Teaching with the Window Open: Notes on a Pedagogy between the Mundane and the Catastrophic

Abstract

In this reflexive essay about teaching, I reflect upon the political space anthropology might hold in Lebanon, a country positioned at a continuum between so-called normalcy and catastrophe. What does it mean to teach in a context where there is a jarring disparity between a mundaneness, an almost banality to the everyday, and severe, often life-threatening interruptions? Where do political possibilities go in the process? What is recuperated? What is left to burn? I will use these questions as a starting point from which to reflect on the politics of teaching and learning anthropology during times of catastrophe. The emphasis being on the kinds of meaning ascribed to the learning process at a time when people, in a country such as Lebanon, live almost continuously within and in the aftermath of one catastrophe or another. How then is anthropology, as a discipline, as a way of learning and viewing the world, configured into these webs of significance? 

Keywords: Aftermath, Anthropology, Ghosts, Lebanon, Methods, Pedagogy, Violence