The work of Munira Khayyat and that of Jean-Michel Landry are brought together in this issue by ethnographic location: Lebanon, a country experiencing a groundswell of anthropological interest. As war, occupation, and authoritarianism have rendered Syria, Iraq, Yemen, Palestine, and Egypt increasingly dangerous, if not impossible, to research, Lebanon became a compelling field site for anthropology graduate students interested in the Middle East. Thus, in the anthropology of the region, Lebanon has perhaps emerged as a new “prestige zone” (Abu Lughod, 1989; Deeb & Winegar 2012). After all, war and violence are not just theoretical or ethnographic subjects; they are often the conditions of possibility, and impossibility, for funding, access, mobility, and academic knowledge production. Thus Lebanon, which for too long has been framed as politically, demographically, socially, and religiously exceptional in the region, came to stand in for it. And yet, as revealed in Khayyat's and Landry's work, “peace” and “stability” do not characterize Lebanon as a field site. As many anthropologists of Lebanon have reminded us (e.g., Al-Masri, 2017; Hage, 2015; Hermez, 2017; Mikdashi, 2022; Moghnieh, 2017; Peteet, 2005), and as the present state of the country teaches us, the temporality of violence is both historical and future oriented. It is as productive as it is destructive.

Both articles are set in areas of Lebanon coded, in Lebanon and outside it, as dominated by Hezbollah. In the 2006 war, Israel targeted both the southern suburbs of Beirut and the country's South, as it did and has done in many wars and skirmishes before and after that year. The targeting aims to inflict terror on a particular group of people, to shake political support, and to manifest the brutal, inevitable result of sectarian and classed residential separation in a divided city and country. Although Landry does not address the 2006 war and its effects on the seminary or seminarians, the lived reality of violence inescapably shapes both the communal environment (bi'a) that Landry is interested in and the resistant ecologies that Khayyat attends to. This lived reality exists at multiple scales: the local (crime, fights, exploitation), the national (civil war), the geopolitical (invasion, occupation, and war). Landry explores Shi‘i seminaries and the teaching and practice of ethics as sites to reimagine the relationship between political ethics, subjectivity, and communal environments (see also Kassem, 2016, 2018). Khayyat reveals how resistant ecologies invite a reconceptualization of communities in which humans are not the sole actors but rather members of human-tobacco-goat collectives that create and sustain life in landscapes of war and destruction.

Khayyat and I share, with Al-Masri (2017, p. 46) and many others, a felt understanding of how “attention to the cumulative experience of living in war—be it one's own or another context—deepens a researcher's ability to discern war as a condition of living rather than an encountered event.” Khayyat compellingly insists that we revisit life, space, and time as shared projects that humans never fully control. For example, the archives of the highest court were burned in a fire started by a mortar barrage during the Lebanese Civil War. Working in this archive, I came to view its lifeworld as an assemblage of people, objects, and infrastructure—all open to the reversals of time. A fire that began more than 40 years ago continues to burn in Lebanese jurisprudence. To understand how past wars continue to press into futures, just as future wars already shape our present, we must appreciate the skill of Khayyat's goats in evading land mines. We must squint through the weak flashlight built into a lighter because on some days there was no electricity in the archive of the state's highest court. We must smell the burning of tobacco and legal files, and dwell in the multiplying relationships between the sensorial, the relational, and the temporal.

I am especially drawn to Landry's work, since he and I have both conducted research in religious institutions and their attendant court systems, both of which are largely worlds of men. Gender affects researchers’ access to Islamic and Christian seminaries, just as it permeates the work and impact of these institutions in Lebanon and elsewhere. The Shi‘i personal status courts, for example, staffed by male graduates of seminaries, are the site of women's opposition to and protest against what they consider punitive custody judgments and corruption in the courts’ financial, political, and moral registers. Gender and gender relations are a fundamental part of the bi'a that seminarians emerge from, live in, and are concerned with, and we all will learn from Landry when he turns his sensitive ethnographic analysis to this fact.

