects, and time-spaces of perennial
conflict. I do not want to normalize war here—far from it. While
my ethnographic descriptions begin with war, this is not a naturalizing move; it is a humanizing one. To decolonize war as
an object shaped from distant shores, I want to describe life
in war without rendering war as Other, an exotic elsewhere, a
negative space where the social is suspended and violence and
chaos rule. Instead, I grasp the stubbornness of life from within
the lethal realities in which it grows, and I argue for an ecological and thus decolonized understanding of lifeworlds of war. To
ecologize war is to approach it differently: from the lifeworlds
of those who must live it. Ecologies, here, refer to relationships
that nurture life in deadly places. When one must exist in war,
one strives with all that is available to live. To find a way to
stay alive is to resist the necropolitics of war. Thus, to think of
life in war as rooted in resistant ecologies is not to romanticize
but rather to decolonize by shaking off war’s persistent cloak of
otherness, of singular violence, savagery, and barbarity, and to
grow an understanding of war rooted in livable, albeit deadly,
environments. The violence of war may be described as savage,
but those who live through it are not.8
Since the end of the Second World War, with the notable
exceptions of Northern Ireland, the Balkans, and now Ukraine,
wars have largely been confined to the Global South. Although
they are as globalized (and as unequal) as any process
in capitalism—and apart from the unwelcome migrants and
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4
refugees they generate—wars have been successfully outsourced to other worlds and hence are not immediately
experientially and imaginatively accessible to those of us complacently inhabiting more “peaceful” quarters in the Global
North.9 How this riven reality has shaped war as a conceptual object is profound, and this goes largely unrecognized.
The fact that wars take place in far-off elsewheres determines
how war is thought about, researched, and written about, felt
about.10 I want to think and write about war differently. Living and writing and speaking from the Global South, where
wars are existential struggles deeply bound up with being and
time (Hermez, 2017) and with ongoing imperial and capitalist projects, contests, and interests (Alliez et al., 2016), I insist
that war—as experience, as analytical object—must take its
place alongside other more recognized sites of violence and
ruin (modern, industrial, capitalist, corporate, state-sanctioned,
etc.), sites where many beings have little choice but to inhabit
and thus contend with as part of their lot on this damaged,
dying earth. War, as lifeworld and as conceptual object, is not
an elsewhere.
With the aim of pushing anthropology beyond its persistent Northern bias and enduring epistemological trench, I take
up Michel-Rolph Trouillot’s call for an anthropology (of war)
beyond the savage slot. Trouillot (1991, p. 39) writes, “We owe
it to ourselves to ask what remains of anthropology … when we
remove this slot—not to revitalize disciplinary tradition through
cosmetic surgery, but to build both an epistemology and semiology of what anthropologists have done and can do.” Trouillot
continues, “At the very least, anthropologists can show that the
Other, here and elsewhere, is indeed a product—symbolic and
material—of the same process that created the West. In short,
the time is ripe for substantive propositions that aim explicitly
at the destruction of the savage slot” (p. 40). My work on war
is a guerrilla missile aimed at destroying anthropology’s savage slot for the “irreducible historical subjects” (p. 40) of war.
Through careful, grounded ethnography in a lively war zone,
I want to show that war is a human experience that is continuous and coherent with the worlds we comfortably inhabit—even
if these worlds of war appear temporally, spatially, existentially removed from ours. It is politically relevant—especially
to those of us researching, writing, and living in such worlds—
to show that our ethnographic subjects (and the worlds they
inhabit, love, and fight for) are much more than mere illustrations of our academic arguments. They and their worlds
constitute the larger portion of this, all of our beloved, wretched
earth.
War is never easy to inhabit, and it is never one thing: it is
fraught with many gray zones (Levi, 1989). To those who live in
its midst, its dimensions become the dimensions of their everyday worlds, and so they must be navigated, inhabited, resisted,
lived. “Anthropologists who work in the growing number of
societies in which armed conflicts span entire lifetimes, need
to trace the unfolding of social relations and cultural expression
through the social condition of war, rather than treating it as a
period in which the social process is suspended” (Lubkemann,
2008, p. 24). To think of war in this way places it on a continuum with peace, to which it is often counterposed. This alters
war’s ethnographic and analytical framing. Rather than thinking
5
of war in purely negative terms as the chaotic “unmaking” of
the world (Nordstrom, 1997), it is much more accurate and generative to recognize war beyond the event, in structural terms,
as a maker of worlds. This necessarily merges war and peace,
collapsing their clear distinction (and ranking), which is the normative position of theory and privilege. Recent ethnographic
work in the region has shown how war is present and lived
beyond the violent event. In Lebanon, Palestine, Iraq, Syria,
and Turkey, war is encountered, experienced, expressed, and
inhabited in urban (infra)structures (Bou Akar, 2018; Nucho,
2016), (military) waste (Al-Mohammad, 2007; StamatopoulouRobbins, 2020; Touhouliotis, 2018), politics and time (Hermez,
2017), embodiment (Açıksöz, 2020), and affect (Navaro, 2017;
Yıldırım, 2021). Writing about the Troubles in Northern Ireland, Aretxaga (1997, p. 4) observes, “Peace and war are not so
much two opposed states of being as they are multi-faceted,
ambiguous, mutually imbricated areas of struggle.” And as
Mbembe (2002, p. 267) provocatively puts it, “Getting beyond
a consideration of its empirical aspects … the state of war …
should in fact be conceived of as a general cultural experience
that shapes identities, just as the family, the school, and other
social institutions do.”
