My Mother’s Table: At Home in the Maronite Diaspora, A Study of Emigration from Hadchit, North Lebanon to Australia and America
Author: Nelia Hyndman-Rizk
Date Of Publication: Jul 2011
Isbn13: 978-1-4438-2948-9
Isbn: 1-4438-2948-X
In the era of globalisation, studies of migration focus on mobility, deterritorialised identities and diasporic forms of belonging across nation state boundaries. Indeed, uprootedness from the soil of home and place has resulted in a general condition of ‘homelessness’ in late modernity, referred to as the diasporic condition. This study explores the construction of home amongst immigrants from Hadchit and their descendants in Australia and America and shows how their strategies of home-building depend upon the capacity to imagine themselves as being united by kinship, a shared village of origins and as part of the broader communal Maronite identity (Mwarne), which now transcends nation state boundaries. Patrilineage (bayt), village (day’aa) and sect (ta’eefa) have historically defined Lebanese sectarian identities and now, as this study shows, are deployed as a strategy of home-building and community construction in diaspora. However, capitalist social relations of production in Australia and America have transformed bayt, day’aa and ta’eefa amongst the second, third and fourth generations through the gendered renegotiation of the marriage contract from relations of descent to relations of consent. Thus, the Hadchitis now face a crisis of (re)production and attribute this, in the case of Australia, to the state being hukum niswen, ruled by women, an inversion of the gendered order of power in Lebanon. Through pilgrimages to the ancestral village, however, émigrés seek a spiritual resolution to the contradictions of migration through the restoration of their connection to place, but find they cannot seamlessly belong in Hadchit. Meanwhile, multicultural crisis and a milieu of anti-Lebanese racism limit their claims to national belonging in Australia and America. This study finds, therefore, that the contradictions of the migration process are unresolvable through physical mobility, because the feeling of ‘home’ is a metaphysical state of being, which transcends place and is defined by its affective, social and spiritual dimensions. The elusive quality that defines home and provides a sense of unconditional belonging is, in fact, socially constructed by women, through their daily practices of care within the home and the most important woman for the construction of homeliness is the matriarch, sit el bayt—the power of the house. Thus, the place where the immigrant can be at home is metaphorically at their ‘mother’s table.’

Dr Nelia Hyndman-Rizk is a trained anthropologist and lectures in research methods in the School of Business at the University of New South Wales, Canberra, Australia. Her research interests include the economic and social dimensions of migration, gender relations, globalisation, human insecurity/war and transnational flows between Lebanon and the Diaspora. Additional interests include multiculturalism and diversity management. She has ongoing research projects examining social media technologies and social change in the Arab world, strategies for peace building in Lebanon and the effects of migration on maternal mental health.

“This book is an interesting, sound and compelling study and the first in examining a migrant community (i.e. the Hadchiti community in Australia and America) by using an anthropological perspective, in a time framework which no one else has done before. The novelty in her study is in the critical and creative application of the current literature on migrant identity, racism and the second generation, and essential concepts such as liminality, belonging and homeliness, to the case study of Hadchiti emigration. Most particularly, her analysis of the Hadchiti identity and its relation with the contested gender structure of the migrant family is very powerful and revealing. Her argument about the articulation of the identity of the first generation with the gender structure of the family and how the hyphenated character of the second generation’s identity is made contingent upon the sense of homeliness generated by their mum’s cooking is quite innovative. In the end, this study gives more substance to the concept of a ‘deterritorialised identity’ found in the literature on migration. In fact Hyndman-Rizk succeeds in showing that the identity of Hadchitis is not only de-territorialised, but also acquires its meaning from this de-territorialisation and associated liminality. I recommend this book as an important contribution to the study of Lebanese emigration and the relationship between home and mobility.”

—Dr Paul Tabar, Associate Professor of Sociology, Institute for Migration Studies, Lebanese American University

“I strongly recommend this study of a global Lebanese village as providing an excellent social history of contemporary Lebanese migration, the social and cultural re-articulation of Hadchiti identity in a new world re-imagined as a global diaspora centred on Hadchit. It provides a rich ethnography based on a phenomenological approach which links everyday practices to large scale processes of identity formation, belonging and community as a transnational phenomenon.”

—Michael Humphrey, Professor of Sociology, University of Sydney, Sydney

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