Harvard Anthropology Seminar Series: Peter Habib (Harvard University)

Title: Delivering Relief: Water Trucks and the Negotiations of a ‘Cut-Off’ Life in Contemporary Lebanon

Speaker(s): Peter Habib is an Hicham Alaoui Postdoctoral Fellow in Harvard’s Weatherhead Scholar Program and holds a PhD in Cultural Anthropology from Emory University. His work explores how ruinous environmental realities become appropriated into politicized narratives in the Middle East, often serving exclusionary nationalist purposes.

From the speaker: In Lebanon, amid compounding crises and infrastructure breakdown, trucking has become a fundamental mode of water distribution. Water trucks both address the momentary failings of the standard distribution network while also extending water’s reach to refugee communities exiled from these connections. 

This presentation offers an ethnography of water trucks servicing populations experiencing a cut-off (maʾtouʿ) life, from Lebanese municipalities experiencing infrastructure breakdown to displaced Syrians living in off-grid settlements. Rather than permanently repair broken systems, water trucks bring continuous relief to the (un)expected and inevitable shortcomings of infrastructure’s standard operations. They are vital, powerful, yet suspect actors that, in delivering life’s fundamental essence, shape daily life in contemporary Lebanon. 

Closely examining water trucks reveals a series of material, labored, and political realities which define a shared life of both Lebanese and displaced Syrians alike. Despite concerns of cost and quality, trucking has become essential to the adequate functioning of the everyday.