Everyday lives of a new generation : Growing up across continua of cultural space

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EUI Working Paper RSC No. 2001/7

Volk: Everyday Lives o f a New Generation: Growing Up Across "Continua o f Cultural Space”

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The Robert Schuman Centre was set up by the High Council of the EUI in 1993 to carry out disciplinary and interdisciplinary research in the areas of European integration and public policy in Europe. Research publications take the form of Working Papers, Policy Papers and books. Most of the Working Papers and Policy Papers are also available on the website of the Robert Schuman Centre for Advanced Studies: http://www.iue.it/RSC/ PublicationsRSC-Welcome.htm. In 1999, the Centre merged with the European Forum to become the Robert Schuman Centre for Advanced Studies. © The Author(s). European University Institute. version produced by the EUI Library in 2020. Available Open Access on Cadmus, European University Institute Research Repository.

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EUROPEAN UNIVERSITY IN STITU TE, FLO R EN C E ROBERT SCHUMAN CENTRE

FOR ADVANCED STUDIES

Everyday Lives of a New Generation:

Growing Up Across

Continua o f Cultural Space

LUCIA VOLK

Harvard University

EUI Working Paper RSC No. 2001/7 BADIA FIESOLANA, SAN DOM EN ICO (FI)

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No part of this paper may be reproduced in any form without permission of the author.

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Mediterranean Programme

The Mediterranean Programme was established at the Robert Schuman Centre for Advanced Studies of the European University Institute in Autumn 1998. The Mediterranean Programme has two long-term strategic objectives. First, to provide education and conduct research which combines in-depth knowledge of the Middle East and North Africa, of Europe, and of the relationship between the Middle East and North Africa and Europe. Second, to promote awareness of the fact that the developments of the Mediterranean area and Europe are inseparable. The Mediterranean Programme will provide post-doctoral and doctoral education and conduct high-level innovative scientific research.

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ABSTRACT

Coming-of-age in the new millennium poses challenges to teenagers as well as social scientists who try to assess the impact of divergent and contradictory cultures on the life of adolescents. Based on conversations and encounters in Beirut in the late 1990’s, this paper examines new ways in which to conceptualize youth, so as to free young people from the theoretical straitjacket which discursively constructed them as a “problem” that adults needed to solve. Growing up as post-war generation in Beirut, young people can show us that rapid change, global influences, and an absence of history must not lead to an “epidemic of identity crises.” While the Lebanese parent generation is unable to formulate coherent symbols which would be meaningful for the new generation, young people are undertaking their own identity construction. Young middle- class urbanites are able to traverse “different continua of cultural space,” engaging the traditional, local and global and drawing identity borders within, across, and around which they lead their daily lives.

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INTRODUCTION

In their book Generation on Hold: Coming o f Age in the Late Twentieth Century, sociologists Côté and Allahar argue that teenagers today suffer from “an epidemic of socially produced identity crises” (1996, xvi-xvii). Because of prolonged education through high school, vocational schools, and college, and concomitant financial dependency on the parents, young people find themselves “on hold,” waiting to grow into adult roles and responsibilities.2 At the same time, they face an ever-changing and fickle youth culture manufactured in global corporate headquarters eager to exploit the time and money young people get to spend on leisure activities. What worsens the identity crisis of teenagers is that adults cannot give much guidance or insurance about their future, as local life ways and traditions are increasingly penetrated by international market forces and changed forever. Parents today are not certain what their children will grow up to be, as their own life experience as teenagers bears little resemblance to what their children are going through (Ibid., 71).

The above argument rests on the premise that formerly stable life worlds are increasingly in flux and at the verge of extinction. While this assumption itself is problematic, as it rests on notions of boundedness, predictability, and authenticity which have, of late, come into question,3 there is a sense among social scientists that the lives of our parents took place in a more defined, familiar environment, which reflected, with some degree of change, the values and fife expectations of their elders. By contrast, young people who grow up today lead lives radically different from those of their parents. With fewer stable reference points or guidance, they are said to suffer from “identity crises.” Identity, for the purpose of this paper, is defined as a sense of belonging, based on experiences of daily life, sentiments about, and the cognitive appropriation (via questioning, debating, commenting, etc) of social realities. It is constituted in the process of social interactions.4 Accordingly, identity crisis describes a state of not knowing where to belong, of feeling “in between” or “on hold.”

But what if we stand this commonsense notion of teenagers in crisis on its head and ask if we are diagnosing the right patient? Perhaps we could understand today's coming-of-age experiences better if we looked for traces of identity crises among the parent generation, while the new generation is quite adept at living across “different continua of cultural space” (Fernandez 1986). My hypothesis is based on anthropological research among a group of teenagers and their families in Beirut in the late 1990’s. Post-civil war Lebanon, and specifically the capital Beirut, are in the midst of immense reconstruction efforts, after a protracted civil war destroyed entire neighborhoods and villages, caused massive population displacement, and resulted in ongoing intervention by foreign powers.5 The city

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scape is marked by cranes, bulldozers, trucks and gaping foundation holes awaiting the construction of new buildings. At the same time that old neighborhoods are being rebuilt, preserving, whenever possible, the old facades or building structures, a second reconstruction trajectory is bringing foreign restaurant and hotel chains to the city. Each new opening signals the “normalization” of Lebanese affairs, as Dunkin Donuts, McDonald's or Hard Rock Café signs contribute to the image of Beirut as a cosmopolitan city. After the years of military invasions, militia fighting, kidnappings, and bombings which sent foreigners and many Lebanese fleeing from the country, the Lebanese crave normalcy, and their construct it, rather physically, with the help of foreign investment and global business.

