A Threatened Lebanese Face: Dirty Work, Social Order, and Stigma

Abstract

In this thesis, I critically explore the long-held belief that Lebanese citizens are too prideful to do any garbage work. Through multi-method ethnographic research conducted between 2021and 2024, a period commonly referred to as the “collapse”, I argue that garbage work was (re)produced as being symbolically incompatible with that of being Lebanese. To try to understand why citizens seemingly abstain from this type of work, or why observers continue to insist on this abstention even when facts suggest otherwise, the analysis reflects upon the high social and symbolic costs incurred by citizens who have performed it. Throughout the thesis, I document the social and symbolic costs of garbage work. In the second chapter, I show how political elites and upper-class citizens (re)produced the incompatibility between being a Lebanese citizen and doing garbage work by creating and reinforcing a social order that attributes dirty work to migrants who are positioned at the very bottom of Lebanon’s hierarchy of labor and work. Under such a social ordering, any citizen who dares perform this kind of work is one who risks his identity as a Lebanese. In the third chapter, I explore how a clean-up initiative led by a group of upper-class citizens who, dissatisfied with the seeming decline of an iconic street, attempted to restore its cleanliness without disrupting Lebanon’s established social ordering of waste work. In the wake of a collapse forcing many migrant workers out of the country, and in response to calls to recruit Lebanese nationals as the new cleaning workforce, the initiative restores the street’s cleanliness by foregrounding images of “dirty migrants,” thus reasserting that dirty work belongs to no one other than migrants. In the fourth chapter, I present the life story of a Lebanese citizen who performed this stigmatizing work, document the social costs that he and his family had to endure, and examine his attempts at managing this stigma and restoring his “Lebaneseness”.