Landry and I also share an interest in ethical practice. Many of my interlocuters, in part seeking to avert future wars, engaged in what I call evangelical secularism. That is, they sought to practice and cultivate an ethics, culture, and politics of anti-sectarianism. They wanted to reshape public space in ways that would allow different, secular forms of subjectivity to flourish. Many of them were queer, feminist, and anti-sectarian activists, and they shared several concerns with Landry's seminarians. Some of the seminarians and evangelical secularists live in the same neighborhoods and hail from the same families. And yet would these evangelical secularists and seminarians recognize themselves as allies in a joint struggle? Can the anthropology of religion and of secularism hold space for them as they are, living together and building—sometimes through friction—a communal environment? As I argued in my book (Mikdashi, 2022), secularism and religion are both embodied, communal, proselytizing, and ethical practices; they structurally and affectively contain each other. The seminarians and evangelical secularists share the desire to produce, embody, and model a lifeworld in which religion can be purified of “noise.” Yet they differ on their visions of what kind of future and what new subjectivities, collectives, and environments these ethical practices should bring forth. This cacophony of desired futures is one of the soundtracks of Lebanon, and of ethnography in its best registers.

Writing this reflection from Beirut, in this quotidian temporal holding cell of political and economic implosion, I cannot help but wonder what kind of life multispecies networks are making possible—even if it is a bitter life, to paraphrase Khayyat. What are the assemblages that produce life, or perhaps cling to it, like barnacles on a capsized boat, as a regimen of daily survival? What are the codes of being stranded together in this forever temporary? Is steadfastness an ethical project, a communal environment that is cultivated in times of war, peace, and paralysis? What new understandings of violence, itself just another word for life, will emerge from this collective, cacophonous experience?

Munira Khayyat 和 Jean-Michel Landry 的作品在本期中按民族志位置汇集在一起​​：黎巴嫩，一个正在经历人类学兴趣高涨的国家。由于战争、占领和威权主义使叙利亚、伊拉克、也门、巴勒斯坦和埃及的研究变得越来越危险，如果不是不可能的话，黎巴嫩成为对中东感兴趣的人类学研究生的一个引人注目的实地考察点。因此，在该地区的人类学中，黎巴嫩可能已经成为一个新的“声望区”（Abu Lughod，1989 年；Deeb 和 Winegar ，2012 年）). 毕竟，战争和暴力不仅仅是理论或民族志的主题；它们通常是资助、获取、流动和学术知识生产的可能性和不可能的条件。因此，长期以来一直被认为在该地区在政治、人口、社会和宗教方面具有特殊性的黎巴嫩开始代替它。然而，正如 Khayyat 和 Landry 的著作所揭示的那样，“和平”和“稳定”并未将黎巴嫩描述为实地。正如许多黎巴嫩人类学家提醒我们的那样（例如，Al-Masri，2017 年；Hage，2015 年；Hermez，2017 年；Mikdashi，2022 年；Moghnieh，2017 年；Peteet，2005 年）)，正如该国的现状告诉我们的那样，暴力的暂时性既是历史性的，也是面向未来的。它既具有破坏性又具有生产力。

这两篇文章都设置在黎巴嫩编码的地区，在黎巴嫩境内外，由真主党控制。在 2006 年的战争中，以色列将贝鲁特南郊和该国南部作为目标，就像它在那年前后的许多战争和小规模冲突中所做的那样。瞄准的目的是对特定人群造成恐怖，动摇政治支持，并体现分裂的城市和国家的宗派和阶级住宅隔离的残酷，不可避免的结果。尽管兰德里没有谈到 2006 年的战争及其对神学院或神学院学生的影响，但暴力的现实生活不可避免地塑造了公共环境（bi'a) Landry 感兴趣的是 Khayyat 关注的抗性生态学。这种活生生的现实存在于多个层面：地方（犯罪、战斗、剥削）、国家（内战）、地缘政治（入侵、占领和战争）。兰德里探索什叶派神学院和伦理学的教学与实践，将其作为重新构想政治伦理学、主体性和公共环境之间关系的场所（另见 Kassem，2016 年，2018 年）。Khayyat 揭示了抗性生态如何引发对社区的重新概念化，在这些社区中，人类不是唯一的参与者，而是人类-烟草-山羊集体的成员，这些集体在战争和破坏的景观中创造和维持生命。

