The Grammar of Healing: Sharing Practices and Narratives at Lebanese Sacred Places

Abstract

This thesis examines everyday life in Lebanon through the lens of pain, struggle, and vulnerability, understood not only as bodily exposure but as the fragility of ordinary ac tions, relations, and expressions in conditions of crisis. It explores how healing and pro tection are enacted through practices of sharing, language, and bodily ritual across sev eral ethnographic contexts, as individuals navigate Lebanon’s medical pluralism by moving between biomedical institutions, saintly figures, and sacred spaces, often across confessional boundaries. I examine the circulation of pain and baraka (divine power) at the house of Magdalene in a suburb of Beirut, arguing that healing emerges in the ten sion between a biomedical understanding of pain as something to be removed and a reli gious understanding in which pain is not demonized but generates sacred states. Draw ing on the concept of narrative and symbolic displacement, I analyze the sacrifice of hair and names in the Beqaa Valley, showing how articulating what is not desired func tions as a strategy to secure the fulfilment of one’s true wish. I also describe how mira cle narratives of Saint Charbel are shared and officialized at the sanctuary in Annaya, arguing that the ability to narrate healing in the appropriate grammar of miracles posi tions individuals within a moral and social economy. Through the sharing of emotions, stories, and interpretative frameworks, my interlocutors sustain language-games of heal ing and protection. Within systems of recognition that both rely on and reproduce mech anisms of inclusion and exclusion, devotees become potential mediators and moral models in communities shaped by suffering and hope, while also becoming vulnerable to the very language they use.