Practicing Sectarianism: Archival and Ethnographic Interventions on Lebanon

"Practicing Sectarianism explores the imaginative and contradictory ways that people live sectarianism.

Essays use the concept as an animating principle within a variety of sites across Lebanon and its diasporas and over a range of historical periods.

With contributions from historians and anthropologists, this volume reveals the many ways sectarianism is used to exhibit, imagine, or contest power: What forms of affective pull does it have on people and communities?

What epistemological work does it do as a concept? How does it function as a marker of social difference?

Examining social interaction, each essay analyzes how people experience sectarianism, sometimes pushing back, sometimes evading it, sometimes deploying it strategically, to a variety of effects and consequences.

The collection advances an understanding of sectarianism simultaneously constructed and experienced, a slippery and changeable concept with material effects. And