Intersections of Taste, Race, and Class

Abstract

out further explanation. Drawing inspiration from her interlocutors, Khayyat revitalizes the notion of resistance through an ecological perspective. Like many other terms currently being reconsidered in anthropology from a more-than-human framework (e.g., political participation, kinship, damage, justice, reparation), resistance acquires different connotations when addressing the affective cross-species relationships, connections, and collaborations that emerge and consolidate in the struggle to remain alive. Since these networks of care and survival are rooted in the land, Khayyat uses the landscape as both medium and method. Concerned with the life that unfolds in war environments, she borrows Ingold’s dwelling perspective, which allows the ethnographer to grasp “the complexity, breadth, and depth of this place and of life in general” (25) while attuning her to the “patterns, practices, tendencies, textures, rhythms, proclivities, loves, edibles, interdictions, imaginaries, desires, [and] fears” (26) manifested in the living world and experienced by those who persist through seasonal devastations. A Landscape of War examines various human-human, humanplant, human-animal, and human-spirit relationships. The first two chapters offer a historical description of the separation, violence, and occupation that produce present-day South Lebanon and a methodological reflection on Khayyat’s ethnographic work and politics, respectively. The other four chapters focus on particular relationships within these resistant ecologies. Chapter 3 considers the material and affective attachments of locals, particularly women, with the tobacco plant, calling attention to the tension between the lethality and vitality that sustains its farming. In these war zones, tobacco is a bitter crop. It is hardy, it offers refuge, and it empowers and roots people in place—but it is also entangled with a nationalist economic agenda and (para)state political groups, enmeshed in an exploitative capitalist industry that commodifies the product of affective ecologies. In conversation with the anthropology of military waste, chapter 4 examines the art of navigating explosive landscapes—a skill that, as I have explored in my own work (Pardo Pedraza 2020, 2023), is not an exclusively human affair. Goatherds and their goats are the protagonists of these survival efforts, which sometimes fail tragically. Through their adaptive presence and daily creative practices, this human-animal collective resists displacement and reclaims lands occupied by war’s lethal and disabling technologies. Chapter 5 ethnographically contrasts two living landscapes to think about the mundane realities of violence and its connection with the resistance of nature’s sacred forces. These landscapes—housing supernatural beings, objects, and military arsenals—remind us of the “gathering” power of place, its capacity to narrate and commemorate stories, and the affective charge they emanate. In the cycles of destruction that have constituted South Lebanon, war remnants, kindred spirits, and nature merge into a resonant topography “that cuts across the riven political landscape,” opening up—if only momentarily—“the possibilities for another politics in the present” (172). In the sixth and final chapter, Khayyat mobilizes the notion of gray zones to illuminate the edges and opacities of war-torn areas. These areas complicate the binary logics not only of peace/ war but also of oppressor/oppressed, friend/enemy, and collaboration/resistance, forcing us to face “the daily realities and micro-practices of survival” (194) characterized by moral and epistemic murkiness. A concept Khayyat borrows from Primo Levi, gray zones share with “bitterness” profound and evocative sensory nuances. Surviving is neither crystal clear nor innocent in landscapes constituted by different (armed) political regimes, and this realization calls for political action: “If we want people to make better choices, we must fight for better worlds” (200). 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. Under conditions of precariousness, uncertainty, and exploitation, humans are not alone in their struggle to survive. Their chances of sustaining life depend on morethan-human networks of mutual support, on developing the art of becoming with and living alongside lands, plants, animals, and sacred forces. The book is also 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.