Ethnography as thrownness and the face of the sufferer

Thrownness as process and method

It is through the thrownness I encountered as a researcher in the outskirts of Burj al Barajneh (a refugee camp in southern Beirut) that a wider relational structure between violence, affect and ‘media’ was un-concealed. I borrow the concept thrownness from Heidegger (1962: 276) to depict a double-ontological condition. As ethnographers we are often thrown into situations, settings and experiences with which we are rarely familiar. Our figuring out or finding out what things are, how they work, is only possible after such an act of thrownness into the world has occurred. That is, when phenomenological work starts. Ethnographers, however, are not only thrown into the world; they are, I argue, also thrown into the face of the other. Our relation to the face of the other (in the case of this research, my interlocutors’) is part of an ethical event that decentres the phenomenological task as it reorients it towards an ontology that is primarily founded on the ‘impossible’ responsibility towards the other. It is through the lens of this double-thrownness that I will weave the story of my encounter with the Maimoun family. The argument of this work is weaved using thrownness as a double-manoeuvre: manoeuvre 1 is inspired by a Heideggerian phenomenological take, which prompts the ethnographer to figure things out for themselves (outside pre-packaged hermeneutics/institutionalised semantics), manoeuvre 2 subscribes to a reading of ontology that is ‘accomplished not in the triumph of man over his condition, but in the very tension in which that condition is assumed’ (Levinas, 1998: 2). This ontological take is inspired by a Levinasian ethical human inversion:

of the in-itself and the for-itself (of ‘every man for himself’) into an ethical self, into a priority of the for-the-other – this replacement of the for-itself of ontological persistence by an I henceforth unique certainly, but unique because of its chosenness for a responsibility for the other man . . . this radical turnabout would take place in what I call an encounter with the face of the other . . . he calls to me and orders me from the depth of his defenceless nakedness, his misery, his mortality. It is in the personal relationship, from me to the other, that the ethical ‘event’, . . . lead beyond or rise above being. (Levinas, 1998: 202)