Once the “Paris of the Middle East,” with a famed casino, restaurants and entertainment, Beirut used to attract tourists from all over the Arab world and beyond. The parent generation dwells nostalgically on images of the golden past that has to be retrieved, while remaining silent about the civil war.6 At the same time, they complain heartily about the challenges that come with reconstruction workers everywhere and a infrastructure that needs complete overhauling. In that way, parents are discursively absenting themselves from the realm that matters most to the young people: the Now. In the midst of this context of reconstruction and nostalgic re-imagining, young people have everyday life experiences that place them outside the parental reconstruction discourse. Having neither a sense of history, nor a clear idea what the future holds amidst economic and continuing political uncertainty, young Lebanese have many reasons to feel “on hold.” Moreover, as avid consumers of global culture, be it clothing, music, fast food, etc., which the reconstruction boom brought to the city, they are also prime candidates for a corrupt identity. Having grown up outside the country because of the civil war, and having attended British or American schools abroad, these young people are the ones sociologists would describe as “in between.” Hence, their live stories should easily fit into the framework of existing “crisis theories.” However, after talking with them, visiting them at their homes, and accompanying them when they went out to have fun, I cannot say that this is the case.

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STUDYING NEW GENERATIONS: An Overview of Crisis Theories

The way youth has been studied says at least as much, if not

who conduct the research as it says about young people. Over the course of the past century, we can distinguish three main paradigms, a biological-behaviorist, a structural-marxist, and a textual-postmodem framework of analysis. The first encapsulates an adult longing for a lost innocence of an idealized, pre-industrial youth experience where young people were perfectly adapted to their environment, listened to elders, and grew up into respectable citizens. The second was created by a generation of marxist scholars searching for a new proletariat which would embody themes of alienation, resistance and struggle against the now firmly entrenched middle-class (Cohen 1999, 179). Opposing deterministic images of youth, the third analytical frame undertakes a critique of the former two. But in the process of deconstructing the theories, it deconstructs youth and youth experience into fragmented bits and pieces of pop culture, fashion, and style, resulting in an intentional or unintentional loss of the subject. As a consequence of the different theoretical lenses, and despite massive scholarly output on the topic of youth, young people have remained a mystery to most adults.

Ever since psychologist Stanley Hall's seminal study Adolescence (1904), teenage years and early adulthood have been treated as a biologically-based “problem” that required grown-up analyses and solutions (Hall 1904). Hall theorized the different stages of development from childhood to adulthood, which roughly “consists in an evolution from a state of primitive wilderness to one of civilized maturity” (Cohen 1999, 184). Blaming biological factors of human development, Hall's analysis delivered young people into the hands of psychologists, educators and counselors who were to help them with their “problems.” The primacy of biology in determining set life stages in young people was later challenged by anthropologist Margaret Mead who argued that only certain cultural expectations led to the experience of a tempestuous youth (Mead 1928). Her and other anthropologists' research started the nature-nurture debate that was to define much of last century's thinking about young people. It was, in both cases, an argument over young people being trapped by biological or cultural factors beyond their control, from which they could extricate themselves via the help of caring, counseling adults.

While American academics argued over biology and culture, the Birmingham Center for Cultural Studies researched and located the reasons for the latent adolescent crises in the conditions produced by late capitalism. British sociologists and anthropologists undertook studies of marginalized youth subcultures in order to

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critique white middle class culture. Questions were framed within Marxist frameworks of class production and reproduction, and youth sub-cultures were analyzed as “skilled semiotic accomplishments by young bricoleurs that challenged the dominant culture” (Clarke et al. 1976; Hetherington 1998). A widely read ethnographic study of working class youth in Britain showed that white middle class values which permeated the British school system led to the high drop out rates of working class teenagers who thereby ended up replenishing the unskilled labor force (Willis 1977). Rebellious and unruly youth were merely a predictable outcome of unfair socio-economic configurations. Youth were the product of historical forces beyond their control, forces which they helped to reproduce by their acceptance of educational systems that made them drop out, or by engaging in individual, unorganized acts of rebellion which could easily be contained by those who had power.7

Both the nature-nurture and class-based inquiries into youth culture initiated lively discussions about the challenges young people faced in rapidly modernizing societies. In both cases, adolescents were framed within a structuralist, and rather determinist worldview, either as victims of biology, culture or the relations of modes of production. The young people that were discursively produced in these studies were clearly unreasonable and undisciplined, even if it was not by their own choosing, but rather, because of some structural dilemma. And this is why scholarly investigations had to produce some measure of explanatory containment, be it through imagined stages of development that every individual had to pass through on his or her way to maturity (however defined), or a sense that if cultural and economic givens could be newly reconfigured, dilemmas and crises might be avoided. While the biological-behaviorist way of looking at youth has become firmly entrenched in the therapy and counseling culture that has emerged in the West, the structuralist framework has fallen out of favor, since young people have disengaged from political causes and manifestations, at least in the Western world.

A third theoretical framework emerged in the 1980's, set to analyze youth in a media saturated world. The impact of new information technologies in our everyday lives, has led post-modern theorists to believe that neither cultural, biological nor capitalist frameworks can explain the adolescent experience of today (Côté and Allahar 1996, 22). Installing cyber-reality in adolescent life worlds, current scholarship studies young people's media-mediated perception of, and experience with “old-fashioned” social constructs, such as family, school, or work. Studying sit corns, pop icons, fast food, and fashion, analysts find that “adolescent life in Geelong, Australia, is increasingly finked to fife in Los Angeles, Tokyo, and Berlin” (Tinning and Fitzclarence 1992). While early observers of the invasion of media in our fives dreaded that this technology created a worldwide gap and misunderstanding between generations (McLuhan 1964; Mead 1970), recent

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scholars see the media as generating a new vocabularies, tunes, and symbols that young people can appropriate in many different ways. Consequently, more attention is paid to the symbols and styles, which are read as texts, than to the people appropriating them (Hebdige 1987; Willis 1990).

