Teaching rights and responsibilities: paradoxes of globalization and children's citizenship in Lebanon.

Learning Citizenship in a Globalizing World

What families teach their children as their rights and responsibilities as citizens in state societies needs to be studied in the context of the contradictory and complementary modes in which globalization has impacted cultural beliefs and practices in all states and transformed citizen subjects into complex global subjects, materially and concretely. Globalization can be understood in multiple ways. For the purposes of this paper I use the approach that "Globalization is a process that opens nation states to many influences that originate beyond their borders. These changes are likely to decrease the primacy of national economic, political, and social institutions, thereby affecting the everyday context in which children grow up and interact with the rest of society." (1) While it is often difficult to discriminate between influences which originate within and beyond state borders, it is nevertheless important to assess the impact of (the largely Western) international constructs of rights and responsibilities to which state societies have been subject or subjected to. These Western constructs have transported basic presumptions that citizens are autonomous, individualized selves with direct and unmediated relationships with the state and with rights and responsibilities which inhere in their personhood. (2) Such notions, universalized to some degree through international conventions, (3) have been resisted, assimilated, and become imbricated in family relations and child-rearing practices in complex and contradictory ways in societies which have long engaged in globalization. Among the families with whom I have worked in Lebanon, cultural ideas and practices of teaching children their rights and responsibilities (4) appear to reflect resistance to and assimilation of basic presumptions embedded in international conventions. Yet ferreting out what constitutes resistance and what constitutes assimilation is difficult at best since it presumes an a priori "pure" culture, unaffected by globalization. This is not the case in Lebanon. I suggest that the practices deployed by families in teaching children rights and responsibilities in Lebanon entail paradoxical incorporations of notions which both support and undermine both international conventions and locally upheld ideals and that locally held beliefs are already inflected with regional and global influences.

In this paper, I suggest that Lebanon has been so much at the crossroads of globalization (whether one defines globalization as beginning 1,000 or 300 or 50 years ago), that it is difficult and perhaps not meaningful to articulate "authentic" Lebanese family child-rearing discourses and practices. But global engagement does not mean homogenization. Indeed, it is perhaps because of this deep embedding in globalization that the diversity of discourses and practices in the teaching of children's rights and responsibilities in Lebanon raises compelling questions. Based on two long term research projects, one urban and one rural, one project begun (1971) before the Lebanese Civil War (1975-1990) and one begun (1994) just after, I found discourses and practices played out among families teaching their children rights and responsibilities which both complemented and contradicted Western notions underwritten in international conventions.

On the whole, international conventions have been informed by liberalist notions of the autonomous citizen subject. On the whole, locally upheld cultural ideals support a notion of the relational or connective self. In Lebanon, the liberalist model of children's rights and responsibilities (based on an autonomous, individualist self) wove through public and local discourses and practices in tandem with relational models of children's rights and responsibilities (based on a connective self nested in patriarchal connective familial relationships). (5) While the relational models of rights and responsibilities and connectivity were not "authentic" Lebanese discourses and practices unaffected by globalization, they did, nevertheless, propel dictates for action which at times appeared to contradict liberalist dictates, leaving parents, extended kin, and children confused. Parents rehearsed assertions of children's autonomy from young ages. But familial practices also demonstrated the recognition that children had rights and responsibilities which, while potentially complementary to, often superceded their autonomy. Practices revealed that children learned rights and responsibilities which were far more conditioned by webs of sociality than implied by the liberalist autonomous citizen-subject model.

By model and practice, families nested children in webs of relationships, sanctified through kin or kin-like (idiomatic kin) moralities. Kin, extended kin and idiomatic kin filtered most of life's realities for children, well into and through adulthood. Given the dense sociality, rights and responsibilities, locally and nationally, came to be modeled and practiced as mediated by whom one knew and how they were related. Thus, while the notions that children had autonomy and inherent rights and responsibilities were publically available and discussed, the idea that children's rights and responsibilities were delicately negotiated possibilities which had to be constantly worked through known relationships was everywhere evident in practice.

The outcome of these competing, complementary, and overlapping discourses and practices of the autonomous, rights-endowed self and the connective, relationally-nested self offered families and their children with a range of choices which they applied situationally. As a result, conflicts over rights and responsibilities required intense negotiation and mediation. Paradoxically, the intense negotiations and mediation reinforced aspects of both patriarchal connective and liberalist individualist notions of citizenship. Children learned that the basic principles of citizenship--their rights and responsibilities--were less fixed principles inherent in their personhood, but more the continually negotiated and fought for possibilities. These negotiations, they learned, were situated within relationships which were within or had to be transformed into familial frameworks, idioms, and moralities. The outcome, on the face of it at odds with liberalist notions of individually endowed rights and responsibilities, paradoxically supported a liberalist notion of active citizenship. Children learned that they had to be pro-active as citizens on behalf of their rights and responsibilities--they had to go get their rights. In tandem, they learned that they did not own their rights or responsibilities; rights and responsibilities inhered in or were produced through relationships, contravening their autonomy. (6) These paradoxical lessons, I suggest, derive from Lebanon's long immersion in globalization.

Lebanon in a Globalizing World

Perhaps more than any other Arab country, Lebanon has opened its borders to global political, commercial, social, and cultural influences. (7) Lebanon has been a crossroads of transcontinental movements of people, products, and ideas for centuries. Many foreign powers have invested politically, economically, socially, and culturally in Lebanon, turning Lebanon into a relatively free market of and haven for ideas, practices, and to some degree, of people. (8) Given its nineteen legally recognized and formally represented religious and ethnic communities, it is the most heterogeneous Arab country. Until just before the Civil War (1975-1990), Christians slightly outnumbered Muslims; but Muslims came to outnumber Christians in Lebanon sometime in the 1970's. From its modern inception (independence from the French mandate in 1943), Lebanon has been a country which looked outward. With none of the religious and ethnic communities demographically dominant, Lebanese pluralism has seemed to invite the involvement of international and regional actors in its internal affairs for hundreds of years. (9) The Civil War, which saw American troops, Israeli troops, Syrian troops, and United Nations troops battling in and for Lebanon for varying lengths of time, was only the most recent incident of regional and world intervention in the local affairs of the Lebanese.

There is no question but that Lebanon has been, for centuries, a player in the global market of people and ideas. It has had a laissez-faire economy with modest regulation of its borders. Lebanon has for centuries exported its people on a global scale. An exporter of human capital, Lebanon nevertheless continued to be a magnet for its own emigres (mughtaribeen) who often returned to Lebanon, bringing back transnational wealth as well as a wealth of transnational ideas. Lebanon has also been a net importer of regional and global labor, especially in the past half century. (10) The acceleration of exchange in people and ideas (intensified by the Civil War 1975-1990) in the past quarter to half a century, however, has had profound implications for childrearing practices and, more specifically, for what children learn as their notions of citizenship rights and responsibilities.

