All Honourable Men: The Social Origins Of War In Lebanon (i.b.tauris In Association With The Centre Of Lebanese Studies)

Ethnic conflict is a pervasive feature of the modern world, yet while there are many studies of the social construction of difference, there are few that deal with the emotional content of ethnic violence. Drawing on sociological and psychoanalytic theory and using comparative examples from other parts of the world, Michael Johnson examines the history of confessional or ethnic identity in Lebanon and the civil wars of the 1970s and 1980s. He demonstrates that far from being residues of a traditional society, the values of ethnic honor and shame are peculiarly modern phenomena. He explains the horrors of ethnic warfare in terms of social threats to patriarchal authority in sexually repressive families. These threats fuel a style of violence in which shame acquires its own dynamics. Contents Lebanese Confessional Communities Chronologies of Lebanese History Regimes Post-independence presidencies Confessional harmony and conflict 1. An Auto-Critique 1. Lebanon and confessionalism 2. Class and client 3. Honour and vengeance 4. Ethnicity and massacres 5. Modernization and confessionalism 6. Ethnicity and history 2. Honour and Confession 1. Nobility and respect 2. Honour and shame 3. Nobility and honour 4. Agrarian society and the city 5. Respect and honour 6. Honour and the state 7. Confessionalism and war 8. Honour and reproduction 3. Honour and History 1. Lebanon and the Mediterranean 2. Honour and the European Renaissance 3. Lebanon and the nineteenth century 4. Honour and reproduction 5. Mafia and feuding 6. Honour and confession 4. Patriarchy and Surveillance 1. Arab and Lebanese nationalism 2. Ethnicity and kinship 3. Ethnic violence and psychoanalysis 4. Ethnic conflict and sociology 5. Neopatriarchy and surveillance 6. Conclusion: external determinants of ethnic nationalism 5. Civil Society and Confessionalism in Postwar Lebanon 1. Liberal nationalism and patriarchal honour 2. Reconstruction and economic growth 3. Elections and confessionalism 4. Neopatriarchy and the future References Index "All Honourable Men examines the cultural values of honour and patriarchy in Lebanon, with a particular concern to show how they influenced confessional identity and conflict in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries."--BOOK JACKET First, a Lebanese joke told to me in 1972.