It may be possible to argue that our preoccupation with the global, fragmented, and surface-deep in the post-modern era of theorizing is a reflection of scholarly anxieties that adult authority is increasingly eroded by adolescents, capable to harness technologies in their own interests at an early age. Nowhere is the anxiety more pronounced than in educational institutions where the teaching authority can now more easily be challenged by youth who read “the latest” on various web sites. The other source of anxiety lies with disenchanted adults who fear that teenagers are in the grip of a global leisure and fashion industry, which has turned them off from local interests and concerns, and has turned them away from revolutionary causes and idealism to mindless consumers of goods and information. The image of young people created in this post-modern discourse is so entrenched in this media-saturated world that young people’s lives begin to consist mainly of leisure and pleasure, “ignoring the mundane worlds of family, school and work which most young people still inhabit” (Cohen 1999, 199).

ADOLESCENTS, SPACE, AND EVERYDAY LIFE: Towards a New Theory of Youth

With the ethnographic accounts of adolescent life in Beirut below, I hope to generate new ideas on how to study, understand, and learn from young people's daily experiences and reactions to the worlds of adults which frame their growing up. It behooves us social scientists to come up with better ways to study youth. If we can believe a recent article in the National Geographic, a “critical mass of teenagers - 800 million in the world, the most there have ever been - with time and money to spend,” are the defining powers in the new phenomenon called “global culture” (Swedlow 1999, 17). These young people - many of them urban, relatively well-off, educated, and often fluent in more than one language - are still understudied and little understood. They are non-traditional and rather mainstream, which might explain why neither anthropology nor sociology has turned much of their attention to global teens in local contexts. In the past, academics have exoticized, confined and lost young people with our theories. A broadening of our analytic lenses might help to amend this shortcoming.

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The following observations of and conversations with young Lebanese from different sectarian backgrounds, most of whom returned to Beirut with their families at the beginning of the 1990’s.8 The parents belong to the professional class, many were engineers, doctors, or self-employed. I met the students at the American Community School where I taught high school history as part-time teacher, while conducting my research. However, my data is not limited to the school environment. As the students got to know me over time, they invited me to their homes and to activities outside the school. Anthropological method consists of a process called “participant observation,” whereby a researcher spends a year or more living in a community learning new life ways and a the local “common sense.” This method lends itself to a focus on everyday practices and their impact on structuring people's actions, thoughts, and talk. Ideally, the ethnographic narrative and connected analysis will reflect, to some extent, the narratives and interpretive frames of the people that made the study possible (Abu-Lughod 1986; Herzfeld 1985).

What brought the issues of identity, the everyday and being “in-between” to my attention as salient analytical concepts were the discussions I had with the students. During my first week in the classroom, I explained to my history juniors that I had come to Lebanon to study reconstruction and that making of a post-war identity in Lebanon. I was immediately asked, “But Miss, why do you study us, we are not pure Lebanese?” Another student added, “Yes, Miss, we watch MTV,” and another, “Yeah, we were not here during the war.” When I asked what made a person purely Lebanese, I was told that it was something you learned, something your parents taught you, but also something more like an attitude, something you either had or didn't. Yasmine said, “No, it's all about the language you speak. And we speak both English and Arabic.” Referring to the long history of bilingualism in Lebanon, Khaled retorted, “And that makes us less Lebanese than the people who speak Arabic and French?” The conversation turned to the trendy clothes the students bought, all popular American or European brand names, and baseball hats, especially those that the guys wore backwards. The students said people called them and their friends mtaamrikeen, Americanized. The discussion was lively, and everybody participated with one comment or another. So I asked them to begin a history class journal by writing down for me what “being Lebanese” meant to them. The students wrote eagerly for about five minutes, and I read their short paragraphs that evening. One student who had lived in Saudi Arabia for a decade wrote:

“I think there are quite a few characteristics that are shared by almost all Lebanese, but don't make us Lebanese. For example, our political views, our love for the country, etc. 1 think that our common actions make us Lebanese. These characteristics would include 'simple traditions' like drinking coffee (preferably Turkish [sic!]) after meals...”

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Dividing his answer into categories of thought/opinion and activity, he put an emphasis on concrete, daily rituals, which create a distinct identity. Similarly, another student privileged everyday activities as well, juxtaposing them to the feeling of national pride:

‘T o me, a Lebanese is one who defends his country when it is being attacked. Lebanese people love imitating others, and I speak as a person who is included along with all the Lebanese. Lebanese people care TOO MUCH about what others might think, how they would react and so on. They love gossiping. What I mean by 'defending his country when it is being attacked' is not in the physical sense but mental and more important, emotional...” (emphases hers)

In their answers, the students taught me importance of everyday, mundane activities, such as drinking coffee, gossiping, imitating others, while “love for one's country” or “defense for one's country” function as a framing narrative or framing device, more elusive and outside daily experience.

In their everyday lives, young people move through a multiplicity of interlocking cultural spaces, created in discussions and interactions with their peers or elders. Each space holds different messages, values, and expectations, and they exist right next to each other. Space has been defined in opposition to place, in that the latter is a rather stable “configuration of positions,” and the former is a practice, evoking vectors of direction, time variables, mobility, elements of foreignness and surprise (de Certeau 1984, 117). Keeping this space definition in mind, I will differentiate three spaces in Beirut, which I will name the traditional, the local, and the global for the precise reason that these terms have indeterminate meanings. Traditional spaces are roughly configured by history, stories of the past, nostalgia, Arabic, essentialized renditions of Lebaneseness, national cuisine or folk music, grandparents, photographs in the family album, family trees, nizaam (which means “order”). By contrast, local spaces are a trajectory combining reconstruction sites, urban renewal, fawda (“chaos”), literature that claims Beirut to be a phoenix reemerging from the ashes, daily newspapers and television talk shows, the economy of good looks and the importance of the “good family”, a resigned sense of humor in the face of reconstruction chaos and challenges. Finally, global spaces contain Westernized pop icons and fashions, the internet, McDonald's, fragmentation, English, loss of boundaries, threat to traditions, consumer culture, lack of specific commitments and a vague sense of being connected. These three spaces converge in everyday life, where they are evoked and constituted in social relations. They result in a very specific sense o f place (Agnew 1987, 28) or structures o f feeling (Williams 1961), and describe young people’s strategies to build a sense of belonging for themselves. © The Author(s). European University Institute. version produced by the EUI Library in 2020. Available Open Access on Cadmus, European University Institute Research Repository.

