Everyday Sectarianism in Urban Lebanon is a timely account of the interplay between sectarianism, infrastructures, and public services in Lebanon, casting a much-needed light on the embedded character of sectarian power. It expands our understanding of sectarian identity by showing its multiple connections with the processes that determine people's access to vital resources. Joanne Randa Nucho accomplishes this aim by way of a fine urban ethnography of Bourj Hammoud, the dense eastern suburb of Lebanon's capital Beirut, and the Lebanese Armenian community that has long been associated with it. It is important for her account to make explicit the fact that like other areas surrounding the capital, Bourj Hammoud's growth was spurred by the influx of refugees—Armenians in this case. What a century ago was agricultural land is now a dense, multifunctional fabric of interlocking residential, commercial, and industrial spaces that are governed by an equally diverse set of actors that includes the municipality, a variety of political parties, and numerous religious and secular nongovernmental organizations. It remains today a destination for the displaced multitudes from the Middle East and some parts of the Global South, which the “suburb” sustains through its decaying infrastructures and relatively easily accessible “public” services. As in the rest of the country, the supply of electric power and health care (Nucho's account is focused on these two) in Bourj Hammoud is secured through a network of actors each enjoying a certain “jurisdiction,” as Nucho calls it, such as the municipality, the government's development agency, national and international NGOs, ecclesiastical authorities, and political parties.

The book belongs to a line of scholarship that has taken it upon itself to dispel the essentialism or primordialism which sectarianism often presupposes, emphasizing instead the modernity of the phenomenon and its dependence, in particular, on the modern state. Nucho's contribution to this effort consists of giving an account of sectarianism in which the state figures as only one, and not the decisive, actor. She argues that sectarianism is “a process,” embedded in “the urban infrastructure and services provided and managed … by institutions affiliated with sectarian parties … religious organizations … municipalities and transnational organizations” (p. 3). Nucho acknowledges the ambiguity of “sectarianism” in the scholarship, which has been used variously to designate “a [kind of] modern social and political phenomenon,” “Lebanon's institutionalized confessional governance system,” and “a way of being in the world,” but prefers to take it to be “a mode of political power and social organization” that is characterized by the “privileg[ing] of the religious community” (p. 4), and that is not to be “collapsed onto religion or theology” (p. 5).

Nucho's ethnography casts light on sectarianism as it comes to define the contours of daily life in Bourj Hammoud, in both the continuity of its routines and the events that punctuate it every now and then—the “everyday sectarianism” of the book's title. It shows, for example, how personal disputes (the one she describes is between an Armenian resident and a recent Kurdish refugee from Syria) escalate and are turned into conflicts between two communities, and how the “explanation” and “justification” of the violence and the subsequent actions—in this instance, the eviction of the Kurds—are easily furnished by a ready-made sectarian narrative. In the aftermath, the episode is construed despite its specificity and complexity as just another in a chain of identical episodes within an overarching narrative that essentializes an Armenian experience (p. 30). Conversely, this kind of violence in the present comes to sustain and vindicate sectarianism and the assertion of sectarian identities.

However, the ethnography makes it clear that sectarian narratives are insufficient to secure sectarian identity. Membership in the Armenian community is neither a matter of course, nor does it exclusively guarantee access to the infrastructures that provide electric power, or the public services that deliver affordable health care. Such access requires compliance with norms that are external to sectarian identity strictly speaking, according to which are “produce[d] notions of belonging to and exclusion from sectarian community.” Norms include such ideas as “progress and modernity,” as well as representations of kinship, class, and gender—the latter contributing to the determination of “Armenianness” by influencing the decisions to grant “access to Armenians [sic] women's organizations,” for example, “and therefore who is to belong or not to the Armenian community” (p. 76). A variety of different actors participate in this production, which involves the application of “technologies” such as “informal property relations,” “contracts,” and “jurisdictional technologies” (p. 53).

The ethnography also brings out the instability of sectarian identity itself, an instability that is implied in Nucho's proposition of sectarianism as process. It is as if sectarianism is open ended or incomplete, that it never really yields the product it aims for, and that sectarian identity is a constantly receding horizon which sectarianism is a desperate effort to attain. Indeed, the impression is of a failed, but nevertheless persistently continued, project which finds in its very failure the motivation to affirm, again and again, sectarian identity. The use of the latter to concentrate resources and determine access to infrastructures and public services serves only to intensify that motivation, but also to alter its sense, turning sectarian identity—“Armenianness” in this case—into a nominal affair. Nowhere is this interplay between the sectarian identity and power more evident than in Nucho's description of Armenian women's informal credit networks in Bourj Hammoud. As informal networks, they are not defined by “sectarian” identity—at least not so categorically. They extend beyond the limits of the neighborhood proper and include “non-Armenian” women. However, as Nucho notes, “the [recent] transition from women's rotating credit associations, or shirkets, to [increasingly] formalized credit institutions” has brought about an “increasing sectarianization” not only of shirket, but also “of all kinds of human and material infrastructure” (p. 96). The point that she wants to make here is that the concentration of power and the control of resources does not simply give rise to sectarianism, but also that the mobilization of sectarian identity is a way to secure the concentration of power and control of resources with an imagined “sectarian” community.

Nucho has shifted the focus of analysis of sectarianism away from the state and religious institutions, and explicitly sectarian organizations such as political parties, tracing it out instead across a wider spectrum of converging needs, desires, and interests. Nucho's account shows that sectarianism is not only a political principle in terms of which everything else in Lebanon is determined, but a process among several mutually supportive processes, such as the provision of electric power, the delivery of public services, kinship, gender, and class. In her account, sectarianism comes out dispersed in a multiplicity of interconnected networks, rather than concentrated in the state. It permeates an assemblage of things—infrastructure, public services, urban spaces, humans—which are constitutive of Bourj Hammoud's “sectarian geography” (p. 120). It does not follow from this that it is sealed upon itself, however. Rather, as the example of its informal credit networks shows, Bourj Hammoud—and the “Armenianness” with which it is identified—is connected to other parts of the country and remains firmly set within Lebanon's own, national sectarian geography. Yet, national borders are not the terminal point of the neighborhood, whose participation in “city-to-city” projects, for example, gives it a “transnational reach” that places it in proximity to other cities around the world (p. 108).

Everyday Sectarianism in Urban Lebanon is a welcome ethnographic addition to the growing scholarship on Lebanese sectarianism. A consequence of this growth has been the expansion of the capacity of the category of sectarianism, which could now include the modern discourse of Ottoman and European imperial officials trying to pacify Mount Lebanon, the efforts of self-identified Shiʾa under French Mandate to reorganize the affairs of the Shiʾa community, the descendants of Armenian refugees managing increasingly limited resources in a neoliberal state, philanthropic organizations extending their services exclusively to members of the community with which they identify, and Muslim or Christian citizens rejecting the idea of civil marriage because it is inconsistent with their religious sensibility. This diversification of the uses of “sectarianism” induces one to ask: When people use “sectarianism” to speak about events and phenomena, are they speaking about the same thing? Considering this question should bring to the surface some of the assumptions we make about politics, religion, language, identity and difference and the way they shape our decision to count something as “sectarianism.”