The sakan shababiyy, or the world improvised: Displacement and masculine domestic space in Lebanon

Abstract

This article is an ethnographic study of a sakan shababiyy––a non-familial domestic space shared by young Syrian men living in exile. Based on fieldwork carried out in Lebanon between 2017 and early 2020, the article describes the texture of everyday life in a space where young men attempt to make home together in exile amidst the escalating pressures of housing discrimination, political repression, and economic collapse. The narration critically engages Bourdieu’s famous analysis of the Kabyle house as a frame for considering the ambiguous ‘reversals and reflections’ that structure domestic space in the aftermath of war and displacement. As a group of formerly middle-class young men rebuild lives upended by violence, peer cohabitation produces a masculine domesticity that is both an improvised and creative response to the exigences of exile and the grounds for orienting towards more optimistic imagined futures.