Khayyat 和我与 Al-Masri ( 2017，页。46) 和许多其他人，对“关注战争中累积的生活经历——无论是在自己的经历还是其他经历——加深了研究人员将战争视为一种生活条件而不是遭遇事件的能力”的理解。Khayyat 令人信服地坚持认为，我们将生命、空间和时间作为人类永远无法完全控制的共同项目重新审视。例如，黎巴嫩内战期间，最高法院的档案在迫击炮弹幕引发的火灾中被烧毁。在这个档案馆工作时，我开始将它的生活世界视为人、物和基础设施的集合——所有这些都对时间的逆转开放。一场始于 40 多年前的大火在黎巴嫩法理学中继续燃烧。要了解过去的战争如何继续影响未来，就像未来的战争已经塑造了我们的现在一样，我们必须欣赏 Khayyat 的山羊躲避地雷的技能。我们必须通过打火机内置的微弱手电筒眯着眼睛，因为在某些日子里，该州最高法院的档案馆里没有电。我们必须闻到烟草和法律文件燃烧的气味，并沉浸在感官、关系和时间之间的倍增关系中。

我特别喜欢兰德里的作品，因为他和我都对宗教机构及其附属法院系统进行过研究，这两个主要是人类的世界。性别影响研究人员进入伊斯兰和基督教神学院的机会，就像它渗透到这些机构在黎巴嫩和其他地方的工作和影响一样。例如，由男性神学院毕业生组成的什叶派个人身份法庭是女性反对和抗议她们认为的惩罚性监护判决以及法庭财务、政治和道德记录中的腐败的场所。性别和性别关系是bi'a的基本组成部分神学院的学生从中诞生，生活在其中，并与之相关，当兰德里将他敏感的民族志分析转向这一事实时，我们都会向兰德里学习。

兰德里和我也对道德实践感兴趣。我的许多对话者，部分是为了避免未来的战争，参与了我所谓的福音派世俗主义. 也就是说，他们试图实践和培养一种反宗派主义的伦理、文化和政治。他们希望以允许不同的、世俗形式的主观性蓬勃发展的方式重塑公共空间。他们中的许多人是酷儿、女权主义者和反宗派活动家，他们与兰德里的神学院学生有着共同的担忧。一些神学院学生和福音派世俗主义者住在同一个街区，来自同一个家庭。然而，这些福音派世俗主义者和神学院学生会承认自己是共同斗争的盟友吗？宗教和世俗主义的人类学能否为他们留出空间，让他们生活在一起并建立——有时是通过摩擦——一个共同的环境？正如我在书中所说（Mikdashi，2022 年), 世俗主义和宗教都是具身化的、公共的、传教的和道德的实践；它们在结构上和情感上相互包容。神学院学生和福音派世俗主义者都希望产生、体现和塑造一个可以净化宗教“噪音”的生活世界。然而，他们对这些伦理实践应该带来什么样的未来以及什么样的新主观性、集体和环境有不同的看法。这种期望未来的杂音是黎巴嫩的配乐之一，也是民族志最好的配乐之一。

在贝鲁特写这篇反思，在这个政治和经济内爆的司空见惯的临时牢房里，我不禁想知道多物种网络正在使什么样的生命成为可能——即使这是一种痛苦的生活，用 Khayyat 的话说。是什么组合产生了生命，或者可能依附于它，就像翻船上的藤壶一样，作为日常生存的养生之道？在这个永远短暂的地方被困在一起的密码是什么？坚定不移是一种道德项目，一种在战争、和平和瘫痪时期培养起来的公共环境吗？这种集体的、嘈杂的经历会对暴力本身产生什么样的新理解，而暴力本身只是生命的代名词？