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Paper short abstract

Drawing on healthcare encounters during Lebanon’s financial crisis, I propose an ethnographic theory of collapse as the height of contradictory living, showing how collapse renders visible long-embedded social and economic contradictions in capitalist life—and makes them unavoidable.

Paper long abstract

Through ethnographic encounters with healthcare workers, patients, pharmacists, activists, and artists during Lebanon’s 2021-2022 financial crisis, I show how people in Lebanon describe their world as one that has collapsed. When capitalism reaches an apex of crisis, I show how lives are lived as prices, social relations, identities, and structures become unmoored and in-flux. This un-mooring plays out amid a historically-privatized healthcare system, one that fails spectacularly under intense conditions of medical austerity and a prolonged liquidity crisis. I propose in this paper an ethnographic theory of collapse: that collapse is the height of contradictory living. Put another way, I show how collapse renders visible the social and economic contradictions that have long been embedded in capitalist life in Lebanon — and makes them unavoidable. In this way, I suggest that contradictory living responds to the assumed ephemerality of collapse: it shows the spaces of choice and agency in how people pull apart their routines of everyday living and re-suture them along new seams. The choices that people make in response to these contradictions matter, and it is what makes agentive acts on the social, economic and political worlds during collapse possible.