The end of the Lebanese Civil War in 1990 coincided with the international agreement called the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (1989). Perhaps because of this timing--as Lebanese were turning their attention to post-war reconstruction--Lebanese seemed to throw themselves into high gear on issues dealing with children and children's rights and responsibilities. The proliferation of scores of national and international NGO's dealing with Lebanese children in the 1990's seemed to manifest the need for a safe terrain on which the nation could gather to rebuild a sense of nationhood. It also seemed to represent the recognition that nation building required that the state turn children into a state political project. (11)

Lebanese have navigated their views on children's rights and responsibilities (huquq wal wajbat) through a sea of influences, almost all of which have been impacted by globalization. The Lebanese Civil War (1975-1990)--a regional war enormously influenced by global politics and resources--destabilized the Lebanese state. The borders of Lebanon fluidly transported Syrian, Israeli, American, United Nations troops into the Lebanese heartland during the war, and shipped off hundreds of thousands of Lebanese to France, Canada, England, the United States and other countries during and after the war. With the loss of Lebanese workers, Lebanon imported hundreds of thousands of foreign workers. The internationalization of the Lebanese labor force (begun in the 1950s) became particularly striking post-1990 for its entrance into the private space of the home and the sacred area of childrearing. Tens of thousands of foreign (female) domestic workers (Sri Lankans, Filipinas, Ethiopians, Indians) were hired within homes to do housework and were given direct responsibilities for child care. (12) The repercussions have ignited a heated public debate in newspapers and public media concerning the influence of foreigners on Lebanese children. (13) Even the return visits of Lebanese emigrants (mughtribeen)--with changing notions of children as subjects with rights and responsibilities--added more ingredients to the soup of socialization.

The war had many other repercussions on children and families as well. During the war, Lebanese competed with the militias for the loyalties of the young. After the war, the state, NGO's and other actors also focused more attention on children. The state promulgated a major revision of the Lebanese national curricula, developing pedagogies to train children for citizenship. Many of the curricular ideas were adopted from or influenced by French and American educational discourses and philosophies. (14) The nineteen religious communities, whose identities and power relations were high stake investments during the war, intensified charity, training, and religious work with children and families in the aftermath of war. International and national non-governmental organizations (NGO's) campaigned (and competed) for Lebanese children's rights through conferences, workshops, the parliament, and the national media. (15) Children became a site for nation-building post-civil-war, and a site for competition over the nature of that project.

These multiple transformative influences on how families teach their children rights and responsibilities produced paradoxical and contradictory impacts on local notions of children's rights and responsibilities in the two sites of study (Borj Hammoud and Yusfiyyi)--which cannot be called either authentically Lebanese or global. In the section below, I explain the construct of the connective self, patriarchal connectivity, and relational rights and responsibilities, which I found to be locally upheld ideas. This is followed by a description of the two sites of the field work. I outline the processes by which children were taught their rights and responsibilities in Borj Hammoud in the period between 1971-1980, before and during the first phase of the Lebanese Civil War, and in the period 1994-2004, after the war. I describe learning of rights and responsibilities in Yusfiyyi in period 1994-2004. An example of transnational families and transnational socialization of children right's from Yusfiyyi ends the data section of the paper, followed by concluding remarks about the implications of these processes for children becoming citizen subjects and learning their rights and responsibilities. Given the general academic and public understanding of liberalist notions of rights and responsibilities, I focus below my use of relational rights and responsibilities and connectivity.

Relational Rights and Responsibilities: Connectivity and Patriarchal Connectivity

By relational rights and responsibilities, I mean that a person's sense of entitlements and duties came from specific relationships that they built or were built for them. Relational rights and responsibilities were personally constructed claims and obligations to specific others. By patriarchal connectivity I mean the production of relational citizen-subjects socialized for aged and gendered hierarchy.

Residents in Borj Hammoud and Yusfiyyi came to have a sense of entitlement and duty by being invested in relationships. Rights and responsibilities belonged to relationships, not to autonomous selves. Relational rights and responsibilities were often unstated and at times came to be understood in the breach as much as in the practice. As rights and responsibilities were embedded in personal relationships, people invested enormous amounts of time to developing and maintaining relationships.

A breach in a relationship could disrupt rights and responsibilities and the mending often required the intervention of others. Mediation and brokerage were essential to the enactment of rights and responsibilities--thus rights and responsibilities involved not only those who were trying to obtain or discharge them, but also a bevy of others interconnected through them who acted as networks or middle-men/women. Relational rights and responsibilities created an arena in which one had to be very proactive constructing and investing in relationships--a kind of active citizenship. Political and social relationships required high-intensity investments of social labor, but they were investments shaped by patriarchy and patriarchal connectivity.

Children were not an undifferentiated category. Patriarchy systematically favored the boy's rights and responsibilities. Families (parents and extended kin) were more likely to be permissive with boy's breaking of rules than they were with girls' breaking of rules. Girl children found it more difficult than boy children to deviate from the rules and morality of family. Families were likely to allow boy children more freedom of movement, of exploration, and of trial and error than girl children. Boy children were given less responsibility at home and more outside the home and girl children more responsibility inside the home and less outside. Children, like women and junior males, did operate effectively in this system of rights and responsibilities, learning to maneuver specific relationships to gain access to what they wanted.

Patriarchy, as I define it, is not only gender-based but also age-based--a definition that is at variance with the way patriarchy is usually defined by western feminists. Patriarchy in Lebanon, and much of the Arab World, privileged elders over juniors. Elder siblings had authority over younger siblings. Extended family elders had authority over younger family members and non-kin elders expected deference. Ageism made it possible for elder women to gain power, especially as they moved out of child bearing years.

Gender privileging, however, was stronger than the age privileging. Younger males came to have authority over elder females. Younger brothers came to have authority over older sisters and their mothers at a certain point. While these patterns are continually changing, in Yusfiyyi in 1994, I observed a ten year old boy escorting a fifteen year old sister on an errand. The ten year old boy was thought to have capacities of judgement that the fifteen year old sister did not have. That sister, however, still had responsibilities of taking care of that brother. Girls generally came to believe that their brothers should have authority over them (though not necessarily without resistence). (20)

Patriarchy, in Lebanon, was kin-based. It was the privileging of males and elders and the justification of gender and aged privilege on the basis of kinship relations. Patriarchy meant that children's rights and responsibilities were embedded primarily in kinship. The constraints of kinship on children were intensified by the power of kinship idioms in the public sphere. The operations of relational rights and responsibilities in public spheres, in politics, in the state meant that rights and responsibilities were always mediated through patriarchy, in the domestic and the public sphere alike. Patriarchal relational rights and responsibilities meant that their relationships to society, economy, politics and religion were always mediated, most particularly through kin or idiomatic kin, and not direct. Patriarchal connectivity entailed the socialization of children for gendered and aged hierarchy based on kin moralities and idioms. It was sanctified in the public sphere by religion as well as by the power of kinship.

