Living in Refuge: Ritualization and Religiosity in a Christian and a Muslim Palestinian Refugee Camp in Lebanon

Abstract

This comparative ethnography of a Muslim and a Christian Palestinian refugee camp in Lebanon focuses on contrasting social belonging processes through a ritualization approach. The author argues that contrasts emerge out of the intersectionality of religiosity, nationhood, refugeeness and politics, and synthesizes academic research on piety and moral self-cultivation and on the everyday life of religious communities. He contributes to the literature on refugees at large, and Palestinian refugees in particular, with the unique dense socio-historical portrait of two refugee camps for which there is almost no recorded literature.