Spatial thrownness

Bourj-el-Barajneh Refugee Camp, situated in Dahia, a village outside of Beirut, was established in 1948 to accommodate the influx of Palestinian refugees from what is now Northern Israel. The camp is in a southern suburb of Beirut and it is the most overpopulated camp in the city. More than 20,000 Palestinian refugees live in the camp, which was initially built to accommodate 10,000 refugees and with an influx over several years of different waves of refugees from Iraq, and, more recently, Syria into this 1 km² site, living conditions in the camp have been made extremely difficult. The sewage system is regularly flooded during winter. The camp is run by the United Nations Relief and Works Agency. The security at the entrance to the camp was extremely strict: I, accompanied by my co-researcher, Nisrine Mansour, who was born and bred in Dahia, had to go through three check points. Yet, 3 months after the fieldwork, on 12 November 2015, Bourj-al Barajneh was the scene of two suicide bombings, which killed 37 and injured 180. My encounter with Dahia, in all its glory, brought to the fore elements of Arab difference, even strangeness, that could only be grasped through the phenomenological encounter. The gaze of the other – tattooed young men standing in the corner of narrow streets in the refugee camp, the army by the check point – went right through me, as Nisrine (my co-researcher) drove into the camp, questioning my being there, interrogating me, in minute temporal sequences. Let us be clear about positionality here: I was a suspicious outsider. It is the kind of encounter that no camera lens can mediate. Distance orientates the affective nature of encounter. The phenomenological encounter of being-there, unlike televisual mediations, is a reciprocal process: I was both observing and being observed. It is a reciprocal dynamic of unsettling. However, as the gaze moves away from the face of the other into buildings, architecture, posters, graffiti, mourning mothers in black, another form of unsettling ensues (see Sabry and Mansour, 2019). I conjured up memories from my childhood of the conspicuous displays of the then King of Morocco (Hassan II) at the school, the shops, the university, the hospital, railways, streets, highways, government offices, the barber’s, the baker’s and in hotels. I am not sure how they missed out hammams! In Dahia, such imagery of power, and its monopoly over appearances, was more diverse; what you get is images of religious leaders, resistance heroes, martyrs, all men, of course, but different men, nonetheless (see Sabry and Mansour, 2019). As a stranger, and an estranged British North African, what I found eerie was not just the religious and warring nature of the posters or the aura they exuded, but their size. Gigantic posters of Hizbullah religious leaders and war martyrs are part of a violent strategy, it is an imposition on the eye, not to just see or glimpse at, but a designed process whereby a vision is fulfilled in its entirety with nothing other than images of the religious leader and the dead young men of the resistance. The posters denote sacrifice as an idea, but also as a proposal for moral and political commitment. The size of the larger than life martyr posters serves to immortalise, to keep the dead alive in the present, in talk, in popular culture and in folk memory. These are the same streets that my interlocutors, Hicham, Sanaa and Omar, walk in and through day in and day out. They are an extension of a traditional media-ideo-scape, part of an ongoing struggle against Israel and a calling to resistance and martyrdom. They are instruments of political mobilisation. Observing the images of the martyrs; a live museum of the dead, I could not help but take a glimpse into the distant future of an even more sinister, dystopic reality: Hizbullah will have digitalised all the martyr posters and having by now mastered the technology of the hologram. The resistance youth are taught guerrilla warfare and hologram technology manipulation. Holograms of speaking martyrs will remind passers-by, children and perhaps indifferent youths, of their political responsibility, of commitment – they can re-enact how they were martyred. Children may have access to interactive digitised touchscreens on street corners with holograms of martyrs teaching them guerrilla warfare. On the way to an ethnographic session in the camp, I looked up from the car window and my eyes caught an 8- or even 9-m high and 4-m wide poster of a young martyr, dressed in Hizbullah attire. The poster was hanging between the first and second floor. A middle-aged woman, dressed in black, moved almost in slow motion, as she hung the washing on the line – her face intoxicated with pain and sorrow – it is the mother of the Martyr: Um al-Shaheed!

Thrownness into the face of the sufferer

We are in the family’s sitting room in a second-floor apartment on the outskirts of the Camp. The room is 3 m wide and in the middle of it there was a television that did not work. The room had one window, which was wide open every time we visited, but because of the high temperature and the curtain that remained down to prevent the neighbours looking in, there was not much air. The father, Zaki, a 35-year-old from Rif Dimashq, who had suffered a major burn injury at work (a gas bannister exploded, as he was trying to fix it), sat facing us throughout the fieldwork visits. He had to leave hospital after only 3 days, as his family could not afford the treatment. Zaki chain-smoked as he listened to us and every time he took a cigarette out, he courteously offered us one. He would ritually change the bandage in front of us, each time we visited, as if to make a point, revealing severe scalding and a mixture of blood and pus:

The noisy electric fan, which was interrupted by power cuts, a daily occurrence in Beirut, did not bring much relief. It circulated the stench of burned flesh, pus and cheap cigarettes, as we talked and sipped our very hot tea. Fatma, the mother, a 30-year-old Syrian from Aleppo, talked incessantly about the war, her daily struggle to pay rent and the abuse her children endured from the neighbours because they are Syrian, a burden on the camp, a burden on the war effort. On one occasion, Hicham, the eldest boy at 12, was late for our meeting. When he showed up 30 minutes late, his face was bruised. He had been beaten up at the entrance to the camp. It was shocking and unsettling to see the bruises on Hicham’s face, and I wondered whether it made any sense at all to start asking the children about their media uses, or to even carry on with the ethnographic session that day (see Sabry and Mansour, 2019):