Borj Hammoud and Yusfiyyi:

The ethnographic basis for this project is urban (Borj Hammoud) and rural (Yusfiyyi). It has a long-term base line (over thirty years for Borj Hammoud and over ten years for Yusfiyyi). And it includes a heterogeneous population of Arab and non-Arab people from a number of countries and religious sects residing in Lebanon. Both sites reveal the profound influences of globalization for centuries.

In the early 1970's, Borj Hammoud was a prototype of a community produced by globalization. A very mixed urban working-class to middle-class municipality, it was a part of Greater Beirut. It housed approximately 200,000 Lebanese, Syrians, and Palestinians, with a sprinkling of Egyptians, Greeks, Jordanians and other nationalities. Its residents were Muslim and Christian, including Armenian Christian. It was about 40% Armenian, 40% Shi'a's and the remaining 20% Maronite, Roman Catholic, Greek Orthodox, Greek Catholic, Arab Protestant, Syrian Orthodox, Syrian Catholic, Sunni, Druze and Alawite. The Armenians had come to Lebanon and Borj Hammoud right after World War I, while Lebanon was still under the French Mandate, and again in the 1940s, both following Turkish massacres of Armenians. The Palestinians had come in 1948, after the wars which erupted with the establishment of the state of Israel and again in the 1970s after Jordanian attacks on Palestinians. The Syrians had come in the 1960s and 1970s, following regional developments which spurred economic growth in Lebanon, but economic disruption in Syria. Lebanese from South Lebanon (especially Shi'a) had moved into Borj Hammoud especially after the 1967 war transformed South Lebanon into a battle zone between the Arabs and the Israelis. The demography of Borj Hammoud by itself was a narrative that could only be told as a story of globalization.

In the 1970's Lebanese, Syrians, Palestinians, Muslims, Christians lived side by side in the same buildings, on the same streets, working in the same shops, profoundly influencing each other's ideas and behavior, frequently intermarrying, and often becoming each other's closest friends. (16) Following sectarian and ethnic purges during the war (beginning in 1975), however, Borj Hammoud became predominantly Christian for a period of time. After the Taif Accords which formally ended the Lebanese Civil War in 1990, many Lebanese Muslims, especially Shi'a, and some Syrians began returning to Borj Hammoud. Some returned to claim homes and property they abandoned during the war and some were new residents. As there is no current national census, the population and the religious/ethnic/national mix are difficult to estimate. There is no question, however that Borj Hammoud has become one of the most heavily populated suburbs of Greater Beirut. A dense mixture of religions, nationalities, and classes, Borj Hammoud has become predominately Lebanese and working class, with a highly mixed religious base.

The Civil War not only continued the disruptive Borj Hammoud history of population turnover, but also introduced many residents to international experiences. Many of the 1970 residents of Borj Hammoud were no longer residing there by 1994. Some had died, some had migrated abroad, some moved back to Syria, many had gone abroad for a period of time to work and returned. Some had married abroad. Almost all young people with whom I spoke who were still living there in 2004, said they would migrate if they could. Almost everyone had a family member or friend who had migrated and returned or continued to live abroad. The multiple languages they had learned in their public and private schools, starting from kindergarten, in Borj Hammoud, had served them well, as global events thrust them onto the global stage.

At the start of my research in 1994, Yusfiyyi (fictitious name) was a Christian village of about 5,000 residents in the governate of Mount Lebanon. It was predominantly Greek Orthodox and Maronite. Almost all the residents had been born in or married into the village. The majority of the residents owned family property, largely handed down over a few generations. While there were class differences within Yusfiyyi, it could be described as mainly lower-middle to middle-class. On the surface, it might seem as if Yusfiyyi exhibited more stability, homogeneity, and continuity than Borj Hammoud--thus appearing to be less impacted by globalization. However, this was not the case. Mount Lebanon had been subject to enormous turmoil for centuries, as a result of being pulled into global markets. Lebanon prospered from the 18th-19th century silk trade with Europe, then suffered with European capitalization of Chinese and other Oriental silk markets. Lebanese tobacco, textiles and food production rose and fell as regional markets expanded and contracted. Lebanon was flooded with European products, undermining local industry, as Ottoman concessions gave preferential treatment to European commodities. In the late 19th century, following several decades of class-based and sectarian conflicts, about 25% of the population of Mount Lebanon migrated to the Americas and Africa. Migration continued into the 20th century, with Lebanese strewn all over the world. Many, like my own parents, went back and forth, buying land, bringing their families back to Lebanon, returning with ideas and practices they had learned from places as distant as Brazil, Australia, Mali, the United States. In 1994, when this research project began, almost every family in Yusfiyyi had close family members in some part of the distant globe. A number were themselves dual citizens and most continued to export some members of their families abroad for education and work. Many had themselves spent time working abroad, in the Arab Gulf, in Europe or in the Americas. Many traveled to visit family abroad periodically. Like the youth of Borj Hammoud, most of the youth of Yusfiyyi would gladly have migrated had they had the ability to do so. Their most frequent request of me was to help them migrate to the United States.

By 20004, Yusfiyyi, within relatively easy driving distance of Beirut (15 kilometers), was growing rapidly. It had had a population of about 500 in 1950, increasing ten-fold to 5,000 in 2004. Its beauty and proximity to Beirut invited development. "Outsiders" were moving in, including a few non-Lebanese and non-Christians. A new phenomenon of "renters" was emerging. Most residents, however, still owned their houses, or owned apartments in multi-storied buildings (a relatively new phenomenon in the village). Everyone owned TV's, radios, had access to international media and almost all were informed to some degree of world and regional events. On the whole, the villagers were relatively educated. Despite the disruption of schooling during the Civil War, there was little illiteracy in Yusfiyyi, even among the older residents. And most of the young were bilingual or trilingual (reading and/or speaking French and English as well as Arabic). Villagers in Yusfiyyi were, therefore, integrally connected with global networks of people, products, and ideas.

My most intense research in Borj Hammoud was carried out 1971-1980, but frequent visits since 1994 have allowed me to track key issues. My most intense research in Yusfiyyi was 1994-2003, but I continue to carry out research annually. In both Borj Hammoud and Yusfiyyi, I found similar tensions within families attempting to teach their children their rights and responsibilities. The practices, in many respects, seemed to be shared, by Lebanese, Syrians, and Palestinians and by Muslims and Christians in Lebanon. The tensions escalated in both sites after the Civil War.

In Borj Hammoud and Yusfiyyi, residents could and did speak the language of children's autonomous rights and were aware of public discourses to that effect. They also modeled and practiced relational rights and responsibilities embedded in patriarchal connective networks, as they taught rights and responsibilities to their children.

