Table of Contents for Famine Worlds
Introduction: Four Years of War
The introduction outlines the war and its effects on the eastern Mediterranean region during World War I, showing how trends and events eventually produced catastrophic famine in what would become Lebanon in the war's aftermath. It evaluates Lebanon's place in the war's historiography and makes the case for a history of the war as more than just a hinge event. The wartime famine was a lived context that shaped the lives of everyone it touched for four years through catastrophe and social destruction. Rather than simply asking what happened in the famine, this book considers how lives throughout society were transformed by the famine. It argues that within the overarching experience of the famine, each person lived within their own famine world—to understand the war demands that we unravel the complexity of life in the crisis from the perspectives of those who lived it.
1.Some "Sufficed"; Others Died
Many studies of the famine in Lebanon during World War I have dwelled on the causes of the crisis, focusing on factors like government mismanagement, military blockade, or economic weaknesses to explain why the famine took place. Chapter 1 reconsiders the question of famine causality, instead asking more specific questions about how the famine was experienced on an individual level and why there was such a diversity of experiences. It analyzes the challenges that different communities and individuals across the region faced as a result of the war and how famine catalysts triggered vulnerabilities to produce patterns of suffering and resiliency that had life or death implications during the war. It concludes that famine susceptibility was complicated but often depended on the ways that latent and acquired vulnerabilities such as social status, gender, profession, and location were offset by social assets and resiliency.
2.Death and the Famished Body
Death tolls are a tempting metric for measuring famine suffering, but in the case of the Lebanese famine of World War I, the statistics are frequently misleading, and contemporaneous political and social interpretations of death tolls have left us with more questions than answers. Chapter 2 advises against a statistical measure of famine death in favor of a qualitative understanding of the way that the famine changed perspectives about death on both small and mass scales. The chapter argues that new, famine-specific constructs of poverty and the body excluded many from the compassion normally afforded to the dead, rendering individuals sympathetic in literature but ultimately ungrievable in practice. This extended from wartime reports about suffering to the ways that bodies were treated—both before and after death left them vacant.
3.Staying Alive
Survival strategies can easily be dismissed as the last resort of the desperate in times of crisis, but they were necessary aspects of life for nearly everyone during the Lebanese famine of World War I. Chapter 3 shows how individuals across society used coping strategies to counteract the changes that the famine wrought in their daily lives. Some strategies sought to mitigate the effects of high prices, unemployment, and scarcity; others, like migration, sought to modify personal circumstances in order to make the famine more survivable. While many strategies were undertaken on an individual level, others were extensions of the same collective and cultural practices that supported people in normal times. Ultimately, coping was not a sign of desperation but rather a rational expression of agency by those seeking to endure the crisis.
4.Trauma and Time
The lived experience of the Lebanese famine of World War I was in many ways defined by the trauma that the crisis inflicted on those who suffered directly or merely vicariously from its effects. Chapter 4 evaluates how trauma and time shaped the lives of individuals across society. It considers concepts of historical and felt time during crisis and shows how the famine redefined the temporal rhythms and activities of those who lived it. It argues that time and trauma were cumulative and transformative—when the effects of both were combined, they had real social consequences. The ongoing exposure to the horrors of the famine redefined social attitudes and behaviors as people coped with the intense suffering that they encountered in their daily lives. Such transformations were projected as a normalization of suffering, an aversion to poverty, and a reconceptualization of those who suffered as the famine dragged on.
5.A World in Decline
For many elevated observers of the famine, the physical degeneration of starvation and the filth that covered the bodies of the poor beggars on the streets were metaphors for the region's spiritual decline. They saw confirmations of collapse in the rise of criminality, taboo breaking, the dereliction of duties, and moral transgressions that increased as the famine progressed. Chapter 5 investigates how perspective influenced how participant observers understood both the famine and others within it. It argues that preexisting ideologies and the traumas of daily life influenced discourse about concepts like poverty, suffering, and worthiness in contemporaneous writing. These new famine-contingent definitions shaped the content and terminology used in the informal information networks that conveyed news across the region amid Ottoman wartime censorship. Such discourses of decline ultimately moralized suffering and dehumanized those who suffered as observers tried to rationalize the disaster they saw around them.
6.The Unwashed and Unwell
Along with conflict and famine, Lebanon also had to contend with the impacts of disease during World War I. Thanks to poverty, displacement, and medical deficiencies, familiar afflictions grew both deadlier and more prevalent, and epidemics of typhus and malaria menaced the population. Chapter 6 argues that, though it was neither the deadliest nor the most widespread disease during the famine, epidemic typhus had the greatest social impact of any pathogen in the period because its disease construct also encompassed the poor and starving migrants who were most associated with it. In essence, the typhus construct infected other concepts, like poverty and suffering, at a time when the secure had already grown averse to the poor living in their midst. Due to the disease and the lice that spread it, the starving grew to be seen as more than just distasteful, but dangerous as well.
7.The Sheep and the Goats
Humanitarian work conducted in Lebanon during World War I was portrayed in glowing terms in the war's aftermath, but it exacted a toll on those who conducted it. Chapter 7 analyzes the experience of American humanitarians during the famine to understand how the social changes of the famine influenced their lives and their work. It examines American aid work and the workers who conducted it, with a special focus on the triage policy implemented in 1917. It argues that while seeking to rationalize aid distribution, American humanitarian policy came to rely upon notions of worthiness that favored those deemed more worthy rather than those in the greatest need. It argues that such rationalization was necessary to ensure the flow of aid but that it made humanitarians arbiters of life and death while not necessarily alleviating the trauma that the work inflicted on them.
8.Conclusion: An Uncomfortable Memory
Both the centennial of the famine and Lebanon's current descent into economic crisis have rekindled the memory of the famine as an archetype of suffering in the country. However, that memory and the meanings that it conveys remain quite complicated. Even commemorations that sympathize with the subjects of the crisis are often still framed by perspectives that regard the famine as an era of shame and victimhood. The conclusion contends that the victimhood narrative was merely one aspect of the famine that was privileged by the politics of the postwar period and the perspective of elite observers. It argues that additional meaning can be derived from the stories from within the famine that include themes of survival and the reclamation of honor. It ultimately asks what meaning the memory of the famine can bring to those enduring the traumas of today.