Inventing Home: Emigration, Gender, and the Middle Class in Lebanon, 1870-1920

by Akram Fouad Khater

Between 1890 and 1920 over one-third of the peasants of Mount Lebanon left their villages and traveled to the Americas. This book traces the journeys of these villagers from the ranks of the peasantry into a middle class of their own making.

Inventing Home delves into the stories of these travels, shedding much needed light on the impact of emigration and immigration in the development of modernity. It focuses on a critical period in the social history of Lebanon--the "long peace" between the uprising of 1860 and the beginning of the French mandate in 1920. The book explores in depth the phenomena of return emigration, the questioning and changing of gender roles, and the rise of the middle class. Exploring new areas in the history of Lebanon, Inventing Home asks how new notions of gender, family, and class were articulated and how a local "modernity" was invented in the process.

Akram Khater maps the jagged and uncertain paths that the fellahin from Mount Lebanon carved through time and space in their attempt to control their future and their destinies. His study offers a significant contribution to the literature on the Middle East, as well as a new perspective on women and on gender issues in the context of developing modernity in the region.

Genres: History, Lebanon, Nonfiction, Middle East

295 pages, Paperback

First published October 30, 2001

Reviews

[Julie Bihn]

For a Lebanese peasant time was never made up of concrete and invariable blocks that could be measured and controlled in a linear progression from past to future. Such a concept would seem presumptuous in its attempt to forecast the future and alien in its abstraction of time from the physical and emotional experiences that make up the passage of life. Instead, time was seen as cyclical, tied closely to the variation of seasons, agricultural work, and crops. Each block of time was associated with subjective experiences that were not necessarily equal in duration nor uniform in nature. Rather than being linked in a linear continuum, these experiences were seen as independent units that did not require other points of reference in time. In other words, the organization of events in sequential order was not necessarily done according to which came first in time but according to the purpose behind the intended structure.

I'm a fiction author performing casual research, and I wouldn't consider myself an academic. I specifically picked this up because I wanted to learn more about the history of emigration from Lebanon, those immigrants' lives in America, the lives the villagers had at home, etc. I found the first few chapters of this book to be fascinating and invaluable on that front and generally easy to follow, if not written specifically for the layperson. It is an academic work, but there's a lot of great information for someone who's just interested in the history aspect.

The last chapter gets much more into the evolution of gender roles, the development of the middle class nuclear family, and the various statements made in magazines and literature of the era about same. I thought that section had fewer personal stories, so I didn't connect as well with it. Plus, I don't have a solid base of knowledge of American gender roles from the era, so I struggled to differentiate and between what was specifically linked to the Lebanese versus what was generally typical for "Westerners." I think that was the main chapter I think might be less engaging to a non-academic (or maybe it's just me or my background).

In any case, I learned a lot, and I think anyone with even a casual interest in Lebanese emigration from the time period referenced will find it to be a worthwhile read.

Available free (!) at the UC Press E-Books Collection:
https://publishing.cdlib.org/ucpresse...

[Paul · Rating 5 out of 5]

Akram Khater’s Inventing Home focuses on an oft-ignored facet of immigration studies, that of emigrants who return to their native land after a lengthy period abroad. Through an examination of this understudied phenomenon, the author posits that peasants from Mount Lebanon who travelled to America (the focus of his study) were inspired to strive for something more and, upon their return, used their experiences to transform their homeland and negotiate a new form of modernity that blended what they had learned abroad with their customs and traditions. In particular, Khater focuses his analyses through the lenses of class and gender and argues that modernity was transmitted and transformed most strongly through these channels.

