Paper short abstract:

Social relations composing the Austro-Lebanese encounter highlight asymmetry and materiality as pervasive properties of the social relations encapsulated in the social situation analysed, informing fluxes of people, ideas, values, dispositions, moods and affects.

Paper long abstract:

This presentation draws on my fieldwork on the Austro-Lebanese encounter, where various social actors interact by localizing and mobilizing significant difference in embodied dispositions, values, affects, and practices as part of their social belonging and identification processes, and in which permanent or contextual relationships between them are significantly informing their agency and perhaps worldviews. My ethnography has highlighted asymmetries, expressed in directionalities and intensities of, and resistances to, the fluxes of people, ideas, values, dispositions, moods and affects, I have been analysing. In addition, social scientists often take the existence of social relations for granted. But actors involved in the Austro-Lebanese encounter, from the Lebanese side, strive to create bonds, especially affective, between Austria and Lebanon, whereas these bonds seem to be quasi-invisible from the Austrian side. Thus, the question of materiality comes tightly knitted to that of asymmetries. In this presentation, both materiality and asymmetries, encompassing intensity, directionality, and resistance, will be treated as a pervasive properties of the social relations encapsulated in the Austro-Lebanese encounter.