Living in Refuge is a unique dense socio-historical portrait of two Palestinian refugee
camps in Lebanon for which there is almost no recorded literature and that have changed
greatly, especially after 2011 and the influx of Syrian refugees. It is primarily based on the
authors ethnographic fieldwork in Lebanon carried out in situ for 24 months between 2006
and 2010, and secondarily on fieldwork carried out among Palestinian refugees from 2010 to
2019 in Lebanon, Brazil, Denmark and Austria.
The book compares two contrasting patterns of social belonging in one Muslim
Palestinian camp, Al-Jalil, and what, before 2011, was the last Christian Palestinian refugee
camp in the world, Dbayeh. Through its unique approach to social belonging processes based
on the ritualized rhythm of daily life, it presents and analyses complex discourses, practices,
experiences and emotions of life in exile, avoiding simplistic explanations solely based on
dogmatic understandings of religion and nationhood.
In Al-Jalil, social life was symbolically militarized, largely revolved around Palestinian
political parties and social movements, and was characterized by overt ritualization of
quotidian life. Dbayeh was symbolically demilitarized, and ritualization was much less
prevalent. Processes of belonging in Dbayeh also mingled both Palestinian and Lebanese
elements. The common sense tends to attribute the camps differences mostly to religion.
However, this study shows how moral self-cultivation, piety and religiosity, nationhood,
refugeeness and politics are all embedded in each other and frame much of the camps daily
life.