The research team designed the diaries in Arabic, with key cultural or social and political specificities in mind. But we were in no way prepared to encounter such suffering so up close. We both stared at the television. It stood lifeless in the room. The box took centre stage in the Maimoun family’s sitting room, but it was a mere ornament – it was a beautifully adorned cadaver. However, it was also a live memorial of a time lost, when the Maimoun family could afford and enjoyed watching television in Halab. So, television as a medium, can, in this context, be read as both a dead and a live object, it lies at the intersection between multiple temporalities, a mnemonic and more stable past, a tragic present fraught with death and loss, and there is the futural possibility for revival: the revival of television as a screen and a technological object, and with it the revival of a hopeful situation, of a resolution and a better future. Unlike other families, where sociality is often convened around the television set, in the Maimoun family household, the mother’s mobile phone was the technology of communication, and entertainment:

Thrownness, suffering and ethnography as a form of stammering

Being thrown into the voice, the gesture and the gaze of the sufferer, as an event, is a pre-philosophical moment that resists theory and analysis, posing different and challenging questions for the ethnographer. The statement below from the children’s mother came out of nowhere (when the children were showing us media content they liked on her mobile phone) and can only be explained as a ‘serendipitous’ moment and part of a pattern, described by Robert Merton, as involving ‘the unanticipated, anomalous and strategic datum which exerts pressure upon the investigator for a new direction of inquiry . . . ’ (Merton in Rioval and Salazar, 2013: 178):

The fixation thus becomes with the face of the sufferer, their speech, their daily grievances. The subjectivity of the researcher, who has here become an audience of an unanticipated serendipitous moment, reveals itself as a distorted other, a spectator of anguish and suffering, a stutterer; projecting messiness, clumsiness – a state of deferral, even desperation. How do I respond to the mother? What do I tell her, as Zaki stares at me and nods, as if to affirm his wife’s anguish? This encounter with the Maimoun family invited the researcher, much later, to reconsider the ‘whatness’ of media, moving from its conventional definition – that of broadcasting or digitality or screen or computer to a more ontological interpretation that considers bodily organs as extended forms of technicity and widens, therefore, the scope and definition of the media-scape (see Andre Leroi-Gourhan’s (1964) le geste et la parole, as well as John Durham Peters’ (1999) invitation at the start of this article and Gilbert Simondon’s (2018) engagement with the ‘trans-individual’). The Maimoun family needed to make their concerns part of a collective knowledge, and to do that they used speech, the body, the face, as equipment. ‘Equipment’, as Heidegger (1962) put it in Being and Time, ‘is essentially something “in-order-to” . . . A totality of equipment is constituted by various ways of the “in-order-to”, such as serviceability, conduciveness, usability and manipulability’ (p. 970). My interlocutors’ uses of their bodies as affective technicities of narration – including voice and face, amount to forms of media. To limit the worldliness of the media, therefore, to screen media or to limit, in our case Hicham, Sanaa and Omar’s media uses to the mobile phone or other screen media alone, reinforces the power of ‘the absence of presence’: the structural mediation of power and ideology through the poster of the martyr – the religious leader – the poem on the wall – mural art – mourning men and women – the funeral – or what amounts to the aesthetics of structural violence. The findings from participant observation and family ethnography with the refugee children and their parents intimate a more complex picture. While the children clearly derived immense pleasure from playing video games, listening to music videos and watching cartoons on YouTube (using their mother’s phone), the texts they enjoyed the most showed a high level of violence.

Two key functions of the mother’s mobile phone were for her to ask about family members in the war zone or to get information (from different non-governmental organizations (NGOs)) about housing and other matters such as food allowances and education for her children. But in the absence of a working television set in the household, the Maimoun family also used the mother’s mobile phone to access different forms of online content. Thus, the phone and its uses move intermittently from an equipment used for survival to becoming an entertainment equipment.

Sanaa, an 11-year-old girl who aspires to be a doctor, negotiates her phone time after the household chores are done to play Candy Crush. After finishing work, showering and eating, Hicham, the 12-year-old mechanic and the main bread winner, gets his phone time to play war video games and to listen to some Lebanese music video clips on YouTube. Omar, a young Hizbullah cadet, gets to watch his favourite cartoon, The Child and the Coloniser, produced by Taha TV, which is owned by Hizbullah.

