Dissertation research: The Interim Structures of Kinship. Kin relatedness among Palestinian refugees in Lebanon

目前的研究表明，尽管有返回家园的要求，也有一些引人注目的遣返实例，但许多难民营具有半永久性的性质。因此，本来应该是临时性的事情变成了例行公事。然而，对于在这种长期不确定和不稳定的环境中出现的社会关系的一般模式，特别是家庭制度，人们的看法各不相同。有些研究强调家庭的作用，它使难民有一种连续感，并使他们在世界上熟悉自己的生活方式，而难民在其他环境中则会经历无能为力和参照不稳定的情况。这类研究还将难民家庭描述为社会和文化资本的一种重要形式：不仅是实际或潜在支持的来源，而且也是一种生成图表，用于阐明短期或长期可用的灵活关系网络。然而，其他研究表明，难民往往认为，与亲属保持关系的工作很难长期维持。分配微薄的和过度紧张的资源，或分散的亲属追求同一目标的相互保护，可能会加剧紧张局势，造成裂痕，甚至导致放弃家庭生活完全。这篇论文的研究由文化人类学研究生将探讨阿拉伯重塑其家庭关系和价值观在巴勒斯坦难民营在南部黎巴嫩。通过生活在难民中，并使用定量和定性相结合的方法，研究人员将调查在何种程度上的规范和处置有关的l-aela，家庭，部署在战略，以应对难民环境的不确定性。它还将探讨长期暴露于不确定性和有限的可能性的宇宙如何影响家庭的道德经济和亲属关系的自然性的概念，以及长期连根拔起的经验产生创新或对家庭文化创新的抵制的条件。这项研究将为研究生的教育和社会科学调查的三个当代领域做出重大贡献：难民研究，新阿拉伯家庭的人类学和亲属关系研究。此外，这项研究将有助于更好地了解难民环境对难民形成和维持重要的合作和照顾关系的长期能力产生影响的过程。这对中东和包括美国在内的其他地方负责照顾持久难民社区的机构具有政策影响。

Current studies show that despite the demand for return to homelands, and some spectacular examples of such repatriations, many refugee camps take on a semi-permanent quality. Thus, what was supposedly provisional becomes routine. However, views differ regarding ordinary patterns of sociality that emerge in such environments of prolonged uncertainty and instability, particularly with regard to the institution of the family. Some studies emphasize the role of the family in providing refugees with a sense of continuity, and a source of familiar ways of being in the world, in environments that refugees otherwise experience through powerlessness and referential instability. Such studies also describe the refugee family as a critical form of social and cultural capital: not only a source of actual or potential support, but also a generative chart for articulating flexible networks of relationships usable in the short or long term. However, other studies show that refugees often experience the work that goes into securing relations with relatives as very difficult to maintain in the long run. The allocation of meager and overstretched resources, or the dispersal of relatives in pursuit of the same goal of mutual preservation, may exacerbate tensions, create rifts and even lead to abandonment of family life altogether.This dissertation research by a cultural anthropology graduate student will examine Arab recasting of its family ties and values in Palestinian refugee camps in southern Lebanon. By living among the refugees and using a combination of quantitative and qualitative methods, the researcher will investigate the extent to which norms and dispositions pertaining to l-'aela, the family, are deployed in strategies for coping with the uncertainty of the refugee environment. It will also explore how the long-term exposure to a universe of uncertainty and restricted possibilities affect notions of the moral economy of the family and the naturalness of kinship ties, as well as the conditions in which the experience of prolonged uprooting produces innovation or resistance to innovation in family culture. This research will offer a significant contribution to the education of a graduate student and to three contemporary areas of social science inquiry: refugee studies, the anthropology of the new Arab family, and kinship studies. In addition, the research will contribute to a better understanding of the processes whereby the refugee environment bears upon refugees' long-term ability to form and maintain significant relationships of cooperation and care. This has policy implications for institutions charged with care of persistent refugee communities, both in the Middle East and elsewhere, including the United States.