My paper will discuss how diverse groups of activists in Lebanon articulated being positive as essential to asserting “life” and new future horizons (Koselleck 2002) against the country’s systemic crises, which were described as “killing” its citizens. Since 2011, the war in neighboring Syria has paralyzed Lebanon’s already fragile politics and economy, leaving many Lebanese feeling stuck in recurrent crises. To address these crises, diverse groups mobilized within civil society (al-mujtama?al-madani) and increasingly called themselves activist (nashit?). In civil society spaces, ranging from institutionalized forms such as NGOs to grassroots forms such as collectives, Lebanese who had previously been apolitical or cynical of politics began to directly confront the political system.
My ethnographic research (2012-2015) has demonstrated that everyday activist practices sought to transform both individual moralities and affects and political and social structures to solve Lebanon’s crises, and imagine a better Lebanon. Through fostering what I call “ethico-political dispositions”—embodied capacities that were believed to generate empowerment and agency—activists sought to manage “negative” (selbi¯) affects such as stuckedness and fear of war. Activists’ moral imaginations counteracted narrowing horizons of expectation (Guyer 2007) by invoking alternative future imaginations (Crapanzano 2003; Mittermaier 2010; Hage 2015) and rebuilding senses of agency (Appadurai 2013; Yurchak 2013).
How do diverse Lebanese activists imagine positiveness as a moral disposition that would bring individual and communal well-being and happiness? Focusing on activists’ everyday work on well-being and endurance, I will examine moral imaginations amidst lived experiences of crisis. My work shows entanglements between ethics, politics, affect, and temporality by examining activists’ affect-management as a process of ethical cultivation with political motivations and consequences. In addition to expanding interdisciplinary debates on crisis, futurity, and ethics, I seek to contribute to anthropological conversations about attending local communities’ complex lifeworlds and alternative imaginations.
