Please join us for the joint lecture event co-organized with the Anthropology Society in Lebanon (ASIL). The lecture, presented by the researcher and writer, Pierre France, is titled: Waste, Paper Industries, and the Maintenance State: Toward an Anthropological Study of Lebanese Bureaucracy and it will be focusing on one of the less understood institutions of the country; the Lebanese bureaucracy

When: Monday, 8th of December at 6 pm.

Where: The FIME premises at 30 Badaro Street, Chaoui Building, 5th floor meeting room. 

You can also attend online by registering for the event. 

RSVP: We kindly request you to RSVP through this link or by sending an email to institute@fime.fi at the latest on Sunday 7th of December.

Abstract

Beyond scandals and media-driven critiques of corruption, the Lebanese bureaucracy remains one of the least understood institutions in the country. The notion that it is crippled by incompetence, distorted by political interference, and routinely bypassed by the powerful still dominates both public perception and scholarly analysis. Yet, approaching bureaucracy through an anthropological and sociological lens—grounded in direct observation and ethnographic fieldwork—reveals a far more complex and instructive reality. Drawing on fieldwork initiated in 2014, including an investigation into the bureaucratic system during the 1975–1992 wars, this project mobilizes Pierre Bourdieu’s theoretical framework to analyze two central features of Lebanese bureaucracy past and present: the pervasive role of wasta and the internal (dys)functions of what can be conceptualized as a Maintenance State.

Bio

Pierre France is a researcher and writer based between France and Lebanon. Trained in political sociology and musicology in Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne and Paris 8 Saint Denis, he has been a fellow at Stanford University, the Marc Bloch Center (Berlin), the Max Weber Stiftung – OIB (Beirut), and the Camargo Foundation (Cassis, France).