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THE QUESTION OF IDENTITY CRISIS IN BEIRUT

Lebanese youth, like youth elsewhere, has been studied as an age group in crisis. In the 1950’s, young Lebanese were said to suffer from an identity crisis which was due, primarily, to their feeling trapped between “East” and “West” (Cénacle 1958). During the civil war, studies of war youth showed that young people were in a moral crisis (BUC 1981) and were losing their close family ties (Assal and Farrell 1992). A school-based post-war study of youth discussed the lack of civic consciousness (Chidiac et al. 1995), and questionnaire responses of over a thousand college students found, among other things, “a deep sense of angst about their future in Lebanon” (Faour 1998, 152).9 Of course, it makes sense to diagnose crises among different parts of the population when the country as a whole is in crisis. However, when I was talking with Beiruti teenagers and explained that many books had been written about teenagers in identity crises, especially those who grew up in cosmopolitan, urban settings, which more often than not, clashed with the “authentic” local culture and traditions, one student looked at me, and, after a short pause said,

“I really don't think there is an identity crisis among young people in Lebanon, because everyone here has a routine. And you know exactly who your group is, ...like, even if you haven't called everybody, and haven't been specifically invited, you know where they are and you can always go and meet up with them... The only identity crisis that there might be is between the parents and the kids understanding each other...”

So I decided to pay attention to direct or indirect inter-generational discussions and commentaries on the one hand, and young people's sense of place on the other. What follows are select scenarios from my fieldwork in Beirut.10 They are meant to highlight the traditional, local and global spaces teenagers traverse in everyday life, and how, in the process, they construct a feeling of belonging to an emerging Lebanon.

Going to an American School: How Good a Lebanese Are You?

During the week of teacher orientation at the American Community School, we were told that Lebanese considered the school the “other” in terms of Lebanese educational practices. As far as teaching methodology was concerned, the school encouraged analytical thinking and creativity, rather than the French inspired memorization approach, as the Principal Mrs. Bashshur explained to us. She said that the Ministry of Education was almost entirely staffed by French-educated Lebanese, who drew up and controlled the national school curriculum. We could rest assured that teaching at an American school was not an exercise at Westernizing an otherwise traditional Lebanese curriculum. The curriculum has

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been a cultural hybrid, as is the legacy in many post-colonial countries around the Mediterranean.I 11 As American school, ACS had the reputation of being too easy on its students, while Lebanese schools were considered strict, almost authoritarian. ACS students (as well as the students at the neighboring International College) were considered spoiled, unruly, and given to American vices, such as drugs, alcohol, and sex. In that way, education was an arena where traditional space met the global, and it was, at least in local imagination if not actuality, an area where opposites clashed.

During my first teaching cycle in my world history class, I brought to class Kipling's poem “The White Man's Burden” and an excerpts from Achebe's “Things Fall Apart.” The objective was to start a discussion about imperialism. We made a list of the objectionable motives of a colonizer's civilizing mission, such as religious conversion, economic exploitation, and divide-and-conquer power play. At one point, Lara brought up the fact that Europeans had brought education to the colonies, which she considered a good thing. She said, “Look at us, what are we doing here? We are sitting in an American school!” Wasseem, one of the more argumentative students in the classroom, was right in her face, “ We are here to get a good education, that is way different than being colonized! We are not influenced that way!” Next to him, Salim fired back, “But look at yourself, look at your clothes and how you talk, and you tell me that you are not a little American.” Dress code didn't mean a thing, Wasseem contended, he was not a little American, in fact, everyone knew he hated American politics. The other students joined the fray, on either Wasseem’s or Salim’s side. For a while the argument drifted into a series of accusations over what kind of food the students chose to eat for lunch, fast food or local sandwiches. On student was vehement about the fact that foreign education made students accept the foreign culture unquestionably, and that most of them were thinking just like foreigners. She said, she certainly felt like one. No, some of the students replied, they felt they could pick and choose what to subscribe to, and an English-based education was a mere tool. In fact, it would be silly not to be getting an English-speaking education in today's world, and what was wrong with being bilingual? It was a spirited exchange, and I had a hard time getting the students back to the subject of British colonialism.

I had more discussions similar to the one above throughout the school year, and I never heard it come to a unanimous conclusion. Conscious of their country’s history of foreign-language education, and the fact that it was not language alone, but practices associated with the language that resulted in the imputed loss of authenticity, the students were sensitive of their status as foreign Lebanese. It was always an argument between those who claimed that schooling was only skin-deep and instrumental, while others maintained it formed their

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core. But there was more than education at stake. Having lived abroad with their parents, many of the students felt they had gained a broadened perspective on life which “purely” Lebanese could never muster, which turned the discussion about Western influence into a discussion of morality. As Lama told me once, “We [ACS students] are open-minded and tolerant, and these other students are not.” The flip side to her argument was eloquently expressed in a satirical essay in the quarterly school newspaper:

“For decades, we the people of ACS have endured the most derogatory, most painfully degrading descriptions from all four comers of this superficial gossip propelled city. We have been called drug dealers, alcoholics, Satanists, whores, ballet dancers... We like to think of ourselves as open-minded in our fine institution, and that we accept and support any student regardless of their personal hobbies and beliefs. So, applying our firm philosophy, the school has established an after school Satanist cult, whose members are recognized by wearing little horns and paper tails. As you can see, we can take a joke. When we are constantly harassed with questions about our school like 'are there really homosexuals?' or 'do you really smoke in class?' you learn to deal with it.” '?

