And what if one spoke of the land? Labour, food and the making of space in modern South Le

Martha Mundy and Rami Zurayk

Speaking to the work of the LSE MEC- AUB FAFS project ‘The Palimpsest of Agrarian Change’, Rami Zurayk and Martha Mundy present the results of research done with Saker ElNour and Cynthia Gharios.  In the presentation they first briefly chart a history of property and agrarian relations since the early 19thcentury.  Distinct property forms, landlord and villager, led to contrasting landscapes within an internally comparable ecological zone of South Lebanon.  The history of property, labour and contestation spans Ottoman to French Mandate rule and forms the background to what, from the Lebanese Republic, can be charted cartographically – shifts in forms of food production, and later with war and labour migration, in the political ecology of urban sprawl.  Articulating techniques of social history with those of geographical analysis, the research team asks how long-term differences in forms of property were reflected in the evolving patterns of land-use and food production and attempts to develop a social and political history of landscape grounded in the materiality of land, labour, food and the making of space. 

We look forward to critical discussion of this work, on which we are writing.  For those who cannot make the seminar, an earlier presentation of the research is available on line at www.athimar.org/Article-79.

If you are interested in attending, please contact Astrid Meier (meier@orient-institut.org).

Find us on Google Maps