The brother is a trap: rethinking brother-sister relationships in a Lebanese town

Michelle Obeid University of Manchester

Draft paper for EASA conference 2008. Please do not cite.

Um Ysif swallowed her anger as she watched her confused son shuffling through a pile of papers and clicking on the buttons of his blue calculator. For a couple of hours now, he had been trying to settle his finances to establish how much money exactly his mothers brother owed him. In the past two years, he had been working with his uncle in a stone-cutting factory owned by the latter. Ysif was persuaded by his uncle to relinquish his previous job transporting agricultural goods in a tired truck which Ysif spent years saving money for and to join him and his two brothers in his new promising business as a partner with a 10 percent share. This arrangement meant that Ysif would not get a daily paid salary like the rest of the labourers. Rather, he would reclaim his share only when the factory started to make profit. Ysifs mother was sceptical bearing in mind her sons commitments (a wife and two children), as it was not clear at what point he would start earning money. But Ysif accepted the offer based on principles of trust in kin, and worked for two years, mainly operating the machines in the factory but also doing a number of other tasks. During the two years, the factory made hardly any profit, or so Ysif was made to believe. Ysif dedicated his pick-up truck, as well as his endless time and effort, to the factory without ever complaining. One day, however, he came home very upset because his uncle had brought in his own son and asked him to start operating the saw. Ysif understood this to be a clear message to him to go home, which he did. When two days passed and his uncle did not come after Ysif, his interpretation was confirmed: His uncle had discharged him without even addressing him directly and, worse, without giving him any of the money he owed him. And all this happened in December, a very difficult month to find work in Yusifs town. Um Yusifs silence finally erupted. She stood up and frantically started picking up things from the floor: pencils and school notebooks scattered by her grandchildren, orange peel and tissue paper which she dumped in the stove. She spoke vociferously and wheezed heavily as she does when her asthma attacks. They [her brothers] are the ones who came to my house and begged me to let Ysif become their partner. I didnt go to them. I didnt even want him to work with them. He was doing so well with his pick-up truck. Hes never been humiliated like this. Now they fire him? The story became known to the public and neighbours comments about the actions of her brother left Um Ysif nursing a lingering feeling of betrayal, namely on the part of her brother against her. Ysif very quickly managed to find an alternative source of income: together with his cousin who owned a van, he bought a public car plate number i.e. allowing him to use his vehicle for public transport and stayed in the transport business, driving university students to a nearby city while still operating his

pick-up truck on demand. Moreover, soon enough after finding a new source of income, he started visiting his uncle again. For Um Ysif, this incident had further connotations and was too difficult to forgive. That her brothers and her own mother never came to check on her after they had discharged her son was more of a reminder of many preceding injustices done on their part, often deriving from a preference for sons over daughters and a general unquestioned bias towards males. This story became a pretext for Um Ysif to reflect on her family relationships but more generally on gender relations in her society. Two months later, although there was no reconciliation, Um Yusif obliged by expectations to fulfil her duty as a good daughter, started to visit her mother again and to bathe her once a week. But with her brother, the sense of betrayal did not seem to fade away. His actions toward her son were also ones against her and seemed to reconfirm the sentiments prevalent in her town towards the ambiguous relationship between brother and sister expressed through the adage the brother is a trap [al-akh fakh]. This paper is an anthropological exploration of the relationship between brother and sister in a Lebanese town. At the heart of this relationship is an ambiguity that is worth examining. On one hand, it is perceived to be one of the closest relationships, most valued and idealised. On the other, it is one of the most tense and loaded relationships. This contradiction is not unlike how kinship relationships are generally perceived in the town, for breaches and conflict are inherent in the ideology of kinship. But the brother/sister relationship stands out as the conflict stems from a particular complexity unique to the expectations and obligations between the brother and sister. This paper will address the tensions in this relationship and contextualise the articulation of ambivalence towards the brother. The once unquestionable power of the brother seems to be challenged and re-thought, as Um Ysifs case suggests, in a context of a transforming economy and gender relations. Brother/sister in Arab anthropology The relationship between siblings has been given very scant attention in the anthropological literature on the Arab World, an intriguing fact considering the predominance of the study of kinship in that region.1 The very little general literature that exists tends to depict the brother/sister relationship through two lenses, the romantic and the patriarchal (Joseph 1994, p.52). In a somewhat functionalist vein, the romantics (Granqvist 1935; Meeker 1976; Ahmad 1989 and El-Shami 1981) have represented the bother/sister relationship as a safety valve a relationship of love and mutuality in a presumed cold and authoritarian family system (Joseph 1994, p. 52), thus overlooking hierarchy and power entrenched in the relationships between brothers and sisters. By contrast, the literature that constitutes the patriarchal view (Fuller 1966; Cohen 1965; Antoun 1968, Marx 1967, Altorki 1986), while recognising hierarchy, has focused the analysis on the honour/shame complex and the manner in which it seeps through social structure, hence being more interested in the