“Open-minded” can easily turn into “morally corrupt,” if seen from a different perspective. The article draws up a dichotomy between the proper, obedient, clean Lebanese teenager and the corrupted, deviant and drugged foreigner. While it is standard cultural practice to draw arbitrary boundaries to distinguish inside from outside, clean from impure, or sacred from profane in order to organize rituals and practices that will define a community, it is mostly within the context of post-colonialism that borders inside a community are discursively drawn onto existing national blocks “us” versus “the West”. These borders are most often embodied by imputed sexualities or substance abuse, or, conversely, dis embodied by imputed religious deviance. In this case, the student formulated ironic self-stigmatization via Satanism, alcoholism, or homosexuality. By way of exaggeration, the student's confirmation of the imputed deviance renders the “gossip-propelled” accusations, and the entire project of vilifying everything “Westernized,” into a joke. This does not relinquish the seriousness of the stereotyping, but it critiques its practice. Enrolled in an American school, the students were conscious of the societal value judgements that came along with it, and they vocally formulated their response to them. Via exaggerated stereotypes or heated discussions the students actively positioned themselves inside a Lebanese landscape, historically marked by foreign influences, in which they claimed morality (tolerance, proper behavior), patriotic feeling (English education as mere tool), and showed a resigned sense of humor in dealing with those around them who generate accusatory gossip.

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“The things that make up a hang out are obvious around the world, but the criteria for hang outs in Lebanon has a different kind of spice to it,” Ahmed wrote in his report “What's Hot, What's Not?” for the high school newspaper AlefBeh. “First, the restaurant must have a known name, or at least a flashy logo that lights up like a sun at night. If the place doesn't have either, then it would probably shut down within a few months.” In journalism class, Ahmed had been given the task to research the new hotspots in town, and discuss where young people were going out to these days. As it was two months since the first McDonald's ever opened in Beirut (September 1997), Ahmed covered the fact that young people did not mind the traffic to the restaurant and the wait in line, which could amount to as much as an hour and a half. But Ahmed also commented that the known name and flashy logo might draw flocks of customers initially, but not necessarily for long, since neither the quality of food nor the service determines success. The bottom line, a restaurant can only be successful if “everybody goes.” To my naive inquiry how people knew where everyone was going on a particular night, Ahmed laughed and drew his cell phone out of his pocket: “This is why we have phones. It's like, let's say Maher finds out a new place opens, he calls and then we all go there. And we'll go there for a while until another place opens, and then we go there.” Wissam remembers his years in school by the restaurants, pubs or clubs he attended, “Like in 9th grade, we hung out at Flying Pizza, then we went to Hardee's, and the year after to Pizza Hut. Nobody goes to Pizza Hut anymore, it actually closed down. We now go to McDonald's.” Dance places go in and out of fashion on a yearly basis, Duplex one year, Options the next, B018, and most recently, Atlantis. Since a Lebanese teenager has to go where everyone goes, it is not the actual place that draws customers, it is the crowd that draws a crowd. As I was told recently, McDonald's, which only opened in 1997, is rather empty these days: everyone goes to Starbucks.

As Ahmed indicated at the beginning of his article, there are many foreign hotspots in town, but what determines their success has “Lebanese spice” to it. Maya who took me to McDonald's one day, gave me the same analysis, “You know, in the beginning, everyone wanted to go eat hamburgers because we had been waiting for McDonald's to open for such a long time. But now, it's just a place where moms take their little children to play.” Unbeknownst to my students, recent anthropological studies of the impact of globalism had come up with a rather similar conclusion (Watson 1997). Global capitalist forces still have to contend with local customs and traditions for their successful implementation. McDonald's might bring new food items to Lebanon (although fries and burgers were already a staple food before the Golden Arches opened), but Lebanese teenagers will schedule their visits to McDonald's around their already existing

Where the Global Meets the Local: Going out Where “Everyone Goes”

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routines. One sign that McDonald's was not simply a fast food option in Lebanon was noticeable on the billboards advertising McDonald's as “family restaurant,” and the most prominent part of the restaurant was a big play area with toys and slides for toddlers to elementary school age children.

When I went for a visit, parking attendants were helping to park the car outside, security people opened the doors, and a friendly woman greeted everybody at the door and showed them where to go and place their order, a long counter with about twelve cash registers. No attempt was made at putting up dividers to form orderly queues. The neon-lit menus, one in English behind the servers, and one in Arabic, in perfect transliteration, right over the counter gave us our familiar menu options. Ali, who was my guide that day complained that the Lebanese had not even tried to rename any food item, like the French had. The French were proud of their heritage and ordered a “Royale" or “Le Mac,” but the Lebanese always wanted everything authentic, i.e. authentically foreign. I remarked that the restaurant was rather spacious, seats, tables and decor in elegant grays and blues, flower patterns along the walls with hidden light fixtures. It was a fast food place that tried to look like a restaurant. A group of five year- olds kept running from the play room over to a table with young women, who had just had their hair done this morning and were dressed in their finest, sipping coffee from styrofoam cups. Ali commented, “This is where Lebanese women now hold their subhiye [a morning coffee break and time to chat, usually at home, with family members and friends].” The mothers listened to their children's chatter and sent them back to the supervision of their Sri Lankan or Filipino maids in the play room. There was no mistaking this place for anything but a Lebanese McDonald's.

I made sure that I ordered some fries, because “our fries are better than the ones you get in the U.S.” and we sat down to observe the clientele that Saturday afternoon. Most of them were women of all ages, sitting in groups or in twos, engrossed in conversation. Nobody seemed to be in any hurry. “If you want to see young people, you have to come at night, like right after the movies, when people sit here and chat before going home.” Ali laughed, “...and to think that I used to come here almost every other day, when it opened... I came to see my friends, everybody was hanging out here. But now, it's where you grab a bit when you have no time to eat elsewhere.” When I asked Ali if he thought that these foreign food chains decreased local food consumption, he said that he could not remember ever having eaten just local fare. “You saw what my mom cooked for the iftar [evening meal during holy month of Ramadan].” Indeed, the table had been spread with a whole variety of items, from the more traditional lentil soup, kibbeh, and tabbouleh to lasagne, stir fry, and chicken ragout, and the mother had made sure I ate from all of it. Ali added, “It is Lebanese to have everything, and

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to pick and choose what you would like that day.” And then, there would always be Fay sal's or Berbir's, and no matter how many foreign chains were going to open, after a night out in a club, at 3 or 4 o'clock in the morning, the shabaab [the “guys”] would always visit these 24-hour street-front stores to eat their manaouche [a local pizza-style snack] and catch up on everyone's news.

