Living in Refuge: Ritualization and Religiosity in a Christian and a Muslim Palestinian Refugee Camp in Lebanon (Forced Migration Studies Series)

This comparative ethnography of a Muslim and a Christian Palestinian refugee camp in Lebanon focuses on contrasting social belonging processes through a ritualization approach. Leonardo Schiocchet argues that contrasts emerge out of the intersectionality of religiosity, nationhood, refugeeness and politics, and synthesizes academic research on piety and moral self-cultivation and on the everyday life of religious communities. He contributes to the literature on refugees at large, and Palestinian refugees in particular, with the unique dense socio-historical portrait of two refugee camps for which there is almost no recorded literature.

Leonardo Schiocchet has a PhD in anthropology (Boston University, 2011) and a Habilitation in social and cultural anthropology (University of Vienna, 2022). He is a researcher at the Institute for Social Anthropology (ISA) at the Austrian Academy of Sciences (ÖAW), a member of the Refugee Outreach & Research Network (ROR-n), and principal investigator of the FWF project The Austro-Arab Encounter. Since 2005, his work has focused on social belonging processes among Arab forced migrants.