When the long civil war ended in Lebanon, the long process of rebuilding the capital city began, which continues to affect events today. In order to understand how Beirut's central district was rebuilt, my work explores the ways that memory and the city's history were debated among groups at all social levels, government officials, financial agents, and intellectuals, ordinary residents, and the disenfranchised—all groups invoked different narratives of the city’s contested past. What happens after the post-war period? How do memory and contested history play out in the post-reconstruction era? After the completion of the controversial reconstruction project, whole collective memories had been obscured, marginalized groups responded by declaring their right to the city in the events of 2006 by erecting the "tent city” in the very city center. This paper, an extension of the epilogue of my monograph, Reconstructing Beirut (University Texas 2010), addresses the ways remembrance—and its antithesis, amnesia-- continue to play a central role in the determining the Lebanese relationship to Beirut's Central District. City residents still vie for their respective rights to this contested national urban symbol. The specific case of Lebanon revolves around questions that speak to the theme of memory in urban developments: How do marginalized groups and power-holders invoke recollections, collective memory, and history to argue for certain policies of urban space? How are these strategies affected by recent developments, especially the technology of social digital media? Reading the current Beirut situation through the lens of memory is part of the growing approach that adapts the anthropology of memory for the context of the Middle East.

During Lebanon’s civil war reconstruction period in the 1990’s, violent conflict continued along its border with Israel. After Lebanon’s militia leaders and political elites had agreed to a ceasefire that ended the so-called “events,” the Lebanese Resistance – a group organized and led by Hizbollah, both a milita group and political party – continued to engage the Israeli army and Israeli proxies at their fortified positions in the South. In April 1996, Israel launched “Operation Grapes of Wrath” to subdue Hizbollah, and in the course of events, killed over 100 civilian refugees in a United Nations compound in Qana. This paper investigates the ongoing commemorative relevance of this event in Lebanon’s post-civil war history. The Lebanese have a long-standing history of remembering martyrs as heroes. They build public memorials and conduct annual ceremonies of remembrance in order to celebrate martyrs’ national sacrifice. These monuments and acts of remembrance cross religious boundaries, and therefore hold an important place in a country known for sectarian politics. What happened in Qana was not only a tragedy for the families struck by the bombings, it was a moment in Lebanon’s history when members of all communities came together to provide relief for the displaced and wounded. As such, the date of Qana’s attack, April 18, was added as a national holiday on Lebanon’s calendar. Since 2000, however, Qana’s commemorative significance has been contested by different political groups. Moreover, in the aftermath of the Lebanon War of 2006, a competing memorial was erected in Qana. However, I argue that throughout the various government crises in Lebanon since 2006, the Qana Massacre (mazjara Qana) remains one of the few events whose memory transcends the current political divides in the country. This paper is based on ethnographic fieldwork, interviews, and newspaper reports about the memorial sites in Qana against the context of a profoundly changed political, as well as commemorative, landscape in Lebanon.

In the late 1960s, Palestinian artists and activists began creating posters as a way of communicating with each other and commemorating their struggles. The early posters commemorated martyrs, marked the advent of political movements, advocated for political positions, and celebrated national moments and progressive causes. As the tradition developed, the Palestinian poster genre grew to include solidarity posters with others in struggle, posters by others in solidarity with Palestinians, advertisements for political and cultural events, and after 1994 posters promoting projects of the new Palestinian authority. The poster art tradition continues to this day, in paper, and more innovatively, in digital form. Palestinian posters now number in the thousands, held in collections all over the world, and are still being produced and pasted in the streets and tagged on Facebook pages throughout the West Bank, Gaza, Israel, the Palestinian diaspora, indeed globally. This research is built on an internet-based archive that contains nearly 4,000 Palestine posters and another 2,000 posters in the physical archive to which I have unique access. This paper will examine the development of a visual language that memorializes the events, symbols, and images of the nation, and how that visual language has been constructed over time through more than forty years of Palestinian posters. Land Day (30 March 1976) is commemorated in 93 posters, each memorializing the event in a palette of symbols that conjures up a uniquely Palestinian memory of that event. Via close study and chronological attentiveness, we can see how images come to have iconographic meaning and become “an object of memory.” In the case of Land Day, the predominant symbols are the kufiya, a tree, and some expression of grief over the land. In addition, poster artists also remix and reuse images, thus both complicating and enriching the symbolic palette. For example, the poster from Land Day 2010 uses an image of an elderly woman clinging to an uprooted olive tree, an image that has been used in five different posters published in the West Bank, Beirut, and Belgium, which first appeared as a photograph on a poster in 1990. The iconography that artists use is built on a vocabulary of symbolic events that connect to individual and collective memories of the past. Through these visual renderings and remixes, the posters create narrative nodes of Palestinian history that draw on communal memories and create shared spaces for recollection.

Like much of the Middle East, a discourse about a “marriage crisis” –namely, the delay of marriage (or the forgoing of marriage all together) as a result of the high cost of marriage celebrations and establishing a separate household, as well as higher education and migration – has circulated throughout Jordan in recent years (with historical precursors as well). The crisis is framed as simultaneously economic, moral and national in nature. The delay or foregoing of marriage all together has been invariably linked to moral corruption, a crisis of delayed adulthood, excessive rates of spinsterhood, and even religious and political extremism among youth. Much of the economic analysis of the “marriage crisis” paints a picture of a stagnant institution of marriage clashing with new material realities. Paradoxically, the media, as well as charitable and community organizations concerned with this crisis, often tackle it by contrasting an idealized marriage “history” with what is viewed as corrupt and inauthentic contemporary marriage innovations. Their solution to the marriage crisis then is framed as a return to the past. Drawing on ethnographic research in Jordan, this paper analyzes memories, or memorializing of marriage traditions of old and the ways in which Jordanian institutions and actors draw on memories of marriage traditions and celebrations to address a contemporary “marriage crisis.” Drawing on this data, I highlight the image(s) of marriage in history that different Jordanians choose to highlight, “remember”, or romanticize and to what ends. Finally, I point to the ways in which marriage has indeed been transformed in a contemporary era, arguing that neither the image of unchanging marriage traditions clashing with contemporary economic realities, nor the ideal of marriages of old are sufficient for understanding how young adults conceive of marriage, marriage partners and marriageablity today.

The last decade, marking the passing of fifty years and counting since the nakba, has seen considerable production of accounts of that year’s events in the publications of Palestinian political parties, NGOs, artists, poets, writers, intellectuals, film-makers, the media of various Arab states, as well as journalists and scholars sympathetic to the Palestinian struggle. These accounts present 1948 as the pivotal point of Palestinian history and the bedrock of national memory and history. However, scholars of national memory remind us that unity is always effected through forgetting. Why are the events of 1948 accorded this privileged position within Palestinian nationalist narratives, given Israeli nationalism’ attempts to delegitimate the authenticity of Palestinian nationalism by portraying it as the by-product of the establishment of the state of Israel? What are the processes by which the experience of 1948 has shaped the identity of three generations of camp refugees in Lebanon? What differences in the experience of refugee-hood may be obscured by this privileging of 1948? Drawing on fieldwork conducted during 2003-2006 in Bourj al-Barajneh refugee camp located in the southern suburbs of Beirut, this paper explores these questions in order to examine the relationship between experience, memory and the construction of Palestinian nationalist narratives.