By both Ahmed’s and Ali's accounts and my observations, global influences were localized as soon as they hit the ground. The fact that young people can keep open or shut down restaurant chains, and in fact they do, shows that the global does not possess the sole destructive powers that people fear it has. Young people decide which place will be successful and for how long, and they do it according to local criteria. Grown ups as well as teenagers frequent the new places, as the post-war boom brings constant novelties to town. Standing in line for an hour and a half for a Big Mac says less about a loss of tradition in Lebanon, but about welcoming “normality” in a post-war context in which McDonald’s had for years refused to open franchises in the country for lack of quality control.13 McDonald’s is certainly a potent symbol, but as symbol, it can still be read in more than one way. But most importantly, what I would like to point out here are the students’ self-conscious analyses of global influences in their local lives, and their ability to situate themselves firmly in those overlapping spaces.

Knowing Your Place: Gender Lines Across Generations

Sitting in the kitchen with Maya one Saturday afternoon, she began telling me how difficult it was for her as the eldest daughter to get her parents' permission to go out at night. We had made ourselves some afternoon tea, after Maya had gotten off the phone discussing her plans for the evening with her cousin. “The only way it's okay is if I go with my cousins... then it doesn't matter when I come home.” She was in the middle of telling me of the fights she had had during high school, when her father joined us in the kitchen to make himself a cup of tea. Maya said to me, while looking straight at her father, "... but when Karim grew up, he was allowed to go wherever he wanted, and come home whenever...” The father, easily guessing the gist of our conversation, and clearly not thrilled at facing the accusing look of his daughter in front of the foreign guest, responded, looking at me, “Maya wants this country to be changed all at once, she doesn't see that what she is able to do. Staying out late was completely unheard of when I was her age.” He said that Maya could now stay out as late as she wanted, and not just with her cousins, provided the parents knew with whom she was going and how she was getting back home. Maya, leaning back in her chair and crossing her arms in front of her chest, was not going to let her dad get off that quickly. “And what do we girls gain from going out until four, dressed up in

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miniskirts and wearing heels and all that make-up?... We are allowed to do this because the guys like to look at us, but I wouldn't count this as progress for Lebanese girls...” Her father ignored her challenge, maintaining once more that Maya had no memory of how different times used to be, “Lebanon is changing, and girls are doing more and more what boys get to do.” And Maya turned to me, saying, “Whenever my dad does not want to respond to a question, he goes back to history... Like when I ask why I cannot go out with a boy, when Karim go with his girlfriend all the time.” The father gave her an exasperated look, “You know exactly why that is... We live in a place where such things are not done. You cannot go out and break all the rules because you want to, but you can work on changing the rules, slowly. That is what I mean when I talk about history!”

Going out with friends in the evening can be said to be one of the prime concerns of urban youths, especially in Lebanon, which prides itself on its entertainment industry and nightlife. On the weekends, I was told, it is not a question of whether you go out, but rather, where you go out. Teenagers use their monthly allowances for dinners, movies and evenings at night clubs. “Dating,” a budding version of the American teenage pastime, is of equal importance. Going out and dating figures prominently in Lebanese gender identities. For Maya, it is one coupled to frustration and a sense of unfairness for the uneven treatment between boys and girls, one that leads to tension with her parents on a regular basis. And what is most annoying to her is her fathers “in-between” arguments. On the one hand pointing to the enormous changes that make a girl's experience today vastly different from the past, the father at the same time tells his daughter that certain things “are not done.” There are traditions at stake, which translates, in everyday life, into reputations. So both advocating the way things used to be and the way things have changed, the father moves in and out of traditional and local spaces. His hyperbolic use of “Maya wants this country to be changed all at once” or “You just want to go and break all the rules” is as much a discursive ploy to shift the discussion to his terms, setting up the answer “No, I don't!”, as it is the acknowledgement that he finds himself on shifting ground. Which has him exasperated, and his daughter defiant.

On the other hand, when I asked Tareq's point of view on the privileges he received growing up as a boy in Lebanon, he acknowledged, “My sisters get kind of jealous at times... but I mean, what am I supposed to do? Chop off my penis? I can't do that, you know, I'm bom a man, I'm sorry...” Tareq looked at me in defensive indignation, his voice raised, making clear that he intended to hold his position. “When I go out of the house and my sisters are not allowed to, I say the same thing, I say, I'm not gonna chop it off, you know, I am sorry, I'm a guy, and I am not gonna stop living my life because I want to feel down with you ... I do feel, I feel... what is the word?... I feel like I want to sympathize with my sisters,

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but sorry this is my life too, you know...” His resort to exaggeration made it hard to come up with a reply, so I smiled and remained silent. He continued, “My sisters don't realize how much I do for them.” He then enumerated the behaviors his dad had asked him to report at home, such as drinking or holding hands. Tareq said he does not tell on his sisters. And once, when they all came home late from an evening out, their dad berated the sisters for staying out beyond acceptable time limits, while he told his son just one thing: “Tareq, you are not Arab!” Tareq looked at me and said, “And I was thinking to myself, what on earth is he talking about?... Like I was gonna worry about my sisters' honor or something, I mean, give me a break, we are almost in the 21st century...”