Teaching Children Rights and Responsibilities in Borj Hammoud and Yusfiyyi

Perhaps the most important socio/cultural feature of Borj Hammoud and Yusfiyyi relevant to understanding the teaching and practice of children's rights and responsibilities is the intense sociability in both sites. In Borj Hammoud, from the decades of the 1970s and post-1990 and in Yusfiyyi in the decade 1994-2004, it was almost impossible to calculate the hours people spent daily building relationships through social visits. In interviews I conducted on social visits in 1972 in Borj Hammoud, when I asked female or male household heads (most of the visiting was done by females) who visited them and whom they had visited in the week previous to the interview, I found myself writing nonsensical answers. The most frequent visitors were immediate neighbors in the same building (regardless of their religion or nationality). I found myself writing 14, 21, 28 times a week for specific visitors because they typically visited 2, 3, 4 times a day or more. In a one-week period, for example, the sixty-five household heads I interviewed had been visited in their homes by or had themselves visited in their homes 1,357 people--an average of 21 visitors/visits per household head per week, 61% of whom were visitors to the household heads. Of the 834 visitors who came to the household heads' homes, 70 or 8% visited 8 times or more (more than once a day), and 135 or 16% visited 4-7 times in that one week. Of the 523 people that the household heads visited, 34 or 7% were visited 8 or more times by the household heads, and 63 or 12% were visited 4-7 times by the household heads in that one week. (17) While I did not attempt that kind of calculation in Yusfiyyi, observations over ten years produced a similar picture. Basically almost all free time was spent visiting others, especially with immediate neighbors (in Yusfiyyi's case, most neighbors were kin). Even some work time in the neighborhoods was social as domestic work was sometimes shared in Borj Hammoud and Yusfiyyi and local shops became sites of sociality.

For the argument of this paper, what is critical is that children were included in almost all the visits, regardless of the nature of the visits. They received visitors with their parents and they went on visits with their parents. In both Borj Hammoud and Yusfiyyi, a visitor to a home was considered a visitor to all in the home. Children were expected to receive, host, entertain visitors regardless of whom the visitors came to see. Children listened to and participated in almost all the conversations that transpired in household visits. They observed adults catering to kin and non-kin. They observed the transactions, pleasantries, negotiations, conflicts, mediations, and the after-visit reflections and commentaries.

Social visits were value-packed. Conversations included enormously important information on health, jobs, politics, local issues, schools, religious affairs. Such conversations were one of the primary means of information gathering for local residents of both sites. Children partook in this information exchange, contributing what they knew. Indeed, children, as frequent visitors in many households, were often important sources of information on who had what, who did what, who knew what, locally. Given that children were often more educated than their parents, children were also often better sources of information about ideas and events at the national or international level. A portrait of a number of children from one family in Borj Hammoud offers the flavor of children's practices of rights and responsibilities.

Neighbors assumed that any child of the neighborhood belonged to the neighborhood and that anyone in the neighborhood had the responsibility and was entitled to intervene in the activities and behavior of the street's children. When children misbehaved, fought, or were out of line, neighbors scolded them and told their parents on them. Neighbors also spent time playing with, feeding, or taking care of each other's children. Children, regardless of who they "belonged" to, were called upon to run errands for neighborhood elder, and help with small tasks. Children quickly learned that they were embedded in webs of sociality brimming with rights and responsibilities.

Shaady, the youngest son of my immediate neighbor, was 5 years old in 1972. At 5 he had already learned that if he needed anything, he needed connections to achieve them. Like his sister, Flaur, he was versed in the neighborhood networks. He assumed that he shared his circumstances with his good friends in the neighborhood, regardless of who they were, because he and they were idiomatic kin (like sisters and brothers). To his mother's amusement and modest chagrin, he took Koranic classes with the local sheikh in public school, because his Muslim neighborhood friends took them. Whenever he had special treats, he assumed he would share them with other children. Like most children in the neighborhood, he also assumed that he had rights in whatever anyone dear to him owned and demanded they share with him their goodies. When he got into trouble, he assumed his older siblings would run interference, which they did.

Shaady's sister, Flaur, twelve-years old in 1972, was a model of local sociality and active involvement in pursuit of rights and responsibilities. She was an avid visitor, constantly floating between apartments and houses, despite her brother's efforts to contain her movement (18). She was always thrilled to accompany her mother on visits, begged to accompany her brother, and latched on to neighbors when they opened their doors. Since the doors to our apartments were only a few feet apart, she visited me multiple times a day, when I was home. She was a store house of neighborhood knowledge. When my tape recorder broke down, she knew who had a tape recorder and offered to borrow it for me. When I needed a doctor, she recommended the doctor that her neighbor had used. When I needed to hem my pants, she took me two neighboring tailors, telling them to offer me a good price. As she felt quite close to me, she also felt entitled to offer my resources to others whom she knew might need them. She told neighboring children that I would take pictures of them, that I would give them rides in my car, that I had food in the house that they could have. As generously as she shared her knowledge and resources, she shared mine. This was not only a critical indicator of the connective relationship we had, but was typical of close familial and idiomatic kin relations in the neighborhood. Relationships entailed rights and responsibilities. Rights and responsibilities required relationships.

Flaur's brother, Hanna, 17 years old when I first met him in 1971, was a model local citizen. Highly respected and deeply embedded in relationships the local community, he felt responsibility for its well-being. He was heavily involved in raising his five younger brothers and sisters. When school issues came up, he was more likely to intervene on behalf of his siblings than was his alcoholic father. He disciplined his sister when she was unlady-like and encouraged his brothers and friends to work hard and become politically aware. He sought out local people who had knowledge of national politics. He took it upon himself to politically educate or learn from anyone who would talk with him--including me. As active a local citizen as one could find in the neighborhood in the 1970s, he was carving out a local career as a neighborhood leader.

Hanna exquisitely understood the necessity of relationships to make one's way and meticulously cultivated them on his own behalf and on the behalf of his family and friends. A Maronite Christian, he counted as one of his best friends, the half Shi'i, half Christian (identified locally as a Shi'i because his father was a Shi'i) son of a neighbor. He felt it was his responsibility to bridge sectarian divides by taking care of his Muslim friend, help him navigate local networks, and use his own resources to connect him to job possibilities. In one incident in the early 1970's, when his street Christian Palestinian friends refused to include his Muslim friend in a teenage boys' outing, Hanna refused to join them. They came around to include his friend. He explained to me that responsibilities must start with family and friends. Simultaneously, he was well aware that his high status as a responsible young man gave him rights in others. His friends would do almost anything for him.

