GIFTS/PRESENTS/PRESENCE
Meanings and Materialities
Conference – Exhibition

Cable Factory (Valssaamo), Helsinki
6–15 June 2024

Conference 6–8 June 

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    Exhibition 6–15 June

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    Cynthia Kreichati


    A Gift of the Litani river: The politics of electricity in Lebanon
    What are the forces that regulate the public provision of electricity in Lebanon, a country with a history of inchoate electrification? What are the regimes of value under which electricity circulates — particularly when it is construed as a gift, given in exchange of land? Based on one year of ethnographic fieldwork in Lebanon (2021-2022), this paper explores the implications of conceiving of state services as gifts inseparable from the moral duty to repay. It takes as its focus the Litani river dam and hydropower plants, an infrastructural project of development funded by the World Bank’s first loan to Lebanon in the 1950s. More recently, amid a nationwide and generalized power outage, the Litani project continues to provide more than 20 hours of hydraulically-generated electricity per day to 109 villages located near the dam. Residents of those villages argue that the state owes them electricity in exchange of land lost when the dam was built, recasting dispossession as sacrifice and emphasizing the duty of repayment during an economic crisis. The paper attends to the meanings of that exchange and explores its political and ethical consequences.

    Biography
    Cynthia Kreichati is an anthropologist and a pharmacist. She recently completed her doctoral dissertation in anthropology at McGill University — a historical ethnography of the Litani river and its people. Prior to joining McGill, she worked with Médecins Sans Frontières in Lebanon and served on the editorial board of the Beirut-based Bidayat Magazine, an Arabic language quarterly on culture and politics.