Reorientation toward future : lives among the Palestinian refugees from Syria (PRS) in Lebanon -

Abstract

The media coverage of the ongoing predicament of the Palestinian refugees from Syria (PRS), the reports of NGOs intervening amongst them, and the calls for international attention of UN agencies officially responsible for them tend to focus squarely on their basic and urgent needs. Portrayals of the “twice-displaced” community contribute to perpetuate a monochrome picture of weakness and dependency. The so-called “refugee issue” entails much more than the lack of food or housing. This thesis hopes to complicate the representation of this group of refugees as primarily victims in need of humanitarian relief. Refugees have experienced existential upheavals. The processes of cooping with loss and adapting to new social environments entail individual, familial, and communal decisions, plans and efforts, in contrast to the image of passive recipients of aids and foreign interventions. Through an ethnography that focused on a small number of individuals and families, this project explores the temporal experiences through which the refugees struggle to maintain, or produce, under extraordinarily adverse circumstances, the orientation toward the future that constitutes a fundamental dimension of a life worth living.