A Stranger in my Home: Conversations on Knowledge and Being in Times of Social Calamity in a Shia Muslim Community

Abstract

This thesis is an anthropological study of acts of knowing and learning as socially mediated and epistemological practices from the perspective of a professor who migrated from Iraq, first to North America, and then to the South of Lebanon. To examine the “exceptional” life of this professor, the study engages the life history method, analyzing the religiosity of his diverse experiences as a teacher and learner. Whereas the thesis focuses mainly on his experiences as a professor at a university in the South of Lebanon, analytical attention extends to his earlier memories of learning and teaching in Iraq and North America. The study also relies on schematic analysis of extended conversations with this professor as well as other interlocutors, combining fieldwork observations and personal reflections in the “exceptional” context of war. This is because this ethnographic study was carried out around the time of the Israeli war on Lebanon in 2024.

To this end, the thesis addresses the question of what it means to know and how we relate to knowledge as a modality of being in the context of war and social calamity. To do so, the thesis engages with a conceptual discussion of “social wounds” and “situated learning” in juxtaposition with theosophic traditions of knowing. The study ultimately attempts to shed light upon overlaps or intersections between situated learning theories in anthropology and theosophy, whereby the latter speaks to theories of an understanding of realities that extend far beyond human intellectualism.