Review of “The Best of Hard Times”, by Elizabeth Berk , published at Anthro Book Forum, May 9, 2022 (in English)
Both Gustavo Barbosa and I, as non-native speakers of Arabic educated in the Western liberal tradition, have dedicated portions of our scholarly inquiries to gender and agency, as concepts, lived experiences, words, and metonyms that link all of these. During my fieldwork in Lebanon I, as Barbosa, found myself searching for an Arabic word for agency and curious as to why conversations otherwise held in Arabic often employed the English for both gender and agency. Barbosa delves further into these questions in his The Best of Hard Times: Palestinian Refugee Masculinities in Lebanon, echoing Visweswaran’s (1997: 616) invocation to not mistake the category, the heuristic device, of gender for its reality or realities.