This perhaps echoes a parallel trend in mainstream anthropological research, with some regional exceptions in south-east Asian literature. For an exploration of the relationship between brothers, see Carsten 1989, McKinley 1981, Peletz 1988. For brother/sister relationships see Carsten 1991, McKinley 1981.

social structure and culture of the Arab family rather than in psychodynamics or the brother/sister relationship per se (Joseph 1994, p.54). Suad Josephs contribution to the study of this topic in the Arab context is worth reflecting on, as she is the first to shed light on the need to address this neglected relationship. She proposes an approach that moves away from the dominant Western psychodynamic theories which see the parent/child relationship as the exclusive model for gender socialisation and argues that, in the Lebanese context that she studied, cross siblings used their relationships to learn and practice socially acceptable notions of masculinity and femininity, dominance and submission, and commitment to patrilineal kinship structures, morality, and idioms (1994, p. 56).2 These processes are mediated through what she coins as connectivity, 3 the psychodynamic process in which one person comes to see him/herself as part of another (ibid., p. 55) and to derive a sense of completeness in a cultural context where the family has precedence over the person, or even, as she argues, society. Rather than focusing solely on either the psychodynamic or the power aspect of this relationship, Joseph sets out to understand the love/power dynamic between brothers and sisters. Through this relation, men learned that loving women entailed controlling them and women learned that loving men entailed submitting to them (1994, p. 56). The relationship is depicted as a complementary one in which men protected women and women upheld family honour. Departing from normative behaviour necessitated punishment from brothers, sometimes to violent extents. In this sense, the brother/sister relationship becomes an exercise in reproducing patriarchy; in this context defined minimally as the dominance of males over females and elders over juniors and the mobilisation of kinship structures, morality, and idioms to institutionalise and legitimate these forms of power (ibid, p. 55). Parents condoned this process while they encouraged brothers and sisters to have a loving relationship which was, as Joseph postulates, sexually charged and used as a matrix to judge the husband/wife relationship. The boundaries between these sisters and brothers were fluid, and their sense of self, identity and future called for their mutual involvement with each other (ibid, p. 56). Joseph is credited for initiating a discussion about the brother/sister relationship in the Arab context. Some of the material that I present here will bear semblance to her ethnographic setting. This paper, however, will depart from Josephs arguments in a number of ways. While criticising the romantics, Joseph acknowledges the power, hostility, and possible violence of the brother but she paints a picture of complicity on the part of women, especially sisters. Her treatment of brother-sister relations seems to portray an acceptance almost an invitation to and reproduction of Arab patriarchy. For example, Flaur, a character in the Camp, actually enjoys submitting to and being disciplined by her brother Hanna (1994, pp. 51-52). We do not get a sense of negotiation that might take place in the context of conflict of interest. In the case I present, while the brother/sister relationship is indeed valued, and while idioms of compassion and protection are used to characterise this relationship, there is

Carsten (1991) makes a similar argument for siblings in Langkawi where it is siblingship and not filiation which constitutes the closest possible tie as well as the paradigm for moral relations (p.437). 3 Joseph builds on Catherine Kellers concept of the connective self (1986) which is relational and autonomous.

(today) a permeating scepticism surrounding this discourse and an attempt to avoid this relationship of female dependence. In this regard, the paper will address some of the structural changes that are allowing sisters to articulate the tensions inherent in cross-sibling relations. While I do not go as far as claiming that women are subverting the patriarchal order, since they are not, I do however leave room for negotiation and probe into the factors that have allowed for the enunciation of new discourses of doubt in a particular constellation of obligations, rights and power.