Again, this episode shows that gender concretely embodies Lebanese teenage identity, elaborated upon and constituted in parental rules, expectations, as well as intergenerational interactions. Tareq's story is a sympathetic, yet defensive acknowledgment of the uneven status quo. A sensitive guy, he enjoys his privileges, but with a degree of discomfort. His father's accusations that Tareq was not acting “Arab,” at the same time that the daughters were allowed to go out highlights the overlap of traditional and local culture spaces. Finding himself in between, the father charges his son with an identity Tareq never had nor plans to assume. At the same time, Tareq takes himself discursively out of the traditional space, and puts himself into the present, refusing to be caught in between. His resorting to “...this is my life too” emphasizes the focus on the “here and now” that allows him to go out and have fun. Similar to Maya's father's remark “She wants things changed all at once,” Ahmed takes refuge in (graphic) exaggerations in order to reaffirm the status quo. Both support the change of rules, yet nothing drastic can be done. Letting girls be like boys would literally amount to an act of castration. And therefore, as much as the boys know and enjoy their place in the social order, every girl knows exactly how far she can go when she goes out, makes friends, wants to have a good time. Of course, this does not mean that all Lebanese teenagers follow all their parents' rules. Like everywhere else, girls and boys lie to their parents about who they go out with and who they see. Maya complained to me later, when we were again alone in the kitchen, “Parents here even prefer it if you lie to them... that shows that you respect them.” She gave me a resigned smile, as if saying, “Go figure!” Parents clearly needed to get their priorities straight. © The Author(s). European University Institute. version produced by the EUI Library in 2020. Available Open Access on Cadmus, European University Institute Research Repository.

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The Problem of History: Constructing Identity via Questioning and Debating

One day in history class, we had a slow day discussing the Ottoman Empire and its influence on Lebanon. The students kept asking why they had to study something so irrelevant to their lives. Attempting to make a connection, I asked the students to take out their history journal and write down questions about contemporary Lebanon, questions that they cared about and wanted to see answered. I was hoping to transfer their questions back into Ottoman history and thus continue my lesson. What transpired in the course of the exercise is that the “questions” the students wrote were mostly rhetorical, more complaints than an inquiries. They wrote, for instance, “If the country was in debt, where did all the politicians get all their cars, houses, bodyguards?” or “Why were there all these checkpoints on the roads? Who really controls the government?” or “How come Lebanon was called a democracy but we can't say what we want or do what we want?” What was packed inside these “questions” were feelings of frustration and incomprehension about adults and their perceived irrational, dishonest, or backwards behavior. The questions the students asked signaled their disapproval of the adult status quo. One student specifically critiqued the uses of history in Lebanese life:

“My question is more social than political. How can people, Lebanese people, be in terrible conditions after war, live under such chaos structurally, constantly complaining about their maids yet still live in a glamorous lifestyle and enjoy showing off to others? In other words, why the egotistical and stubborn feeling that is as if they keep saying 'We’re better than what we seem to be.' Even when I ask are you Arab, some will shake their heads in disgust and say, 'No, Phoenicians.' They also tend to linger on the past, always referring back to the days of Lebanon before the war, before the Turkish, before everything. As if Adam and Eve were put here.”

Another student, Rula, wrote in similar frustration about history in Lebanon:

“Why are people still living in the past? Why is the war still a factor in Lebanese life, although it has ended [sic] about 8 years ago. Why do people still say: 'We had war.' Why can't they start doing something about it?”

While Hala complains that “people” (i.e. adults) were constantly living in worlds of make believe, either pretending that life was glamorous when everyone knew that there had been war and that problems continued, or referring back to the past which had as little to do with the present as Adam and Eve, Rula cannot understand why eight years is not long enough to leave past events behind. History, or imagined pasts, refer to the traditional spaces that the students feel trap their parents.

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Interestingly, youth has been defined as a time when “life history intersects with history: here individuals are confirmed in their identities, societies regenerated in their fife style” (Erikson, 1961, 20). In other words, as young people grow up and become aware of history through their own understanding of their lived past, they acquire an understanding of the larger, presumably written or orally transmitted past of their community as well. This definition is based on a rather traditional view that young people grow into some kind of cultural mold which awaits them as they leave childhood, and which will have turned them into culturally literate members of their community by the time they reach adulthood. There is an assumption that young people acquire a sense of history similar to that of adults. Anyone who has ever attempted to teach teenagers history will disagree with this point of view. “High school students hate history” comes probably closer to the actual state of affairs (Loewen 1995, 1). The problem is not just that the teaching of history is dominated by boring textbooks, and one of the least popular activities among teenagers is reading 800-page tomes, but it is also that young people do not understand the significance of things past. Why are people here still living in the past when the war ended 8 years ago?

But what makes the Lebanese case particularly interesting is that there is no intersection of histories for young people to cross. In the first history class of the year, I wrote a George Orwell quote on the board, “Whoever controls the present, controls the past, and whoever controls the past, controls the future,” and asked the students what that meant. The students began a discussion about people in power writing history, until Ahmed blurted out, “Miss, that's what is going on in Lebanon, we have no history because no one is in control here.” Lara, in the first row, muttered under her breath, “No, it's because someone else is in control here,” at which her neighbor nodded and showed signs of a resigned smile. The “someone else” is the code name for Syria, a word that by convention, remains unspoken in conversations that contain criticisms of the Syrian government's continuing involvement in Lebanese affairs. And the statement that there is “no history” in Lebanon refers to the fact that the Ministry of Education has been charged with replacing Lebanon's 15 different school history books with a unified one. So far, several committees have met but they have been unable to produce a book.14 “Miss, they are never going to write a unified book, it's too political.” “Yeah, everybody thinks they are the heroes. They'll never agree.” “They created all these committees, of course, nothing will ever get done.” When I asked what made history so difficult, Fouad said, “Miss, it's too political... it's like everyone knows that there are more Muslims than Christians in Lebanon now, but they are still doing the 50/50 thing in parliament... it's like we all know it, but noone is doing anything about it.” Khaled who had been listening quietly to the spirited debate until this point spoke up,’’Miss, maybe they'll publish a book with nothing in it.” The others started laughing, “That'd be cool.”

