Leisurely Islam: Youth Negotiations of Morality in Shi'ite South Beirut
A lecture by Lara Deeb, Associate Professor of Anthropology at Scripps College
Thursday, December 02, 2010
12:30 PM - 2:30 PM
352 Haines Hall
Lara Deeb will discuss part of her new book-in-process, co-authored with Mona Harb and tentatively titled "Leisurely Islam: Negotiating Place and Morality in Shi'ite South Beirut." At UCLA, she will focus on pious Shi'i youth's negotiations of morality in relation to leisure. New cafes in the predominantly Shi'i Muslim southern suburb of Beirut as well as a new focus on leisure in the community are promoting the flexibility of moral norms and new tensions between norms understood as "religious" and those understood as "social." In this talk, she will discuss some of the factors contributing to this complex moral landscape as well as some of the ways in which young people understand and navigate it.
Lara Deeb is Associate Professor of Anthropology at Scripps College. She is the author of An Enchanted Modern: Gender and Public Piety in Shi‘i Lebanon (Princeton University Press 2006) as well as of a number of articles on the transformation of Shi‘i religious ritual, Islamist women’s participation in the public sphere, and Hizbullah in Lebanon. She is currently working on a co-authored book project with Mona Harb (AUB), tentatively titled “Leisurely Islam: Negotiating Place and Morality in Shi’ite South Beirut,” funded by Wenner-Gren and ACLS. She is also a member of the editorial committee for Middle East Report and the editorial board for the International Journal of Middle East Studies, and Co-Editor for Book Reviews for American Ethnologist.
(Above photo: Cafe in the southern suburb of Beirut, photo by Douaa Sheet)
Co-sponsored by the Culture, Power, Social Change working group, Department of Anthropology
For more information please contact
Johanna Romero
Tel: (310) 825-1455
romero@international.ucla.edu
www.international.ucla.edu/cnes
Sponsor(s): Anthropology