Context: Setting and socio-economic transformations

My familiarity with Arsal is based on a long-term and extensive knowledge of this town, built up during the course of ten years, and culminating in 13 months ethnographic research conducted between 2002 and 2003. Arsal is a border town that lies on the slopes of what is known as the Anti-Lebanon Mountains, southwest of Syria, away from the main road. The town has a large population, estimated at 32,0004 and constitutes vast land about 1/22 of cumulative Lebanese land. According to older people, half a century ago Arsal was a small village, both in terms of population size and residential area. They recount that in the 1940s the population was less than 4,000 people who were concentrated in two neighbourhoods. In this earlier period, the houses were surrounded by fields of grain and cereal. People had houses in the town but also moved around in the highlands as the predominant livelihood in early last century was agro-pastoralism, seasonal transhumance accompanied by cereal farming. Today, the town is expanding, both towards its neighbouring towns on the main road and inwards toward the highlands. Population growth and town expansion are but one feature of the rapid changes that Arsal has undergone in the last few decades. The town has experienced considerable transformations in the livelihoods of its inhabitants, a process which started before the Lebanese Civil War (1975-1991). The Arsalis consider themselves descended from a system of herding traditionally entailing seasonal transhumance generally between the highlands of Arsal in summer and the lowlands of Syria in winter. But since the 1970s, many residents gradually shifted to fruit production, a transition which allowed for the diversification of livelihoods. These shifts gave way to informal (and illegal) livelihoods towards the end of the war and particularly, to smuggling across the Lebanese-Syrian borders which, although it had always existed, intensified during the civil war. This brought in new capital to the town and resulted in investment in small private businesses (petrol stations, shops, trucking equipment, transport vehicles). Another major industry that emerged at that time was quarrying most of it operating without licenses. This industry was brought to life by the process of reverse migration which took place at the beginning of the Civil War when many Arsalis who had been living in the suburbs of the capital Beirut gradually returned to take refuge in Arsal which was far from being a battle zone and upon their return brought with them new ideas, values and experiences (Baalbaki 1997).

Local Municipality estimate for 2003.

Today most Arsali households adopt a multiple livelihoods strategy. Almost all households, including herding households,5 are internally diversified in terms of occupations and livelihoods. It is known that these new economic activities have brought in capital to the town and created a class of wealthier residents with new trends in consumption. Off-farm occupations have become quite popular with the young generation, even those who are not capital owners, due to their stability and higher income as opposed to the seasonal returns from agriculture and herding. These changes have had an impact on the moral economies of livelihoods and the choices people make for adopting one or another livelihood in a diversified system and, most importantly, a changing attitude towards the nature of social life. The most apparent at the time of my research was the tension between, on the one hand, the older and the younger generations and, on the other, between different economic groups over the perceived relationship between production and sociality (Obeid 2006a). Herding and agriculture reinforce a collective sentiment and an ethos of cooperation no longer available in the growing occupations such as quarrying, which tend to be male-dominated and hence preclude the involvement of families or communities. The rise of livelihoods built on individual as opposed to family labour along with other forces of modernisation has pushed for a new model of a family and family relations. Today, the aspired for household model is that of a nuclear family with two or three children and a routine rhythm that persists all year long. Such households have a very defined, inflexible sexual division of labour with the husband holding a wage-earning job while the wife tends her house and children. The two main aspects of this new model are that it is located far away from the wilderness and that its members, namely women, are murthn (comfortable); both aspects that resonate with an urban modernity (tamaddun) which young Arsalis seek. What is relevant for the purpose of our discussion here is that firstly, his trend in the organisation of production has meant that for both men and women, these economic changes have liberated them from the complex web of kin relations that controls their life decisions including education, marriage and occupation in the herding system of production. Secondly, these changes have opened up avenues for women to generate income. Arsals location and the shifts in livelihoods have attracted the attention of a myriad of development projects interested in the question of sustainable human development. Gender was on top of the agenda of these projects and the result was creating a forum, albeit limited, for women to generate income through a variety of activities including carpet weaving workshops, food cooperatives and other opportunities in NGOs. This paralleled increasing jobs that opened up in schools and shops as the town expanded. These new opportunities for women ought not to be seen only in the light of empowerment solely. As work for women gained more grounds in the town, it often competed with predominant notions surrounding domesticity for women. Employment and education and their perils

According to the local Municipality, in 2003 herders made up only 10% of the population.

In the past, it was only men who were sent to school or at least taught how to read the Qurn. Today, by contrast, the value of education is rising for both sexes in Arsal. Education provides a gateway to many opportunities, the most valuable of which to the Arsalis is wazfa (employment), even more so if it is in the public sector (the army or one of the government ministries) as this guarantees stability of income when most of the other livelihoods are seasonal. But this kind of employment is quite minimal and not accessible to everyone who desires it. School teaching presents another opportunity, but those jobs too are quite scarce, although open to both men and perhaps more women. The private schools do not pay high salaries and the public ones usually employ teachers on a contract (ta`qud) whereby they are paid one instalment at the end of each academic year, an arrangement more suitable for women than men, who are the breadwinners and need to provide for their families on more regular basis. Recognising that the prospects are limited, young men find higher education useless and either feel satisfied with a high school degree if they manage to finish that will enable them to carry on (quarry-related) manual labour or prefer learning skills that will enable them to work independently. As a result, more students have been enrolling in technical schools that provide training for jobs like technicians, mechanics, electricians (for males mainly) and nursing, kindergarten teaching (mainly for females) and the like, although Arsals economy is very sluggish and many graduates, females especially, end up at home. Unless they marry, women find pursuing university education attractive as it gives them something to do in case no job comes up when they finish secondary school.6 Remunerated work does empower women and not just economically. Women often describe how work has exposed them to different people and elevated their status at home. While women who do manage to find jobs feel that their status is enhanced within their households, both educated and working women bear a social stigma, as it is only unmarried women who choose to pursue work and education. There is a tension between the seeming leverage of being educated and employed and the recent ideal model of being a housewife, in an urban7 sense of the word. While education is becoming essential for Arsalis and while more women are seeking jobs in order to contribute to their households, they carry the cost of stigmatisation for failing to obtain the ultimate objective in Arsali life, marriage and making a house. Against this sociological background, let us now move to the relationship between brothers and sisters in this changing context.

