Current studies show that despite the demand for return to homelands, and some spectacular examples of such repatriations, many refugee camps take on a semi-permanent quality. Thus, what was supposedly provisional becomes routine. However, views differ regarding ordinary patterns of sociality that emerge in such environments of prolonged uncertainty and instability, particularly with regard to the institution of the family. Some studies emphasize the role of the family in providing refugees with a sense of continuity, and a source of familiar ways of being in the world, in environments that refugees otherwise experience through powerlessness and referential instability. Such studies also describe the refugee family as a critical form of social and cultural capital: not only a source of actual or potential support, but also a generative chart for articulating flexible networks of relationships usable in the short or long term. However, other studies show that refugees often experience the work that goes into securing relations with relatives as very difficult to maintain in the long run. The allocation of meager and overstretched resources, or the dispersal of relatives in pursuit of the same goal of mutual preservation, may exacerbate tensions, create rifts and even lead to abandonment of family life altogether.
This dissertation research by a cultural anthropology graduate student will examine Arab recasting of its family ties and values in Palestinian refugee camps in southern Lebanon. By living among the refugees and using a combination of quantitative and qualitative methods, the researcher will investigate the extent to which norms and dispositions pertaining to l-'aela, the family, are deployed in strategies for coping with the uncertainty of the refugee environment. It will also explore how the long-term exposure to a universe of uncertainty and restricted possibilities affect notions of the moral economy of the family and the naturalness of kinship ties, as well as the conditions in which the experience of prolonged uprooting produces innovation or resistance to innovation in family culture. This research will offer a significant contribution to the education of a graduate student and to three contemporary areas of social science inquiry: refugee studies, the anthropology of the new Arab family, and kinship studies. In addition, the research will contribute to a better understanding of the processes whereby the refugee environment bears upon refugees' long-term ability to form and maintain significant relationships of cooperation and care. This has policy implications for institutions charged with care of persistent refugee communities, both in the Middle East and elsewhere, including the United States.
