A Landscape of War - by Munira Khayyat (Paperback)

About the Book

"What worlds take root in war? In this book, anthropologist Munira Khayyat describes life along the southern border of Lebanon, where resistant ecologies thrive amid a terrain of perennial war. A Landscape of War takes us to frontline villages where armed invasions, indiscriminate bombings, and scattered land mines have become the environment where everyday life is waged. This book dwells with multispecies partnerships such as tobacco farming and goatherding that carry life through seasons of destruction. Neither green-tinged utopia nor total devastation, these survival collectives make life possible in an insistently deadly region. Sourcing a theory of war from where it is lived, this book decolonizes distant theories of war and brings to light creative practices forged in the midst of ongoing devastation. In lyrical prose that resonates with imperiled conditions across the Global South, Khayyat paints a portrait of war as a place where life must go on"--

Book Synopsis

What worlds take root in war? In this book, anthropologist Munira Khayyat describes life along the southern border of Lebanon, where resistant ecologies thrive amid a terrain of perennial war. A Landscape of War takes us to frontline villages where armed invasions, indiscriminate bombings, and scattered land mines have become the environment where everyday life is waged. This book dwells with multispecies partnerships such as tobacco farming and goatherding that carry life through seasons of destruction. Neither green-tinged utopia nor total devastation, these ecologies make life possible in an insistently deadly region. Sourcing an anthropology of war from where it is lived, this book decolonizes distant theories of war and brings to light creative practices forged in the midst of ongoing devastation. In lyrical prose that resonates with imperiled conditions across the Global South, Khayyat paints a portrait of war as a place where life must go on.

From the Back Cover

"This book is an original and engaging ethnography of life in a war zone conceived as an entanglement of worlds formed around tobacco, land mines, nature, and borders. The author's social and affective enmeshment in the field makes for a particularly well-written and gripping text."--Ghassan Hage, author of The Diasporic Condition: Ethnographic Explorations of the Lebanese in the World

"Eloquently written, beautifully evocative of the mundane and the extraordinary forms of violence, endurance, and liveliness in the southern villages of Lebanon, Munira Khayyat's book is an invaluable ethnography of survival in the 'gray zone' of a more-than-human landscape that has seen decades of war and occupation. This book provides a highly original and critically important contribution to anthropological literatures on Lebanon and on studies of war and conflict, memory and space, and life under occupation."--Joanne Randa Nucho, author of Everyday Sectarianism in Urban Lebanon: Infrastructures, Public Services, and Power

Review Quotes

"A Landscape of War is a rich ecological and historical study that also blends into the text the emotional imaginary of Munira Khayyat. It would be of interest to scholars and graduate students of anthropology, history, and war, sectarian, and cultural studies." -- "Arab Studies Quarterly"

"A Landscape of War is a rich and daring ethnography. Ethically and politically committed to honoring the terms through which her interlocutors understand their vital and lethal environments, Khayyat conceptualizes war as a place of life and reclaims resistance as political action, highlighting its ordinary and relational nature. . . . a powerful and necessary meditation on the domesticity of war: war as something that is managed and that can be (to a certain extent) tamed, as well as a space that is inhabited, that bitterly becomes home."-- "Current Anthropology"

"The staying power of this book is how it models a way to think outside accumulated disasters as discrete events, how to use ethnography to render life under a constant state of precarity and violence. Khayyat's approach, ethnographic sensitivity, and relentless focus on "living with" rather than "living despite" scale up and apply broadly to accumulated crisis in both other locales and on a planetary scale."-- "International Journal of Middle East Studies"

About the Author

Munira Khayyat teaches Anthropology at the American University in Cairo.