Coffee Reading and Narrative Healing in Bint Jbeil

Abstract

Coffee reading or tobsir is a common practice among the women of Bint Jbeil in South Lebanon. However, in the official histories of the town, historians and anthropologists were silent on this topic. The main reason of this silence is that coffee reading is looked upon by some conservative groups in the town. It is still allowed though, and most women practice it for fun. Other than being a superstitious, useless, and religiously forbidden act, I show in this ethnography the other lenses where this practice could be studied. In chapter 2, I unravel the reasons why the women of Bint Jbeil need tobsir in their daily lives and look at this practice as a choreographed conversation that brings out the anxieties of these women to the surface at a time where the country is in a multidimensional crisis. In chapter 3, I present the healing side of tobsir, where I give the bassara, the coffee reader, the role of a healer who after building a connection with the women being read that enables the exchange of emotions, she transforms through her cup reading the narratives of these women into ones about the universe away from every day worries. Lastly, in chapter 4, I study the two modes of interpretations the bassarat use while practicing tobsir: the form-based interpretation and the intuition-based interpretation. I go deeper into the formed signs in the coffee cups and their meanings and show how these bassarat activate their intuition in this kind of divination.