Khater’s first chapter grapples with the notion of modernity itself, conceptualizing it as a construction with a fluid and circumstantial meaning. There were many sources of modernization and the phenomenon he describes in his work is not intended to be the sole, or even primary, vessel in Mount Lebanon. Instead, his objective is to restore to the society some semblance of agency in the fostering of modernity, which has often been dismissed in favor of analyses that emphasize the top-down and foreign factors that drove and obstructed its development. The author sets the stage for his narrative in the second chapter by examining the effect of the burgeoning silk industry in Mount Lebanon in the 1860s and 1870s, which rattled traditional structures of gender and class. In the former case, men often refused to work in the factories, leading them to be staffed primarily by women. This gave women a new sense of self-worth and helped them overcome traditional roles, although their duties were physical demanding and they often suffered from social pressures and castigations. In regards to the latter issue, the silk economy disrupted the traditional hierarchy of peasants and upper class shuykh, as the increasing wealth of some peasants heightened their social aspirations and emboldened them to cross social boundaries. In all spheres there were new material expectations and a transition from a mentality of survival to one of consumption, yet these individuals were also vulnerable to a collapse in prices.

When this collapse occurred in the 1880s, many peasants saw their aspirations dashed and were eager to seek a better life. It is this, in Khater’s opinion, that catalyzed the mass emigration that began in 1887, with America being a popular choice due to stories they heard from early emigrants about the wealth that could be found there. Newly-empowered women, meanwhile, refused to be left behind and soon followed their husbands overseas. The author argues that most individuals expected that their stay in the new country would be temporary and quickly involved themselves in cultural networks in the hopes of seeking out wealth. Money, of course, did not come easy, and Khater documents their hardships and, in particular, the societal pressures for immigrants to assimilate into American culture. The end result was that most of the arrivals from Mount Lebanon neither assimilated nor held tight to their traditions, but assumed a synthetic identity that fused these two influences.

Both failed and successful immigrants returned to Mount Lebanon, although it was mostly the latter that constituted the group that would help shape a new, “modern” middle class. Returning with a distinct, hybrid character, these immigrants soon found that the home they had romanticized abroad was now a culture of bureaucracy and reform, with more economic disparity and fewer amenities, all of which contributed to the disconnect between their new selves and their old world that was already inherent to their transformed state. They soon distinguished themselves by building houses that amalgamated traditional and modern influences, while the women attempted to become more prominent in social spheres outside of the household, particularly by means of education, and engage in more “American” forms of romantic love. In his final chapter prior to the epilogue, Khater demonstrates the ways in which women, inspired by their experiences abroad, began to challenge traditional boundaries and notions of femininity and take up roles as social workers in order to extend their sphere of influence. He argues that they found some success in these endeavors, citing evidence that suggests their increased importance in public rituals and as members of the community.

Although Khater’s introduction comes off as somewhat abstruse at first, the remainder of his narrative is well-written, flowing, and accessible and, in the end, helps to make the first chapter much more intelligible. While field specialists might have minor qualms with various aspects of his work, the average scholar should have no serious problems with this text and may even find it an enjoyable read, as his style is casual and lucid. While I would not go quite as far as to claim that it would be of interest or value to a casual reader, overall Inventing Home is a solid work with substantial academic merit and is crucial reading for anyone who engages with the topics covered in the book, although it would be a worthwhile read for any scholar of the late Ottoman era.

[Justin Michael James Dell · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a very perspicuous, thoughtful, well-ordered monograph. Khater does a remarkable job of showing just how "modernity" was articulated in Lebanon at the turn of the twentieth century by focusing on how emigrants from the Mountain - who sojourned in the United States for a time, only to return years later to their homeland - redefined notions of class, family and gender through a hybrid of influences stemming from their Lebanese peasant roots and the influences of WASP America that they had picked up over the course of their stay in the United States. For Khater, “modernity” in the Lebanese case cannot be pinpointed on a linear, cultural-evolutionary ‘map’ (like Modernization Theory) based on certain benchmarks defined by American or Western experience. It has to be appreciated for its own uniqueness. Throughout the text, Khater skillfully educes the multiplicity of social and economic contradictions that were engendered in the metamorphosis of the Lebanese peasant class into the middle class – and they are too many to enumerate!