Date of Award
12-20-2024
Date Published
January 2023
Degree Type
Dissertation
Degree Name
Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)
Department
Anthropology
Advisor(s)
Shannon Novak
Keywords
Beirut;Bioarcaheology;Estrangement;Race;Sectarianism;The Body
Abstract
Modern imperial formations involve a violent reconfiguring of difference that is inseparable from the everyday. Modern-world archaeology as a project that studies interlocking vicissitudes of modernity globally has done much to elucidate the varied social orders and politics of knowledge through which such reshuffling occurs. Yet largely missing from this conversation is the bioarchaeology of the Middle East and North Africa region; as such, the very bodies who shaped and were shaped by modern conditions in a major world circuit are also missing. To advance a more global and grounded investigation of modernity, I turn to the port city of Beirut, Lebanon, and the excavated component of a multi-religious and multi-ethnic cemetery (ca. 1730–1930). Proposed use-dates encompass late Ottoman imperialism, the empire’s fall after WWI, and subsequent French colonialism. The wider cemetery itself is associated with many names, including the Outside Cemetery (maqbarat al-khārija), the Cemetery of Strangers (maqbarat al-ghurabā’), and the Cemetery of North Africans (maqbarat al-magherba). My effort attends to a reconfiguration of difference along the lines of racialized religious sectarianism, estrangement, and racialized and sexualized labor. I first trace religious sectarianism’s shifting coordinates in different (mostly digital) archival records: Eurocolonial and Ottoman imperial/military maps (ca. 1841–1930), site records (2016–2017) that reveal multi-religious use of Beirut’s Outside Cemetery, and archaeological publications germane to excavated and unexcavated Levantine cemeteries (ca. 1921–2021). A key finding is that archaeology reifies and racializes sectarianism in its interpretations of Levantine mortuary spaces via a politics of knowledge that I call “archaeology’s empire of sectarianism.” The multi-religious character of Beirut’s Outside Cemetery/Cemetery of Strangers/Cemetery of North Africans is contrapuntal. Neither religion nor sectarianism should be ignored, but axes of difference other than religious sectarianism may be more relevant and ought to be investigated. Exploratory analyses using recovered human remains direct attention from digital records to physical ones in the forms of skeletal bodies and graves. Principal components analysis (PCA) plots are used to explore interactions between isotope systems, markers of habitual activity, sex/gender, and mortuary treatment/grave type. Analyses prompt a rethinking of categories like “the stranger” in the bioarchaeological literature. They also point to gender (i.e., woman) and potential lived geographic context (i.e., the African continent) as important social axes of difference in the study population. Subsequently, osteobiographies are presented of two women whose isotopic values are consistent with histories lived in the African continent, whose craniometric analyses suggest African ancestry, and whose skeletons indicate lives of labor. The osteobiographies attend to articulations of labor, origins, gender, and sexuality in the context of modern Beirut, an Ottoman and French imperial context in which we know little about African actors and the place of domestic labor. Yet the cemetery also hailed worlds that had little reverence for time and space, prompting the unplanned oral histories of present-day Lebanese diasporas. The dissertation thus returns to sectarianism in the archives by centering an oral history of the Lebanese Civil War (1975–1990) that my interlocutor, Marc, a diasporic Lebanese man, repeated to me on multiple occasions when he learned about my work on Beirut’s Outside Cemetery. By focusing on this oral history, I struggle towards sketching a history of the entanglements between sect, “the stranger”/estrangement, and race that reconfigure in embodied moods, across space and time. Such histories appear in relation to, and coexist with, the cemetery and its bodies. They live, that is, in what I call “a diasporic register,” dispersed yet connected in unintuitive ways. The dissertation makes two sets of cross-disciplinary contributions—the first set is about sectarianism and the second set “the body.” Historians reveal sectarianism’s historical contingencies, yet public, government, and academic circles doggedly reify sectarianism as “the” principle of the Middle East—i.e., social worlds are transhistorically segregated and explained by sect. I show that archaeology is among such circles, and its imperially durable knowledge needs revision. Moreover, through oral history, I treat the body as a diasporic archive and work towards narrating unintuitively entangled histories of sectarianism, race, and estrangement. In turn, and contra debates in modern Lebanese history, race is argued to be integral to structures of difference, not marginal to them and not overshadowed by sectarianism. Regarding the second set of contributions, “bodying” histories of the Middle East via bioarchaeology allows engaging questions that bear upon the entangled workings of the materiality and politics of difference, imperialism, mobility, and modernity, from the site of the body and its grave. As the first bioarchaeological study of modern Lebanon, this research takes early steps towards bridging the gap between the history and the bioarchaeology of the modern MENA region on the one hand, and, on the other hand, towards more firmly incorporating the bioarchaeology of the MENA region in modern-world archaeology’s intellectual project.
Access
Open Access
Recommended Citation
Chamoun, Tony John, "Estranged Bodies, Race, and Sectarianism: An Historical Bioarchaeology of Ottoman and French Beirut" (2024). Dissertations - ALL. 2039.
https://surface.syr.edu/etd/2039