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Listening to the adult's discuss the making of a new national history book, while being unable to produce one, my students kept questioning, joking, and commenting on the silences of their elders. They showed signs of both resignation and a sense of humor, and they certainly understood that parents preferred to leave Lebanese history alone, as it is a history of conflicting sectarian interests. Rewriting that history after a civil war makes it a particularly sensitive task. Without the knowledge of past events and little understanding of why the civil war happened, young people focus their attention on the current parental deadlock. While the adults could not agree on which version of Lebanese history to publish, who should be included and why, who should be cast as hero and who as villain, the students produced a meta-commentary about history that shows that they know exactly where they are situated, despite (or perhaps because of) history’s absence. © The Author(s). European University Institute. version produced by the EUI Library in 2020. Available Open Access on Cadmus, European University Institute Research Repository.

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CONCLUSIONS

This investigation into the processes of identity-making among urban, middle class teenagers in a post-war environment shows that being a young person in a globalizing world challenges traditional and local life worlds does not necessarily feel like a crisis experience. Rather than feeling trapped in between contradictory cultural forces, I found young people adeptly living across continua of cultural space. Perhaps what de Certeau (1984) claims to be a good ingredient for the making of a story, namely the setting up borders in order to cross them, applies equally to the making of identity. Recognizing and formulating the different mandates, values and expectations in different cultural spaces, young people nevertheless cross, merge, or combine elements of each. If anyone needs to be diagnosed with a crisis, we might want to turn to their parents who struggle in between global, traditional and local spaces. Neither outside tradition nor wholly inside of the global, young people are able to generate their distinct post-war sense of identity which puts them squarely into their immediate environment. They do not simply accept the mandates and messages of their elders, but discuss and debate them in a manner that shows their personal stakes. They invest sentiments, wit, and their knowledge in formulating and thereby appropriating their place in a transition society. By presenting a sketch of overlapping theoretical spaces, which will need further refinement, I hope to start a discussion about the ways to study youth in the future. If the theory does not do much convincing for now, I hope that at least my stories of the everyday, at home, at school, or around town, will inspire future research among youth.

Lucia Volk

Department of Social Anthropology Harvard University

Author(s). European University Institute. version produced by the EUI Library in 2020. Available Open Access on Cadmus, European University Institute Research Repository.

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ENDNOTES

1 Acknowledgements: My initial fieldwork (1997-98), which forms the basis of this paper, was made possible by a International Dissertation Research Fellowship of the Mellon Foundation. A grant from The Weatherhead Center for International Affairs at Harvard University allowed me to conduct additional research in January 2000. I am also grateful for the comments and suggestions an earlier draft of this paper received from members of Workshop II: The New Generations South of the Mediterranean: Changes, Challenges and Opportunities at the First Mediterranean Social and Political Research Meeting in Florence (March 2000). I thank Marie Ladier-Fouladi, Carla Makhlouf-Obermeyer, and Mona Shediac-Rizkallah for their particularly discerning comments, which I tried to address in my revisions. I am of course responsible for all the remaining shortcomings.

2 The authors base most of their arguments on data about schooling and employment collected in Canada, the US, and Western Europe; however, they claim to describe a world-wide trend, as modernist educational institutions and curricula are increasingly the norm in non-Westem urban contexts.

3 See for instance, Lila Abu-Lughod (1991) or Stuart Hall (1994).

4 This definition is different from the psychological or psychoanalytical definitions which treat identity as an internal variable, like a personality type, that unfolds along specific developmental stages.

5 The civil war, called “the events” (l-ahdaath) in local parlance, lasted from 1975-1990. The capital of Beirut was the stage for much of the fighting which involved an estimated 186 different warring factions over a 16 year period (Khalaf, 1989, 22). By 1990, 1.2 million Lebanese had been displaced inside Lebanon, which is 30% of the total population. Moreover, the population of Beirut declined to half of its 1975 level (Charif 1994, 154-55).

6 Khalaf (1994) explicitly diagnosed his fellow post-war Lebanese with “collective amnesia.” Only very recently - following the scandalous disclosures of civil war activities of Christian militia members published by Robert M. Hatem, the body guard of Elie Hobeika - the silence was broken by a spectacular admission of guilt and plea for forgiveness by former Lebanese Forces militia leader Asaad Shaftari, a virtual first of its kind (Sennott 2000).

7 Willis' work inspired a series of anthropological studies of schools, and specifically the effects of schooling on young people's identities. These studies have remained, for the most part, within the structural reproduction paradigm (for instance, see Spindler 1982; Eckert 1989; Reed-Danahay 1996).

8 In total, I spoke with about 20 students and their families at length. It is therefore not my intention to make any statements about “the urban upper middle class in Beirut;” rather, I hope to present a textured picture of young people and their constructions of meaning of their life around them. It is meant to complement the many sociological survey studies that have been done on Lebanese youth.

9 Faour estimates that about 16% of the present Lebanese population belong to the 17-24 year-old age bracket.

10 To ensure their privacy, I changed the names of my informants. For more detailed description and analysis, please consult my forthcoming dissertation (Volk 2000).

11 For a concise summary of the English and French educational projects in Lebanon, see Salibi (1993, 130-138). For a lengthy discussion, consult Hanf (1969).

12 See “ACS Students: The Last Laugh is Ours,” Alef Beh 7 (3): 4. The article is accompanied by staged photographs which show students and teachers smoking, empty liquor bottles in hand, and in passionate embrace right in front of the ACS logo at the entrance.

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13 This is similar to the stories about long lines outside the Moscow McDonald's. Russians are eating more than just food: they are literally embodying the idea of Westernized consumer goods (Caldwell, cited in Watson 1997).

13 The complexities of Lebanon's history and historiography have been eloquently discussed by Salibi (1988) and Beydoun (1984).