In the narrow streets of the camp, gigantic images of Hizbullah martyrs converge with electrical wiring hanging from lamp posts electrifying (literally, through electricity) a dystopian live spectacle of death and martyrdom that ‘monopolizes the realm of appearances’ (Debord, 1994: 15), where the dead are more alive than the living and where mourning is suspended in a perpetual state of deferral – the spectacle, here, does not conform to Debord’s definition of the term. It is part of an intentionally synchronised economy which normalises death and martyrdom as a structure of feeling (as opposed to ‘sleep’ and ‘dreaming’) and, more importantly, as an instrument of political mobilisation against the imperialist West and Israel’s occupation of Palestine. The monopolisation of appearance, in this context, and unlike Debord’s definition of the spectacle, does not declare: ‘everything that appears is good’, it is not passive acceptance that is demanded of the spectator, but a commitment to action and armed struggle. The Hizbullah spectacle is not, therefore, as in Debord’s case, the guardian of a neo-liberal social dream; it is quite the opposite; it is a call to arms (Debord, 1994).

Hizbullah has thus intentionally produced a Brechtian spectacle – in bringing the dead back so that their gazes follow the passers-by, as they walk the narrow streets of the camps, and Hizbullah are not just seeking catharsis, but political action, affiliation, solidarity and commitment. Here, the spectators are presented with both a space for catharsis and a solution: resistance. However, the Hizbullah spectacle is not concerned with exposing the contradictions inherent to social and political reality (Bradley, 2006: 4). It is, instead, interested in preserving power, as ‘practical changes in conditions of existence proceed’ (Debord, 1994: 20). The structures of violence I observed in the camp (physical, visual) are, of course, the product of an objective, even an historical reality (to say otherwise would be politically naïve). Here, the spectacle ‘is itself the product of real activity’ (Debord, 1994: 8). However, I argue that this activity is concealed by the very spectacle it creates. The normalisation of death, and with it patriarchal and religious ideology, that give it aesthetics, becomes the mechanism through which society hides truth from itself (Das, 1985). Images of martyrs, funerals, mural texts, the hanging wires in the camp’s narrow streets, as media-scapes, reproduce, the ‘absence of presence’; what the spectacle conceals (through its signs, forms and language) is exactly the workings of the political economy that sustains the spectacle as ideology, and ideology as a spectacle. I argue that the unconcealment of the workings of the spectacle-as-commitment requires us to see it, to use a Heideggerian phrase, as ‘a relational totality of involvements’ (Scannell, 2019: 39). The spectacle, as the ethnographic fieldwork demonstrated, and as I will show, extends from the street, funerals and posters, to other forms of aesthetics, moving image, video games, cartoons and other forms of visual texts.

The child and the coloniser

The Child and the Coloniser, a cartoon series produced by Hizbullah TV, was the most popular programme for the children in the Maimoun household. Using their mother’s phone, Hicham (12 years), Sanaa (11 years) and Omar (7 years), showed us several episodes from the cartoon during our family visits. While viewing the cartoon with the children, we could not help but notice the excitement in their faces as they explained the relationship between the child (children) and the coloniser.

The following is a brief analysis of one episode of the cartoon ² :

[opening scene] a boy and a girl (aged around 9–11) are riding their scooters in an idyllic, green setting (blue sky, trees, flowers). The boy and the girl, dressed in blue jeans and brightly coloured shoes and tops, glide happily, giggling [with happy music in the background]. As the boy and girl cross a road junction, a big bulldozer appears, driven by a soldier, wearing an army helmet with a conspicuous blue Star of David (denoting that he is an Israeli soldier). The soldier notices the two children, acts as if he’s come up with a plan, then charges towards them with the bulldozer.