When Hanna needed a job, he first talked to his mother's brothers, who had partly helped pay for his schooling. They connected him to others. He used his familial and neighborly connections to help his brothers find jobs. Always highly politically engaged, he became politically active during the war in the fighting. He used the connections he made with political leaders to take care of neighbors and family members. And when he was himself in danger, neighbors hid him from militias seeking to take him and possibly kill him. He repeated this story of fear and flight to me numerous times, each time revealing that he would have died had his neighbors not hid him. He and one of his brothers fled during the war to the Arab Gulf. Again he used family, neighborly, and political connections to find work and security. Even in the diaspora, the narrative of his survival, as he told it, was a story of relationships, networks, debts owned and paid, and rights and responsibilities mediated through kin and idiomatic kin.

By the 1990's Hanna was a successful businessman, back in the local neighborhood. He had become modestly fluent in English, occasionally read books of philosophy and politics in English, regularly tried to educate himself in national, regional and international politics, and utterly loved abstract conversations about ethics, morality, civilization, and history. He was more cautious about Lebanon's future, but still invested in its possibilities. Watching him in his store was a study in local brokerage and mediation as active citizenship. Neighbors came to him with problems which he would resolve through phone calls or visits to the right people. His land phone and cell phone were constantly ringing. His store was constantly buzzing with people who had no intention of buying anything from him. Not forgetting his primary responsibilities to his family, he employed one of his brothers, his sister's daughter and son, and had given his apartment to another brother to live in after he bought a new apartment for his wife and children. His store was the center for the activities of his brothers, except the one who had migrated and not returned.

Hanna repeatedly told me he felt that he no longer fit in the neighborhood, the neighborhood no longer represented his values, his standards, his life style. Yet he could not see his way out of the neighborhood. All his commercial value was invested in local relationships. All of his access to economic and political goods and resources were built through networks of kin-like relationships in the neighborhood. Even as he expressed distaste for the neighborhood and imagined and planned for possibilities for himself outside the neighborhood, he felt tied to it. He, his next oldest brother whom he employed, and his fifth oldest brother all worked in the neighborhood. His third oldest brother lived in the neighborhood, first with the family, then in an apartment that Hanna provided for him. While he claimed mobility and autonomy as his rights, and he dreamed and plotted his moves, he saw his possibilities conditioned by the realities of who he knew and what relationships he had, most of which were vested in the neighborhood in kin-like relationships. He was, however, actively building such relationships and a store of social value in another neighborhood he hoped, at some point, to move to.

Hanna was a study in active citizenship. He believed in going out and getting his rights. There was little that one could ascribe to him as "passive". He studied his circumstances, studied people, strategically invested in relationships which he may or may not have personally wished for, and actively built a nest-egg of good will by helping people who needed him, regardless of who they were. While Hanna seemed bent on this trajectory early on, his rise and fall and rise again as a local leader did not mark him as unusual in this neighborhood. Many, if not most, of the characteristics he exhibited as an active go getter of his rights and responsibilities were common in Borj Hammoud. And his active investment in relationships as the vehicle for accessing rights and responsibilities was normative for children and adults.

Yusfiyyi children, in the 1990's, like Borj Hammoud children in the 1970's, were very exposed to people and products from world markets. Most of the children went to the local school, a private school run by the Greek Orthodox church, which taught French as its first language, Arabic as its second language, and taught English by late elementary. Better off families sent their children to private schools in the surrounding towns which offered either French or English-based instruction. The most popular non-village school was one run by an American curriculum. There were no public schools in Yusfiyyi.

The exposure of Yusfiyyi children to world products made it difficult to buy them presents. On every trip, I brought gifts for the 50-100 children in the study and their siblings. To stay within my budget, I would try to find something in-expensive, but interesting that I thought they might not have. One summer, finding small, battery-powered face-fans that I thought the children would like, I bought 100 of them to take with me. When I distributed them in the village, the children said they had all owned these and discovered they did not work well. Indeed they did not! Another time, I bought small hand calculators and found many of the children already had these in their homes. All had televisions and most had VCR's in their homes. When I began research in 1994, most children did not have computers, but by 2004, many had computers and internet connections. Some of the children had surpassed me in their computer skills (not a high bar to pass, but still surprising giving the devastation the war left behind).

Children in Yusfiyyi, like children in Borj Hammoud, were seen as belonging to the neighborhood. In the case of Yusfiyyi, however, most of the neighborhood was recognized kin rather than idiomatic kin. This struck me when I first moved in and saw what seemed like a "gang" of adolescent males who regularly marched back and forth past my house. Transporting my completely misplaced New Yorker outlook, I was a bit uncomfortable. I asked my neighbor who they were and why they marched back and forth in groups like that. With a nonchalance, she listed nephews and grandsons and sons and cousins of hers and others. Every boy was defined in terms of a kin relationship. As to their "marching", she pointed out that children, adults, and elders, spent much of their leisure time visiting, walking, or hanging out in the church yard just down the street from my apartment. The "gang" of adolescent boys turned into a cove of kinship, invited into sociality.

Children learned that any adult had authority over them and that their rights and responsibilities were always conditioned by relationship and kinship. This came home to me watching six women reprimand a little boy who had spit on his grandmother. The boy wanted to go to the store and buy some sweets. The grandmother, who had already given him money to do just that earlier in the day, refused yet another trip to the store. When the 5 year old spit on his grandmother, all the women (kin and non-kin) sitting close by began to scold him. Shaming him and hollering at him, they pointed out that everything he had he owed to his grandmother. She took care of him, provided for him, cooked for him, gave him money--he would have nothing without his grandmother, they said. She had been responsible for him and he was responsible to and for her. Recalcitrant, the boy tried to spit again, only to elicit an escalation of the women's disapproval. Such was their condemnation of his behavior, that the wronged grandmother held him and hugged him and tried to make excuses for him. The women would have none of it, until they had quashed the behavior and made their point. Their point was not only that he must respect his grandmother, but that his rights and responsibilities in the world issued from his relationship with family elders.

In 1994, eight-year old Safia in Yusfiyyi, like Flaur in Borj Hammoud, was encyclopedic in her local knowledge. She knew which local grocer had the best price on colas, who had stocks of the "best" liquid soap, what neighbor had an extra radio that could be borrowed, who was home at 5pm and thus available for an interview. She was unabashedly enthusiastic in pouring out what ever information she had that I or others might need. While she was a bit more shy than Flaur from Borj Hammoud about laying claim to my resources, she had no trouble accepting them when offered or finding an indirect way of letting me know that she or someone in the neighborhood might need or make good use of something that I had. By 2003, Safia, 17, knew more than either of her parents about computers, technology, internet, national and international ideas and events. But, she still knew that her access to these and other possibilities all rested on relationships in the neighborhood. She worked with her mother and uncle and constantly nurtured local relationships to open doors for her future.

