Munira Khayyat: A LANDSCAPE OF WAR

Monika Halkort in conversation with Munira
Khayyat
A LANDSCAPE OF WAR


What worlds take root in war? This talk takes us to the
southern border of Lebanon where resistant ecologies thrive amid
perennial gusts of war. In frontline
villages armed invasions, indiscriminate bombings and
scattered landmines have become the conditions within which
everyday life is waged. Here, multi-species partnerships
such as tobacco-farming and goat-herding carry life through
seasons of destruction. Neither green-tinged utopia nor
total devastation, these survival collectives make life possible
within an insistently deadly region. Sourcing an
anthropology of war from where it is lived decolonizes
distant theories of war and brings to light
creative practices forged in the midst of ongoing
devastation. Like other unlivable worlds of the Anthropocene, war
is a place where life must go on.


Munira Khayyat teaches anthropology at New York
University Abu Dhabi. She is the author of A Landscape of
War: Ecologies of Resistance and Survival in South
Lebanon (University of California Press 2022). Her
writing has appeared in American Ethnologist, Public
Culture, JMEWS, Cultural
Anthropology, Anthropology News, HAU and a number
of edited volumes. Khayyat was a Member of the School of Social
Science at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton
(2018-19). Before joining NYUAD, she taught at the American
University in Cairo (2013-23) and the American University of
Beirut (2011-13). She holds a PhD in Cultural Anthropology from
Columbia University.


Monika Halkort is a researcher and lecturer at
the School for Transformation at the University of Applied Arts
in Vienna. Her research focuses on the political and moral
ecology of techno-scientific infrastructures and their historical
entanglements with colonial knowledge regimes. Next to her
academic work, she is a regular contributor to the Ö1 programs
Radiokolleg and Diagonal.