"This is our land" : The good life in a Lebanese village

Abstract

Ebel Es Saqi is a village in Southern Lebanon, close to the border with Israel. Since 1978 UN peacekeeping troops have been placed here because of the tension in the area deriving from the Lebanese Civil War. This is a thesis about people’s everyday lives in this village: how they live there, how they perceive it, and how they apply meaning to it. People in Ebel Es Saqi are very loving of their homeland despite of it being an area with a fragile history. Through a very self-reflexive and personal viewpoint I have written this thesis based on my background as a half-Norwegian-half-Lebanese student doing research in this area. What I discovered was that people in this village, despite of the history books and media coverage implying differently, are living the good life. With topics such as reciprocity, coffee drinking, Heimat and neighborhoods, the reader will hopefully get an understanding of how life in this village is constructed and end up seeing Lebanon framed in a slightly different way than how the global public (news or other informational sources) usually frames the area.

Keywords: Lebanon, Visual Anthropology, Land, Village, The Good Life, Heimat, Neighborhoods, Place, Coffee, Reciprocity, UNIFIL, Self-reflexivity, Anthropology,