Salvageable Lives: Pathogens, People, and Politics in Lebanon's Anticipated Collapse (WGF - Dissertation Fieldwork Grant)

This resource is an application for the Dissertation Fieldwork Grant from the Wenner-Gren Foundation. This research examines salvage: its different meanings, the theoretical directions it leads to, and how it contributes to understanding social life in Lebanon -a country that, for some time now, has been described as being on the brink of collapse. Among scientists repurposing microbial samples in laboratories, physicians using salvage therapies in clinics, and political activists constantly building and re-building movements and organizations, I study how salvage interacts with three different life-forms: microbial life, human life and political life. Using an array of methods - laboratory ethnography, in-depth interviews, oral histories, and document collection and analysis - these research trajectories will contribute to understanding salvage as everyday practice, as proximal to anticipated collapse, and as an analytic that reconciles practices across different kinds of life. Throughout, I bring salvage to bear on such anthropological categories as value, labor, accumulation, possession, dispossession and, by extension, one thread of social life in Lebanon. Here, living in a world that always seems to be coming to an end, this research asks: What does it mean to live a salvageable life?