The Making of Sectarian Identities: Space, Place and Marriage

The Center for Contemporary Arab Studies and the American Druze Foundation are pleased to partner for our annual lecture. For 2024, we are proud to present, “The Making of Sectarian Identities: Space, Place and Marriage.” The panel will feature the research of Dr. Lara Deeb (Scripps College), Dr. Maria Kastrinou (Brunel University London), and Dr. Dima Abi Saab (Georgetown University).
Drawing on their scholarship, the panelists will illustrate how Druze sectarian and political identities are generated through everyday practices of navigating occupation, violence, and marriage.
CCAS and ADF partner to offer the ADF Fellowship in Druze and Arab Studies at CCAS. More information can be found here.
The panel will be followed by an art exhibition and dinner (paid tickets)
Panelists:
Dr. Lara Deeb is the Laura Vausbinder Hockett Endowed Professor and Chair of the Department of Anthropology and the Program in MENA Studies at Scripps College. In addition to numerous articles and chapters, Deeb is the author of An Enchanted Modern: Gender and Public Piety in Shi‘i Lebanon (Princeton University Press, 2006), co-author of Leisurely Islam: Negotiating Geography and Morality in Shi’ite South Beirut (Princeton University Press, 2013), co-author of Anthropology’s Politics: Disciplining the Middle East (Stanford University Press, 2015), co-editor of the volume Practicing Sectarianism Archival and Ethnographic Interventions on Lebanon (Stanford University Press, 2023). Her latest book, Love Across Difference: Mixed Marriage in Lebanon is forthcoming from Stanford University Press this fall.
Dr. Maria Kastrinou is a social anthropologist with fieldwork experience in the South-Eastern Mediterranean, specifically in Syria, Greece, Lebanon and in the Israeli-Occupied Golan Heights. Her research critically interrogates the politics of religion, sect, state and statelessness, the political and cultural lives of refugees, and the political economy of conflict and resistance. Her monograph Power, Sect and State in Syria (I.B. Tauris 2016) is the first ethnography of the Druze minority in Syria, and one of only a handful of anthropological works about Syria. She has been engaged with projects on sectarianism, statelessness and refugees in the Middle East and she is currently working on the Druze Heritage Foundation funded research project ‘Lives across divides: Ethnographic stories from the Golan Heights.’ Experimenting between anthropology and theatre, together with Hannah Knoerk and Johannes Birringer, they formed the Hotspot Collective and created, produced and performed ‘The Price of Water’ - a political play about refugees, capitalism and the Hotspot critically engaging with Kastrinou’s ethnographic work in Greece and the Middle East.
Dr. Dima Abi Saab received her Ph.D. from New York University in Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies with a focus in urban politics. She is currently working on her book manuscript based on research conducted for her dissertation, Geographies of War: Scalar Containment, Municipal Politics, and the Creation of Post-War Lebanon. Dima’s project engages with the politics of scale as a framework from which to examine the legislative, territorial, and infrastructural maintenance involved in the production of sectarian governmentalities. Dima explores the constitution of modern citizenship from a place of infrastructural precarity and delineates how sect-based militias use this precarity as the blueprint for Lebanon’s post-war governmentality. She thinks through the impact of the afterlives and specters of violence and the ontological experiences involved in navigating geographies of war by anchoring her study in several Druze villages of Mount Lebanon. Dima’s research and scholarship have been shaped by her engagement with municipalist networks from Minim Municipalism to the Urban Democracy Lab at NYU.