Before the soldier takes the turn at the junction in pursuit of the two children, the boy stops abruptly and points to the warning road sign denoting a cliff edge ahead. Both the boy and the girl take a detour then turn around on hearing a loud noise approaching. To their horror, they see a bulldozer approaching very fast, driven by the Israeli soldier (the coloniser) and aiming a bazooka at them. As the children try to escape, the soldier fires his bazooka at the children letting out a huge ball of fire. The boy appears to be hit, as his scooter goes under the bulldozer, and the girl too appears as if she were run over by the bulldozer.

The soldier, thinking he’d killed both children, looks extremely satisfied and cheers in celebration, only to be hit by a stone on his helmet by the boy, who had apparently survived. The girl appears unharmed and gives the boy a big smile. The boy then points at the soldier and threatens to get him back. The boy and the girl take off again, this time on the same scooter (as the other one was run over by the bulldozer) and head towards the same road that shows the cliff warning sign.

The soldier focusing entirely on the pursuit, misses the warning sign (it was his initial plan to drive the children off the same cliff), the children make a quick turn to avoid the bulldozer, half of which now hangs over the edge of the cliff, with the soldier screaming for help. The little girl then touches the bulldozer with one finger and tips it over the edge of the very high cliff. As the soldier screams, the boy and the girl look at each other and laugh in celebration.

The children found the cartoon extremely funny, and they fully identified with the child, who manages at the end of this episode to outmanoeuvre the much stronger and more resourceful Israeli soldier.

Identification, in this case, however, was not with the child as a Palestinian under occupation, for the children had little knowledge of the Palestinian–Israeli conflict. The children identify with the character of the child in this Hizbullah-produced cartoon because he spoke to and informed their everyday lives in the context of war and survival. It spoke to their status as refugees who had had to dodge bombs and snipers as they fled the oppressive regime of Bashar Al-Assad. In the following, the children show us and recount a different episode of The Child and the Coloniser:

Omar, the youngest, is a Hizbullah Cadet and has watched all the series of The Child and the Coloniser. Like Hicham and Sanaa, he finds the programme extremely funny. In fact, he said he had found the programme to be as funny as Tom and Jerry. He too identifies with the child, just as he identifies with Jerry, for being the underdogs and for their ability to outwit and beat the aggressor. We discussed other media content with the children, including a Jordanian programme called Toyour al-Jannah and introduced them to Charlie Chaplin which they had not heard of, but which they liked a lot. All the three children enjoyed video games immensely and played several games using their mother’s mobile phone. Hicham borrowed his mother’s phone to show us his favourite video game:

Screen media uses by the children (including video games, cartoons and Skyping relatives in Syria and in the diaspora) are, as the ethnographic material showed, deeply engrained in the everyday life context of war and suffering. The children’s laughter, their enjoyment of the violent cartoon series The Child and the Coloniser, provided a momentary affective flight, but it is nonetheless a flight within, rather than outside of, the spectacle. The cartoon, the murals, ceremonies and video games are part of a relational communicative strategy that involves the core of social and everyday life. What the spectacle hides is the power structures that sustain it. As Matar, Khatib and Al-Shaer observed in their cogent analysis of Hizbullah’s communication strategies:

Hizbullah’s political, economic, military and cultural mobilisation and activism cannot be seen as natural or taken-for-granted responses to accumulated grievances . . . or as a reactionary product of cultural essence . . . Rather, Hizbullah activism and mobilisation have resulted from the agency of its elites and ideologues and their implementation of a political communication strategy designed to widen its support base and increase its influence. (2014: 5)

‘Towards a conclusion: otherness as uniqueness’

In the context of this work, engagement with the face of the sufferer as media (and not just with conventional screen media and its content), is an invitation to critique and trouble epistemologies and methodologies that deny the other her uniqueness, and deny us, as researchers, an ethical commitment with our research subject. This positioning that also strives to affective entanglement is, by default, an invitation to put responsibility at the heart of epistemology. ‘Uniqueness’ is a term that is frequently used by Levinas. In the following, I quote him in full, from his work Entre Nous as he describes the ethical dilemmas that come with encountering the face of the other:

