Abstract
This chapter provides a self-reflexive account of ethnographic research conducted in a Hezbollah-controlled area of Beirut close to the refugee camp, Burj Al-Brajneh. It engages with a Syrian refugee family’s uses of ‘media’ in the household through the unpacking of the political economy of the fear that marks the family’s everydayness. It will especially focus on the ways in which the ethnographers and the interlocutors were caught up in the context of war and the sectarian politics imposed by Hezbollah. Rethinking the whatness of media, this chapter argues that limiting the worldliness of the media to screen-media reinforces the power of the present absence. This chapter also introduces a new methodological concept, inspired by the work of Heidegger, which we call ‘double-thrownness’. We show how our ‘thrownness’ as ethnographers was both traversal and processual. We show how our ethnographic experience in the South of Beirut was implicated in an entanglement where the ontological, ethical, and epistemological collide and interact.
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Sabry, T., Mansour, N. (2019). Ethnography as Double-Thrownness: War and the Face of the Sufferer as Media. In: Children and Screen Media in Changing Arab Contexts. Palgrave Pivot, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-04321-6_3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-04321-6_3
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