The object of war that I hold and behold is an ethnographic
composite of engaged scholarly labor and intimate experience (mine and others). By shining a light on life in war, I
want to explode the boundary between civilized and savage, to
decolonize hegemonic understandings of war (and peace!). To
decolonize war, we must source our theories from war’s lived
experience, not our untheorized distance from the killing fields.
Alongside scholarship on violence (Feldman, 1991; ScheperHughes, 2007), the experience of imperial soldiers (MacLeish,
2013, Stone, 2018; Wool, 2015), the militarization of everyday
life (González et al., 2019; Lutz, 2009; Masco, 2014), and the
suffering of victims of war (Nordstrom, 1997), we must recognize and affirm the clever and resistant ways that those who
dwell in war make their lives within it (Hoffman 2011; Lubkemann, 2008). When we understand war as a condition that
emerges from the same social, political, economic, and ecological processes that make “our” peaceful worlds, only then can
we recognize our shared humanity, our collective vulnerability,
our complicity, and begin to grow a politics that can challenge this insidious, unequal ranking of life (Fassin, 2009) and
humanity (Asad, 2003). This is what it is to decolonize in this
moment.
Ecologizing war has implications for all of us who dwell on
a damaged planet amid swirling, layered, violent regimes that
we are only beginning to recognize as deeply interconnected
and existentially threatened and threatening. Decolonizing war
should make us more sensitive, more aware, more insistent on
shaping more equitable and inclusive, less violent social and
political realities, institutions, systems, and worlds now. For
those who inhabit it, war is—whether they want it or not—
a living environment, a lifeworld that necessitates a radical
reliance on others. In such a lifeworld, one always hopes but
can never be sure that the sun will rise tomorrow. The creative
survival strategies that grow in these deadly worlds of war are
the resistant ecologies that underwrite life and that grow in all of
modernity’s wreckages. For many of those we share this planet
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RESISTANT ECOLOGIES
with, who are less fortunate than us, the end of the world is
nothing new.
Landscape is the medium and the method of this inquiry
because it embraces the multiple natures of war, decolonized. In
South Lebanon, the Israeli war machine’s deadly technologies
target the landscape, the environment of living. Life-making
practices respond and resist. Villagers refuse, for reasons of
livelihood before ideology, to give up and go away. Tobacco,
goats, olives, friendly spirits and humans together form resistant ecologies in these bucolic battlefields that thwart the
intentional, necropolitical annihilation of nation-state, capital,
empire. These ordinary beings and multispecies collectives
become the front lines of resistance, making military resistance
also viable. To decolonize war is to think alongside villagers
tending tobacco seedlings in frontline fields and herding nimble goats through mined pastures; it is to see in this assembly
of life a resistant project defying the hubris of imperial erasure.
Resistance in South Lebanon is not a romantic illusion (Abu
Lughod, 1990). It is both a military reality and a necessary
existential stance against the consuming and annihilating realities of capitalism, nationalism, and war. Locally grown armed
resistance in South Lebanon (Chomsky, 1984; Kassir, 1985)
successfully expelled the Israeli occupation (Norton, 2000), an
unprecedented historical event. But the ability of life to persevere in these farming villages amid ever-returning gusts of war
is also (key to that) resistance. As Shaw (2016) has pointed out
for Vietnam, military victories are rooted in village life. Hence,
like my interlocutors in the frontline villages, I am convinced
that resistance remains empirically, analytically, and morally
illuminating, showing us how life endures in the battlegrounds
of South Lebanon. Not only do frames of trauma, suffering,
and degradation (or their opposite: resilience and endurance)
fail to contain the pugnacious multispecies vitalities ensnared in
necropolitical materialities that “pulsate” (Lyons, 2016, p. 56)
through waves of war, but southern villagers still proudly refer
to their continuing presence in place and to their enduring lifemaking practices as resistance (this includes steadfastness, or
sumud, as a kind of stubborn being in war). Of course, through
the long years of war in South Lebanon, armed resistance was
taken over and is by now almost entirely dominated, monopolized, and instrumentalized for political and military purposes
and ends by Hizbullah (Norton, 2014), which is known as
the Resistance (al-muqawama). But when enacted and uttered
by frontline villagers, muqawama shakes free of its singular
and mythological status and becomes once again rooted and
grounded in life ongoing—and oriented toward hope. It is also
important to many villagers (composed largely of a vulnerable demographic of elders, women, children—the rural poor) to
own the power, dignity, and praxis of muqawama and the hope
for a better world that comes with it. My insistence on resistance as a meaningful framing for the humble (yet heroic) life of
war respects its continued local currency, returns it to its many
histories and presents, wrests it from both singular politicalideological uses, and recuperates it from the wastepaper basket
of scholarship. Resistance is not only ideological; it is multiple, relational, ecological, lived. Tsing (2015, p. 263) writes,
“Humans become only one of man