My problem consists in inquiring into how to reconcile what I call the infinite ethical requirement of the face that meets me, dissimulated by its appearance of the other as an individual and as an object. How to enter into this comparison of incomparables without alienating the faces? For beings are not compared as faces, but already as citizens [or in the context of this work as refugees – my emphasis], as individuals, as a multiplicity in a genus and not as ‘uniqueness’. (Levinas, 1998: 205)

Levinas’ take on ‘uniqueness’ exposes a discursive process in which the experience of the other, (their suffering), is carefully sequestrated by modernity’s institutions par excellence: the media, who mediate, reveal the other’s distant suffering, but they conceal something important: the uniqueness of the sufferer. Levinas’ critique can be extended to exclusive ideologies that, instrumentally and intentionally, sequester the uniqueness of the face of the other, and their experiences, into big data, numbers and carefully ordered discourses of citizenship, nationalism and even pluralism. Thrownness into the face of the sufferer as media raised a number of ethical questions, the most insistent being: What can we do? What is our responsibility as researchers? How are we to alleviate our interlocutors’ suffering? What is the relationship between knowledge and commitment? Boltanski (1999) makes the point that for a politics of pity to count as politics, it has to avoid the pitfalls of singular suffering – it must instead be able to convey a plurality of ‘situations of misfortune’. Here, for Boltanski, a hyper-singularisation through an accumulation of the details of suffering is necessary (Boltanski, 1999: 12). In this work, it was exactly because of our objection to ‘hyper-singularising’ the condition of suffering that we were able to encounter the ‘uniqueness’ of the face of the sufferer. Politics of pity cannot be developed, argues Boltanski without the ‘division and separation between the unfortunates and the fortunate’ (Boltanski, 1999: 13). Again, in the context of this work, a total separation or divide was unattainable because of our affective entanglement with the family and its experienced daily grievances. The research team was caught between the following three types of commitment: (a) institutional commitment to our field: media studies or cultural studies, (b) commitment to the face of the sufferer and (c) the human, personal and subjective commitment. The main intention of our ethnographic research was to observe media uses by Syrian refugee children, but our ethnographic encounter (and commitment to the face of the sufferer) altered the course of the research. Our intended observations of media usage had largely been substituted by an unplanned, serendipitous thrownness dominated by the face of sufferer, aesthetics of violence and the affective regime this created.

Thrownness as method: a coda

As a method of un-concealment, thrownness reveals a complex structure where the affective, the empirical and the ethical collide. Thrownness, in this case, is both traversal and processual. It is also a resource of knowledge. Phenomenologically, thrownness is the process through which the researcher encounters, and is affected by, the world: its joy, suffering, objects, equipment, feelings, (mis)understanding, messiness, serendipity and it is also partly this process that makes the production of knowledge possible. It is the process through which we figure things out for ourselves, as I observed at the start of this work. It has, as a method, also allowed fieldwork to unfold as a serendipitous process, where research ‘cannot be really “planned,” but where the conditions facilitating the process can be manipulated’ (see Rivoal and Salazar, 2013: 180). In encountering the other’s face, the other’s culture and suffering, thrownness also comes to the fore as an existential condition. In reflecting on encounters with children and their parents on the outskirts of the Dahia refugee camp of Burj al Brajneh, I resisted the institutionalised, meaning-making structures that privilege ‘objective’ truth and ‘empiricism’ over process. The irony is that the two are inseparable. In fact, thrownness was, both for me and the rest of the research team, a source of critical reflection. Thrownness, as method, has a dual structure: it is at once an ontological condition and a thinking or figuring out process. Thrownness cannot be separated from the ethical events, produced by a collision between the objective world and affective regimes. It is this complex relationship that I have essayed in this work. It is an attempt at dis-entangling, a messy process, that leaves a lot unsaid and unthought.

Hicham’s last words to us were so devastating; they have haunted us ever since, ‘Don’t forget about us when you go back to London’.