Michelle Obeid
Biographic Data
| ID | 99513 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Michelle Obeid |
| GIVEN NAMES | Michelle |
| FAMILY NAME | Obeid |
| SIGNATURE | OBEID M |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Manchester |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-1740-9825 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 9 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 40 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 9 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2008 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2023 |
| H-INDEX | 2 |
Sovereignty at what price? Existential displacement at the Lebanese/Syrian border
In 2014, Islamist jihadist groups overran a Lebanese border town and besieged it for four days, spreading terror across the town and the country as a whole. In response, the Lebanese army launched a violent counterattack on these groups with the aid of Hizbullah in what became known as the Battle of Arsal. Declaring the area a security zone, the army restricted mobility and placed Lebanese citizens and Syrian refugees under military confinement. …
The Ways of Friendship
Friendship is an essential part of human experience, involving ideas of love and morality as well as material and pragmatic concerns. Making and having friends is a central aspect of everyday life in all human societies. Yet friendship is often considered of secondary significance in comparison to domains such as kinship, economics and politics. How important are friends in different cultural contexts? What would a study of society viewed through…
Border Lives
Border Lives offers an in-depth account of how people in Arsal, a northeastern town on the border of Lebanon with Syria, experienced postwar sociality, and how they grappled with living in the margins of the Lebanese state in the period following the 1975-1990 war. In a rich ethnography of ‘changing times,’ Michelle Obeid shows how restrictions in cross-border mobility, transformations in physical and social spaces, burgeoning new industries and …
Novices in bureaucratic regimes
This article tracks the learning experiences of a refugee mother in negotiating her housing rights during her first months of settlement in the United Kingdom. New migrants often experience bureaucracy as "novices" in unfamiliar legal and bureaucratic regimes. By contrast to common depictions of bureaucracies as predominant sites of disenchantment and frustration, I attend ethnographically to the ways in which novice claimants come to trust and v…
Director's note
The launch of a new journal is a significant moment for a learned society. Within the Council for British Research in the Levant (CBRL) we are enormously grateful to Michelle Obeid for taking on th
Anthropology's Politics
Reviewed by: Anthropology’s Politics: Disciplining the Middle East by Lara Deeb and Jessica Winegar Michelle Obeid Lara Deeb and Jessica Winegar, Anthropology’s Politics: Disciplining the Middle East. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2015. 288 pp. Anthropology’s Politics is one of the rare (if not first) attempts to “turn the ethnographic gaze” (4) onto anthropologists and to explore what it means to be an anthropologist of the Middle East an…
The "Trials and Errors" of Politics
This article examines the unprecedented victory of the Islamic Group in the 2004 municipal elections in a town on the northern border of Lebanon that was renowned for a history of leftist political activism. The article investigates local idioms of political representation and, using ethnographic material, demonstrates how the political process was framed in a discourse of "trial and error." It explores the traditional idiom of `ā'ila (lineage) a…
Searching for the 'ideal face of the state' in a Lebanese border town
This article analyses conceptual local understandings of the 'state' in a town that lies in a tense border zone, between Lebanon and Syria. It addresses the experience of historically being controlled by two states with changing relations and the manner in which this predicament translates at the local level in issues relating to everyday life. The article theoretically questions the assumed political 'marginality' of people living at the borders…
Documenting transnational migration
Searching for the 'ideal face of the state' in a Lebanese border town
This article analyses conceptual local understandings of the 'state' in a town that lies in a tense border zone, between Lebanon and Syria. It addresses the experience of historically being controlled by two states with changing relations and the manner in which this predicament translates at the local level in issues relating to everyday life. The article theoretically questions the assumed political 'marginality' of people living at the borders…
The "Trials and Errors" of Politics
This article examines the unprecedented victory of the Islamic Group in the 2004 municipal elections in a town on the northern border of Lebanon that was renowned for a history of leftist political activism. The article investigates local idioms of political representation and, using ethnographic material, demonstrates how the political process was framed in a discourse of "trial and error." It explores the traditional idiom of `ā'ila (lineage) a…
Sovereignty at what price? Existential displacement at the Lebanese/Syrian border
In 2014, Islamist jihadist groups overran a Lebanese border town and besieged it for four days, spreading terror across the town and the country as a whole. In response, the Lebanese army launched a violent counterattack on these groups with the aid of Hizbullah in what became known as the Battle of Arsal. Declaring the area a security zone, the army restricted mobility and placed Lebanese citizens and Syrian refugees under military confinement. …
Documenting transnational migration
Searching for the 'ideal face of the state' in a Lebanese border town
This article analyses conceptual local understandings of the 'state' in a town that lies in a tense border zone, between Lebanon and Syria. It addresses the experience of historically being controlled by two states with changing relations and the manner in which this predicament translates at the local level in issues relating to everyday life. The article theoretically questions the assumed political 'marginality' of people living at the borders…
The "Trials and Errors" of Politics
This article examines the unprecedented victory of the Islamic Group in the 2004 municipal elections in a town on the northern border of Lebanon that was renowned for a history of leftist political activism. The article investigates local idioms of political representation and, using ethnographic material, demonstrates how the political process was framed in a discourse of "trial and error." It explores the traditional idiom of `ā'ila (lineage) a…
Director's note
The launch of a new journal is a significant moment for a learned society. Within the Council for British Research in the Levant (CBRL) we are enormously grateful to Michelle Obeid for taking on th
Anthropology's Politics
Reviewed by: Anthropology’s Politics: Disciplining the Middle East by Lara Deeb and Jessica Winegar Michelle Obeid Lara Deeb and Jessica Winegar, Anthropology’s Politics: Disciplining the Middle East. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2015. 288 pp. Anthropology’s Politics is one of the rare (if not first) attempts to “turn the ethnographic gaze” (4) onto anthropologists and to explore what it means to be an anthropologist of the Middle East an…
Border Lives
Border Lives offers an in-depth account of how people in Arsal, a northeastern town on the border of Lebanon with Syria, experienced postwar sociality, and how they grappled with living in the margins of the Lebanese state in the period following the 1975-1990 war. In a rich ethnography of ‘changing times,’ Michelle Obeid shows how restrictions in cross-border mobility, transformations in physical and social spaces, burgeoning new industries and …
Novices in bureaucratic regimes
This article tracks the learning experiences of a refugee mother in negotiating her housing rights during her first months of settlement in the United Kingdom. New migrants often experience bureaucracy as "novices" in unfamiliar legal and bureaucratic regimes. By contrast to common depictions of bureaucracies as predominant sites of disenchantment and frustration, I attend ethnographically to the ways in which novice claimants come to trust and v…
The Ways of Friendship
Friendship is an essential part of human experience, involving ideas of love and morality as well as material and pragmatic concerns. Making and having friends is a central aspect of everyday life in all human societies. Yet friendship is often considered of secondary significance in comparison to domains such as kinship, economics and politics. How important are friends in different cultural contexts? What would a study of society viewed through…
Sovereignty at what price? Existential displacement at the Lebanese/Syrian border
In 2014, Islamist jihadist groups overran a Lebanese border town and besieged it for four days, spreading terror across the town and the country as a whole. In response, the Lebanese army launched a violent counterattack on these groups with the aid of Hizbullah in what became known as the Battle of Arsal. Declaring the area a security zone, the army restricted mobility and placed Lebanese citizens and Syrian refugees under military confinement. …
Political science (8 works) · Law (7 works) · Sociology (7 works) · Jewish and Middle Eastern Studies (6 works) · Politics (6 works) · Law (4 works) · Middle East Politics and Society (4 works) · Anthropology (3 works) · Ethnography (3 works) · Gender Studies (3 works)