While children sometimes embarrassed their parents in their exchange interactions, in reality, these were practice sessions for adult negotiations in rights and responsibilities. They were very much modeled on what the children had observed or been directly taught by their parents. To have rights, the children knew that they had to know who had the resources, skills, and services to offer them rights.

Dunya, the 15 year old daughter of Ibrahim and Yasmin Unis, was a very street-wise girl in Borj Hammoud in 1972. While she was clearly bright and intelligent, she was not as studious as her older sister, Adiba, who began attending the Lebanese National University (very unusual in this neighborhood at that time). Like her ambitious sister, she had plans for her future. And like most children, she had learned to assess her assets in terms of social relationships. She was quite aware that her mother's family had more to offer her financially and in status than her father's. She spoke about her maternal uncles constantly and what they owned, who they knew, and how they would help her. Dunya spent an enormous amount of time visiting from one neighbor to another, talking about herself, her family, and learning about the people she visited. When she visited me, I felt that I had been interviewed. She mined the local networks, registering what each had to offer. (19)

Jamil, a six year old boy in Yusfiyyi in 2004, spent most of his time in the street, playing with other children or going from house to house. Soft-spoken, he mainly seemed to listen and watch. His huge eyes seemed to photograph everything around him. If another child needed something, he seemed to know who might have it. He rarely asked for anything, but was glad to accept and seemed to be around when things were being given away. Playing with his neighboring cousins who seemed to have somewhat better resources, he nevertheless was a reservoir of information for them about what they might need and where to find it.

Girl and boy children both learned that access to resources and rights was about having access to people who had resources and rights. They also learned that such access started with their families. Kin were often the first step in accessing non-kin resources. Kin provided each other with the basic networks connecting them to resources and services. Enacting relational rights and responsibilities required people in Lebanon to cross the lines of gender, class, religion and ethnicity. In crossing these lines, people could call each other "brother", "uncle", "daughter", "cousin" and the like to transport the expectations of kinship into non-kin relationships, thus creating idiomatic kin relationships.

Transnational Socialization for State Citizenship 

Lebanon has exported its people for over a century and half. Emigration from Lebanon escalated during and after the Civil War 1975-1990. Whole families left as well as single persons. Most emigrated through legal channels that allowed them residency and citizenship in new countries. Some emigrated illegally, but often were still able to obtain residency and citizenship in new countries. By and large, the exodus was of the educated young lower middle and middle classes, who were able to find work situations for themselves in the host countries. Most of those who emigrated during the war, continue to return to visit their families. Many buy or build homes in the village, expecting to return either frequently enough to warrant a home or to return permanently at some point.

The summer is the usual time of return. Even before the war, Lebanon geared up for huge influxes of thousands of emigres during the summer. Indeed, whole offices of the pre-war Lebanese government were dedicated to facilitating the visits and return of the emigres. Since the Taif Accords in 1990, the ritual of the summer return has begun again. In addition to emigres returning regularly and frequently to Lebanon, their Lebanese family members often visited them in the United States, France, Canada or where ever they resided. These visits occurred less in Borj Hammoud which was poorer than Yusfiyyi.

The movement back and forth between Lebanon and host countries of emigres and Lebanese family members has not only helped maintain family solidarities, but has also brought tensions and disruptions which have relevance to the socialization of children of these transnational families. Two examples from Yusfiyyi will give a sense of these tensions.

Didi, a 7-year girl in Yusfiyyi, in 1994, was about as practiced in active citizenship as a child of her age could be. She was the essence of "getting her own" through relationships. Actively cultivating relationships, she freely roamed the village streets, visiting from house to house. Fearlessly, she disappeared from her home for hours without her mother knowing where she was. While there was little to fear in a village of kin, she was extremely active in creating relationships. She was also acutely aware of what relationships had to offer. She begged her mother for goodies. When that failed, she begged her grandmother, which usually succeeded. If that failed, she begged her grandfather, which almost always worked. With parents, siblings and grandparents in the same house, she had access to many resources. However, aunts and uncles and grand aunts and grand uncles were also near by. None escaped her circle of sociality--nor would they have wanted to. By herself, she took the relatively long walk (by village terms) to visit her two uncles who lived at the end of the village. At the time, I would not allow my 8-year old daughter do the same walk by herself. However, kin and neighbors invited Didi in, talked with her, gave her things, disciplined her, and watched out for her. So embedded was she in kin, that the world must have seemed to be an extension of her family. Indeed, she seemed to own the space around her and feel entitled to all that it held.

While she was in early junior high, her parents moved to the United States, where they remained in order to become citizens. In 2003, my summer visit back to Yusfiyyi coincided with the summer visit of Didi and her family. I found the teenage Didi in the courtyard arguing with her father. She wanted him to drive her to her uncle's house at the end of the village. He howled in laughter and amusement at the thought of driving her to the same house that she had walked alone to from the time she was about 5 or less. He looked at me and to the other adults gathered raising his hands and eyes in bafflement that she would even propose such a request. She cried and whimpered and begged him to take her. He refused. She asked her mother, then grandmother, then grandfather. They all refused to drive her there. She sat and sulked, somehow overwhelmed by the thought of taking that familiar walk by herself. In her American home, she was driven by her father to most locations. Returning to Yusfiyyi, her ownership of the space around her was dislocated. Finally, a cousin resolved Didi's problem of space and mobility. She walked with Didi to their relative's home.

Mansour was the second eldest in his family and had become head of the family because his father had died and his oldest brother had emigrated during the war to the United States. Two other brothers, one single and one married with children, followed the eldest to the United States after the war. The married brother with children, Jean, had lived with his wife and children in the family home with his mother, Mansour and other brother and sisters for several years before migrating to the United States. Mansour had actively co-parented the children, two boys (a daughter was born to his brother in the United States). He had also actively co-parented his two brother's two sons, just as he had actively co-parented the two sons of his sister, who also lived with the family for a period of time after her marriage. During the summer of 2003, Jean's wife, Lina, returned to visit the family with her three children. Jean and Lina had bought an apartment in the village within walking distance of the family home. Daily they spent time with the family.

One afternoon, I found Mansour and his new wife, pregnant with their first child, having a heated discussion about french fries. I asked them what had happened. Mansour explained that he had bought french fries for the four boys (his brother's two sons and his sister's two sons) and had forgotten to buy for his brother's daughter. He told Jean's sons to share their french fries with their sister. They said no, they wanted to eat them. He insisted, they protested, and he continued to insist until they shared. Lina intervened on behalf of her sons. Mansour was appalled that the boys would not share with their sister. His wife, Rana, sided with Lina, arguing it was not his business to interfere. He was aghast that she could make such an argument. But he was even more appalled that Lina had said to him, apparently half jokingly, "You raise your children and I will raise mine". It was unthinkable to him that his nephews would not share with their sister, and unimaginable that he would not have authority over them.

