Abstract
This article traces the infrastructures of suffering under the governance of humanitarian psychiatry to explore how material conditions of war and aid have shaped the politics of trauma and sumud[steadfastness] in Lebanon. Based on 29 months of ethnographic fieldwork undertaken from 2011 to 2013, I look at the expert, economic, and techno-political assemblages of trauma and sumudduring the July War in 2006 and the Syrian refugee crisis in 2011. Mental health experts faced unexpected difficulties in diagnosing war trauma during the July War. This led political actors to claim that these difficulties reflected a general absence of suffering from war and a sign of Lebanese resilience, drawing on economies of sumudin postwar reconstruction. The Syrian refugee crisis however radically transformed the politics of suffering in Lebanon. A new political economy of trauma emerged where the Lebanese now competed with other aid communities to have their past suffering recognised as traumatic. Comparing the relations between violence, aid, and suffering in both instances serves to contextualise and historicise suffering beyond a particular discourse or event. It also serves to highlight the contingencies of suffering rather than its internal and psychic elements.
Highlights
During a televised speech delivered on the eve of Ashura in Beirut in 2009, Hezbollah’s leader, Hassan Nasrallah, gave what he called a ‘modern reading’ of the events of Karbala, extracting and foregrounding what he saw as moral tools of resistance for use in the present.1 One of the tools he spoke of was the emotional strength of the Lebanese during the July War2 in 2006
I look at the trauma debates that unfolded in the context of the Syrian refugee crisis in Lebanon at the end of 2011, drawing a comparison with the politics of suffering of the July War in 2006
I took trauma—whether defined and framed by psychiatry and humanitarianism as post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), or as evoked in popular Lebanese society and discourse—as an elusive thing that takes on various material, political, scientific, and healing values for different actors and communities
Summary
During a televised speech delivered on the eve of Ashura in Beirut in 2009, Hezbollah’s leader, Hassan Nasrallah, gave what he called a ‘modern reading’ of the events of Karbala, extracting and foregrounding what he saw as moral tools of resistance for use in the present.1 One of the tools he spoke of was the emotional strength of the Lebanese during the July War2 in 2006. My analysis is based on 29 months of ethnographic fieldwork I conducted in Lebanon between 2011 and 2013 and on personal observations drawn from a brief period of volunteering as a psychologist during the July War. My ethnography took me to various institutional sites of trauma and suffering, including humanitarian organisations that provided mental health services, psychological education for communities and refugees affected by war, and training sessions on how to detect trauma.
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