Peter HabibCohort 2018
Education
- M. Litt., Middle East, Caucasus and Central Asian Security Studies, University of St. Andrews, 2017
- BA, Middle Eastern and South Asian Studies, Emory University, 2015
Research
- Political Anthropology
- Anthropology of Humanitarianism
- Anthropology of the Middle East
- Ecological Anthropology
Based in Lebanon’s Bekaa Valley, primarily in the mountainside city of Zahle, my dissertation takes the shape of an ethnography exploring the social life of water as it appears in natural sources, humanitarian provision, and domestic use. I am concerned with the stories that accumulate in Zahle’s recurrent and divergent water flows, which originate from mountainous sources, are guided through contentious infrastructures, enter the homes of Lebanese and displaced Syrians, and arrive at wastewater networks. By examining this normative water path—and the seepage along the way—I interrogate the role of ecology, infrastructure, humanitarianism, migration, and nationalism in defining contemporary Lebanon. I am interested in water not only as a factor shaping governmental policy, imaginaries of the nation, and projections of the future; but how water exceeds control and fosters life across difference in anticipated and unexpected ways.
