Languages of Stateness in South Lebanon's Palestinian Gatherings: The PLO's Popular Committees as Twilight Institutions

Public authority beyond the state has often been seen as isolated from the state and/or constituting a threat to the state. Recent scholarship, however, has started to conceptualize ‘state’ and ‘non‐state’ forms of public authority as closely connected and interdependent. This article contributes to this theoretical shift by means of a qualitative case study of public authority in Palestinian refugee camps in South Lebanon. Lebanon's Palestinian camps are routinely characterized as ‘states‐within‐the‐state’, undermining the sovereignty of the Lebanese state. Yet, as this article demonstrates, both a generic state idea and the specific Lebanese state system constitute crucial benchmarks for the Popular Committees that govern informal Palestinian settlements. The article therefore conceptualizes the Popular Committees as ‘twilight institutions’ and explores the ‘languages of stateness’ that they adopt both communicatively, vis‐à‐vis Palestinian competitors, and coordinatively, vis‐à‐vis Lebanese counterparts. This reveals that the Popular Committees emulate the Lebanese state institutions they come into contact with, to bolster their own authority. They do this partly to be viable interlocutors for Lebanese state institutions; this suggests that the Popular Committees’ non‐state authority might validate rather than challenge state authority in Lebanon, and that state and non‐state authority can be mutually constitutive.     

Landscape and Environment: Insights from the Prehispanic Central Andes

Attention to human–environment relationships in the central Andes has a long history. Although the area is not a neat microcosm of the globe, wholly representative of worldwide trends in the archaeology of human–environment interactions, it has been the site of both seminal investigations in archaeology and a substantial body of recent work that investigates themes of broad archaeological relevance. Specifically, central Andean environments have been variously conceived as structuring, modified, and sacred. These approaches to some extent reflect broad trends in archaeology, while also suggesting directions in which the archaeology of human–environment interactions is moving and highlighting archaeology’s relevance to discussions of contemporary human–environment interactions. This article characterizes concepts that are key for describing central Andean environments and considers the ways in which the particular ecology of the central Andes has informed archaeological research in the region. The example of the central Andes highlights the importance of understanding environments as dynamic, considering both geomorphic and anthropogenic contributors to that dynamism, and examining both ecological (“environment”) and ideological (“landscape”) implications of archaeological landscapes.     

Aging animal bodies: horse retirement yards as relational spaces of liminality,dwelling and negotiation

This paper investigates how animal aging and ill-health are managed, spaced, interpreted, and experienced within a horse–human relationship. It does so by exploring the active construction of ‘retirement’ as a legitimate category within the life course of an animal. The analysis is concentrated around the emergent spaces of horse retirement yards. Conceptualising retirement yards as liminal spaces of transition and transformation, particular consideration is given to the role of the yard manager in creating a good retirement for the horse. This includes negotiating and narrating figurative and bodily processes of animal aging with the distant owner. The paper reviews the yard manager’s careful enactment of re-wilding in the shaping of aged and unsound equine bodies, but also their authentic inter-weaving of practices of domestication. Balancing re-wilding and domestication, in both figurative and bodily form, appears central to securing dwelling-in-retirement on a retirement yard and therefore, successful animal aging. In accordance with the non-uniformity of liminality, however, the relational care practices which permit dwelling-in-retirement require daily attention. They remain subject to multiple potential sources of disruption, including those which extend well beyond the aged or unsound state of the individual animal.     

New Section: Country reports

This paper uses a simplified model of the aid ‘chain’ to explore some causes and consequences of breakdown in communication. Although the rhetoric of Northern‐based donors is awash with words such as ‘partnership’ and ‘inclusion’ when dealing with their Southern‐based partners, the situation in practice is different. Unequal power relationships sometimes result in donor imposition of perspectives and values. It is our contention, based on a collective experience of fifty‐four years in a Nigerian‐based non‐governmental development organization (NGDO), the Diocesan Development Services (DDS), that much of the driving force behind the successes and problems faced by the institution was founded on relationships that evolved between individuals. In order to understand why things happened the way they did it is necessary to begin with the human element that cannot be condensed into objects or categories. While injudicious donor interference had damaging repercussions, our experience suggests that care and consideration flow throughout the aid chain and actions are not malevolent. Breakdowns can be attributed to a number of factors, with the over‐riding one being pressures operating at the personal level that emanate from within the institution itself and the larger community. The paper analyses three experiences using institutional ethnography theory and methodologies as a basis. Examples taken address the influence key donor personnel had in the function of DDS, and how these changed with time. The mission, policies and even procedures of the donor did not change markedly over thirty‐two years, but each changing desk officer had their own philosophy and approach and a different interpretation of their own institutional policies. Hence while the ‘macro’ has an influence it is mediated via individual interpretation. In our view, the importance of people–people relationships is particularly understated in development literature where emphasis gravitates towards the aggregate and global.