Yet his sister-in-law (she was also his cousin), who had been quite submissive to the family when she lived with them, was now asserting an independent authority over her children. The children were exerting a sense of individualized entitlement that they had learned and enjoyed more commonly in the United States. This individualism was inconsistent with the responsibilities siblings and cousins had to each other in Lebanon. And the assertion of independence of a child from an uncle, especially a father's brother, was unthinkable to Mansour. He pondered at length what raising the children in the United States was doing to them and to the family. What he clearly was facing was a different notion of self, a different notion of rights and responsibilities that was taking hold in his extended family as a result of transnational socialization.

Paradoxes of Parenting in a Globalizing World

Parents and extended kin in Borj Hammoud and Yusfiyyi could not cite chapter and verse of international conventions on children's rights (nor could most American parents). These notions were neither alien nor "natural" to them. They were already embedded in contradictory and complementary ways in the discourses and practices of teaching children their rights and responsibilities as members of families and citizens of the state.

The universalized notions of rights, found in such instruments as the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, are built around constructs of selfhood which presume that the child is an autonomous self with a direct, unmediated relationship with the state. They presume that rights inhere in the individualized self and that rights are transportable--detached from relationships. They presume a self-interested self constantly renegotiating rights and they empower that autonomous self with the tools for contractual self-interested negotiations. They presume that the child has an equal status with adults as a separate person.

These notions of citizenship, rights and responsibilities, based on Western, historical, cultural concepts and emerging from Western political experiences, rooted in classical, liberal, bourgeois notions of the nation-state, underwrite a particular idea of the citizen subject. The citizen subject in the classical, liberal, bourgeois model is an individualized self. The citizen is a market creature. The citizen is a rational, self-interested actor who attempts to maximize gains and minimize losses. Recent research, by feminists, by minority scholars in the west, and third world scholars have pointed out these notions of self and citizenship are class-based, race-based and gender-based. The historical experience from which the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child emerged was a specific middle-class, white and primarily male model of citizenship. Women, minorities, and lower classes were not recognized historically as citizens and still struggle today in the industrialized West for full citizenship and full exercise of citizen rights.

Complex and contradictory notions of selfhood, rights and citizenship are always at play in tension with each other, side by side with each other. People negotiate between and among multiple notions of self, rights and citizenship. Children learn these shifting notions of selfhood, rights and citizenship by observing and interacting with the significant adults in their lives.

In Borj Hammoud and Yusfiyyi, rights and responsibilities were inflected with kinship and kinship was inflected with patriarchy. Patriarchy, in the Lebanese context, has been gender and age-based, privileging males and elders (including elder women). Age and elder privilege was justified on the basis of kinship morality. Patriarchal norms and relationships pervaded private and public spheres in Lebanon, especially through patron/client relationships. Patrons offered resources and services to clients in exchange for loyalty and service. The control of resources by the patron gave them more latitude in determining how much, under what conditions and to whom to give. Clients could and did play patrons off against each other. Political leaders drained state resources toward their clients to build their political bases. Citizens felt that their access to political rights and responsibilities was the result of the specific relationships they had to specific patrons. Rights became gifts of the patron to the client. Responsibilities became the traded commodity from the citizen to the patron. The state was viewed through the lens of the set of personal relationships each person created.

In Borj Hammoud and Yusfiyyi, children learned early on that they had to actively pursue their rights and responsibilities. They learned that rights and responsibilities did not come to them, they had to go get their rights and responsibilities, and that their rights and responsibilities were mediated through networks of kin and kin-like relationships. They learned early on to build relationships, nurture relationships, and navigate relationships both for the sake of relationships in and of themselves and for the sake of accessing rights and responsibilities through these relationships. They learned that access to the state and to citizenship was through these highly personalized networks, always inflected with kinship, with patriarchy, with connectivity. Through this lens, the state was both a distant as well as a closely proximate entity. The state was as close as the networks which linked the child to politically significant actors. And no one was without ties that linked to politically significant actors. No one was without ties to the state. Yet the state was not a thing on to itself. The state was the specific set of relationships that bound the children and their families to each other and through each other to the state. As such, the state did not endow children with their rights and responsibilities. But their relationally endowed rights and responsibilities actively tied them to the state.

But most children of Borj Hammoud of Yusfiyyi in the periods in which I worked with them, were already embedded in and conditioned by globalization. Wars, migrations, forced and voluntary movements of peoples, the trade in ideas and products over centuries had produced in Borj Hammoud and Yusfiyyi cultures that were neither universal nor "indigenous". Awareness of the uncertainty in world around them, of their own temporality, of the fragility of their stability led families to react pragmatically to events. They raised their children situationally, teaching what they saw as their cultural values, but adapting as need arose for adjustments. These were at times conceptualized as differences or confusions, but as often as not they were not necessarily reflected upon. They were just acted upon. Such paradoxes created active citizenship in a social world that activated autonomy filtered though embedded sociality. As such, the competing, complementary, and overlapping discourses and practices of teaching children rights and responsibilities could not be conceived of as determined by or producing solely either autonomous, rights-endowed children nor connective, relationally-nested children, but some complex brecciated architecture of the citizen subject. Such is the citizen subject of globalization, both and neither, and something else.

ENDNOTES

I would like to thank my research assistants Benjamin D'Harlingue and Fawn Schoer for helping assemble materials for this article and Peter N. Stearns for organizing the conference on children at which this paper was presented. His comments and those of the other participants were most helpful in the revisions.

1. Natalie Hevener Kaugman, Irene Rizzini, Kathleen Wilson and Malcolm Bush, "The Impact of Global Economic, Political and Social Transformations on the Lives of Children. A Framework for Analysis," in Globalization and Children: Exploring Potentials for Enhancing Opportunities in the Lives of Children and Youth, Natalie Hevener Kaufman and Irene Rizzini, eds. (New York, 2002), p. 4.

2. Suad Joseph, ed., Gender and Citizenship in the Middle East (Syracuse, 2000).

3. G. Van Buren, The International Law on the Rights of the Child (London, 1995); G. Van Buren, ed., International Documents on Children (London, 1993).

4. See Suad Joseph, "Children and Women's Rights: Gender, Relationality and Patriarchy in Rights Practices in Lebanon" in Gender and Citizenship in Lebanon, Najla Hamadeh, Jean Said Makdisi, Suad Joseph, eds. (Beirut, 1999), p. 325-342 (in Arabic); Suad Joseph, "Citizenship Responsibility and Children: Dilemmas of Patriarchal Relational Responsibility in Lebanon," in Building Citizenship in Lebanon, Walid Moubarak, Antoine Messarra, Suad Joseph, eds. (Beirut, 1999), pp. 175-194 (in Arabic).

