Abstract
The “permanently temporary” Palestinian refugee community, present in Lebanon since 1948 with no solution in sight, has the highest rate of abject poverty within all five areas of operation of United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestinians in the Near East (UNRWA), and it still occupies the same limited geographic space it did 72 years ago. This harsh reality stems from the refugees' statelessness but is also worsened by the local conditions imposed by the Lebanese legislation and (non)settlement policy aimed at preventing refugees from becoming permanent. Within this situation, we look at practices of agency enacted by camp dwellers to provide lacking life necessities and improve living conditions in the camps. This paper will identify and analyze coping mechanisms and homemaking practices undertaken by Palestinian refugees in Lebanon, operating within the framework set by Brun and Fábos (2015), which conceptualized home and homemaking for people in protracted displacement through identifying a refugee's “home, Home and HOME.” Building on Donna Haraway's concept of situated knowledge, this paper uses data collected from participant observations, interviews, ethnographic and autoethnographic recordings analyzed through the lens of my own positioned rationality as a Palestinian refugee from Lebanon. Further, the paper will explore how Palestinian refugees establish camp spaces as a “home-Home-HOME,” despite their uncertain futures, through vertical expansion of buildings, stories and family bonding, in addition to trading and micro-markets. The paper will also deduce how refugees' informal coping mechanisms offer a way of strengthening community bonds, making home in those, otherwise, uncomfortable “waiting zones,” and finally, envisioning new ideas for restructuring the camp beyond the rule of formal institutions.
Highlights
Specialty section: This article was submitted to Migration and Society, a section of the journal Frontiers in Sociology
This paper will identify and analyze coping mechanisms and homemaking practices undertaken by Palestinian refugees in Lebanon, operating within the framework set by Brun and Fábos (2015), which conceptualized home and homemaking for people in protracted displacement through identifying a refugee’s “home, Home and HOME.”
I was born in a refugee camp in Lebanon to two Palestinian refugee parents and was automatically granted Palestinian refugee status, a big blue refugee document bearing the name of the city we come from in Palestine (Yafa in Arabic, Jaffa In English), but I was never given the citizenship of any nation
Summary
WHY, WE REFUGEES, WRITE “The moment we arrived to Saida [City in the South of Lebanon] in the afternoon, we became refugees”- (Kanafani, 2015, p. 75). Brun and Fábos’ framework of homemaking can be verified through the attempt to reconstruct a past familiarity, envision a better future and empirically improve one’s living conditions in given place through a variety of practices This framework allows us to analyze the process of homemaking in communities of protracted refugees by exploring the practices, views and even feelings of individuals in order to formulate an idea about their exceptional homemaking efforts in the waiting zones. This paper will attempt to understand briefly the social reality of Palestinian refugees in Lebanon, but only to demonstrate how Palestinian refugees respond to this social reality through different coping mechanisms and explain the livelihood efforts of camp dwellers who have been in a permanent state of waiting for the past 72 years
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