Moving through the contested city: Automobility and civic culture in Beirut, Lebanon

As Catherine Lutz (2014) writes, anthropology has paid scant attention to the automobile, despite the fact that the ‘car-system’, as she puts it, is not only part of the creation of the modern subject but also a crucial object by which to understand the relationship between political economy and the city. This chapter is animated by an inquiry into the car-system and the kinds of social and infrastructural relations it has engendered in Beirut, Lebanon. In keeping with urban anthropology’s long-standing concern with urban space and social inequality, I explore how automobility in Beirut is inflected by class, status, and politics as well as an everyday means through which social differentiation and state governance are instantiated in public space.