5. Suad Joseph, "Problematizing Gender and Relational Rights: Experiences from Lebanon," Social Politics 1:3 (Fall 1994): 271-285.

6. Bryan Turner, "Contemporary Problems in the Theory of Citizenship" in Citizenship and Social Theory, Bryan Turner, ed. (London, 1993), pp. 1-18.

7. For a distinguished early account which continually reads Lebanese history within regional and global developments see Philip K. Hitti, History of Syria Including Lebanon and Palestine (New York, 1951). For a reinterpretation of Lebanon's history in the context of the Civil War, see Kamal Salibi, A House of Many Mansions: The History of Lebanon Reconsidered (Berkeley, 1988).

8. Elie Adib Salem, Modernization Without Revolution: Lebanon's Experience (Bloomington, IN, 1973); Leonard Binder, ed., Politics in Lebanon (New York, 1966).

9. Ussama Makdisi, The Culture of Sectarianism. Community, History and Violence in Nineteenth-Century Ottoman Lebanon (Berkeley, 2000); William R. Polk, The Opening of South Lebanon 1788-1840. A Study of the Impact of the West on the Middle East (Cambridge, MA, 1963); Iliya F. Harik, Politics and Change in a Traditional Society, Lebanon 1711-1845 (Princeton, 1968).

10. Albert Hourani and Nadim Shehadi, eds., The Lebanese in the World: A Century of Emigration (London, 1992).

11. When I began my long-term research project on how Lebanese children learn their notions of rights, responsibilities and citizenship in 1994, I thought I would be carving a frontier. To my surprise, by 1994 (only 4 years after the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child took effect) there were dozens of Lebanese NGO's dedicated to working for children's rights in Lebanon.

12. There are about 500,000 Syrian workers in Lebanon, heavily involved in the construction industry, but also doing all sorts of manual labor. There are about 300,000 Palestinians, most of whom came either in 1948, in the immediate aftermath of the founding of Israel or in the late 1960s and early 1970s after Jordan clamped down on PLO (Palestine Liberation Organization) activities. Domestic workers imported into Lebanon come from Sri Lanka, the Philippines, India, Sudan, Eritrea, Somalia and other countries. By some counts there are over 100,000 Sri Lankans alone in Lebanon, overwhelmingly women, the majority of whom are domestic workers. It is not uncommon for Lebanese newspapers and media editorials to decry the influence of these foreign workers on Lebanese children. However, the use of child care workers in the home is not new to Lebanon. Prior to the Civil War (1975-1990), a succession of domestic workers poured into Lebanese house-holds, first from the rural areas of Lebanon to the urban areas, then from Syria, then from Egypt, then from Seychelles and so forth. What is striking now about the rise of the foreign domestic worker, is that this pattern pervades not only urban middle- and upper-class homes, but is found even in rural homes and lower middle-class homes.

13. See Ray Jureidini, "Migrant Workers and Xenophobia in the Middle East," Identity, Conflict and Cohesion (New York, 2003); Ray Jureidini, "Migrant Women Domestic Workers in Lebanon," report prepared for the International Labor Organization (Beirut, 2001); Ray Jureidini and N. Moukarbel, "Contract Slavery: the Case of Female Sri Lankan Domestic Labour in Lebanon," paper presented to the Workshop on Domestic Service and Mobility, The International Institute of Social History (Amsterdam, 5-7 February, 2001).

14. Louise-Marie Chidiac, Abdo Kahi, Antoine N. Messarra, eds., La Generation de la Releve Vols. I-IV (Beirut, 1992-1995); Lebanese Foundation for Permanent Civil Peace, Citizen for Tomorrow: Patterns for Civic Culture (Beirut, 1995).

15. The UN Convention on the Rights of the Child was adopted by the UN General Assembly on November 20, 1989 and went into effect September 2, 1990. Almost immediately, a flood of literature was produced examining how to apply these conventions to Lebanese and Arab children. For the formal documents on the Convention see UNICEF, "First Call for Children. World Declaration and Plan of Action From the World Summit for Children" (New York, 1990) or G. Van Buren (1993), op. cit. For literature from international, national and non-governmental organizations on the rights of the Lebanese child which are very much within global discourses on the rights of the child see: UNICEF, Lebanese National Core Team, "Lebanon Global Education Project" (Casablanca, 1994); UNICEF, "UNICEF in Lebanon" (Beirut, 1994); Arab Resource Collective, "Training of Trainers on Children's Rights" Workshop in Broumana, Lebanon, (Beirut, 1994); Ghanem Bibi, "Towards Involving Parents in Early Childhood Education. Partnership with Parents" Workshop, Siblin, Lebanon (Beirut, 1993). For manuals on "how to teach rights" to Arab children see Jacqueline Sfeir and Julia Gilkes, "Challenges and Initiatives in Early Childhood Education" (Beirut, 1992); Heather Jarvis, Jackie Chapman, Chris Gibb, Don Harrison, "The Whole Child. A Project to Introduce the UN Convention on The Rights of the Child to 8-13 Year Olds" (Oxford, 1990); Heather Jarvis, Jackie Chapman, Chris Gibb, Don Harrison, "Its Our Right. A Project to Introduce the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child to 8-13 Year Olds" (Oxford, 1990). For similar globalized rights discourse literature on the Arab child see Siona Jenkins, "The Arab Child: Challenges for a Brighter Future" (Amman, Jordan, 1993); Sherene Seikaly and Ghanem Bibi, Children's Rights in the Arab World: Arab Discourse and Legislative Study (Beirut, 1995); League of Arab States and UNICEF, The Arab Plan on Child Welfare, Protection and Development and Resolutions of the High Level Arab Meeting for Children (Amman, Jordan, 1992). For parallel literature on other Arab countries, see especially Osman Osman and Hoda Rashad, eds., The Situation of Egyptian Children and Women. A Rights-Based Analysis. (Cairo, 2002); In'am Mufti, "Rights of the Child in the Arab World," Journal of Arab Affairs, Vol. 9, No. 1 (Spring 1990): 41-60.

16. Suad Joseph, "The Politicization of Religious Sects in Borj Hammoud, Lebanon." Ph.D. Dissertation (1975, Columbia University) pp. 280-292.

17. Ibid.

18. Suad Joseph, "Brother-Sister Relationships: Connectivity, Love, and Power in the Reproduction of Patriarchy in Lebanon" in Suad Joseph, ed., Intimate Selving in Arab Families. Gender, Self and Identity (Syracuse, 1999), pp. 113-140.

19. For more about the Unises, see Suad Joseph, "Connectivity and Patriarchy among Urban Working-Class Arab Families in Lebanon," Ethos 21:4 (1993): 452-484.

20. See Joseph, "Brother-Sister Relationships," op.cit.

By Suad Joseph

University of California, Davis 

Anthropology Department

One Shields Avenue

Davis, CA 95616