The brother is a trap

The brother/sister relationship is a kin relation and, therefore, we need to see it in light of the prevalent kinship ideology in Arsal, even though it has special characteristics as will be argued. Anthropologists of the Middle East, influenced by Bourdieus theory

The nearest university is two hours away which makes attendance very difficult, time and money wise. Unless one is financially able, students choose subjects that do not require daily attendance (such as Arabic or French literature, geography or sociology) but these are not necessarily the most relevant to the market. Also, this arrangement means that a degree could take more than five years (see Obeid 1997). 7 As mentioned in the previous section, in the herding model, a housewifes role included working in the wilderness. In the new model, a housewife is only expected to look after her house, without any agricultural or herding responsibilities.

of practice (1977) and Geertz interpretive approach, 8 aimed at analysing the practical (Eickelman 1981) aspects of kinship and thus focused on lived experiences rather than the ideal constructions about kinship manifested in earlier works (Antoun 1972, Gellner 1969, Lutfiyya 1966). This new approach has indeed pushed for transcending rigid templates and descent just as the more recent concept of relatedness has signal[ed] an openness to indigenous idioms of being related rather than a reliance on pre-given definitions or previous versions (Carsten 2000, p. 4). As illuminating as this transactionalist approach has been, some anthropologists of the Middle East, nevertheless, may have slipped into exaggerating the broadness of kinship relations, on the one hand,9 and their manipulability,10 on the other: kinship, like other aspects of personal identity, is implicated in an ongoing process of becoming (Eickelman 2002: 140). This parallels the mainstream approach of anthropologists who belong to new kinship theories11 in which they consider kinship like gender to be performative (Carsten 2000). Carsten, for example, argues that kinship is far from being a realm of the given as opposed to the made (Carsten 2004, p. 9). The Arsali case leads us to different conclusions. Kinship has a fixed nature in the sense that it is involuntary and irreversible (Simpson 1994). Unlike all other existing but not necessarily less significant relationships such as friends, colleagues and neighbours, kinship relations dictate specific obligations and expectations because they are perceived to be naturally prescribed and fixed, regardless of the emotive and transactional components of those relations. The following briefly discusses the obligations inherent in Arsali kinship relations. The ideology of kinship Kinship qurba (literally closeness) is perceived to be the most enduring of all relationships. It is in this ideal of endurance that a sense of morality is established and obligations and behaviour prescribed. The Arsalis express kinship in an idiom of patrilineal descent in which people construct a mental map of proximity where kin are arranged according to relations of blood (qurbat damm).12 Qurba is understood by the Arsalis through an ideology of descent where the largest unit on this map is the `ila

Lindholm (1995) argues that three trends have influenced the ethnography of the Middle East. Aside from Bourdieus practice approach, Geertz interpretive approach was a major influence on anthropologists who used it to highlight the importance of negotiation in meaning. He also writes that Saids (1985) Orientalism, while useful, has led to a recourse to narrative and biography (p. 818) in anthropology and an avoidance of comparison and theory exemplified in the works of anthropologists like Abu-Lughod (1993), Messick (1993) and Bowen and Early (1993), among others.

Eickelman, for example, has been criticized for compounding descent, alliance and social links through his idiom of closeness and to convolute Arab Kinship into Middle Eastern (see Mundy, 1995).

Rosen (1984) contends that the flexibility in kinship terms reflects the nature of social relations. He also deduces that the meaning of terms is not mechanical but rather is acquired through action and a process of individual negotiation. See Lindholm (1995) for a critique. 11 Schneider (1968, 1980) is believed to have revolutionised the study of kinship through his cultural/symbolic approach to kinship which challenged the culture/biology dichotomy. Feminist anthropologists such as Collier and Yanagisako (1987) and Errington (1989) built on his work and rejected the same separation. They argued for the need to have a unified analysis for gender and kinship as both should be separated from sexual reproduction which they are fundamentally based on. The rise of studies on New Reproduction Technologies (Strathern 1992a,b, Edwards et al 1993), Gay kinship (Weston 1991) and Carstens relatedness raised new questions in the field and incorporated new perspectives. See Peletz (1995) for a review of developments in kinship studies. 12 People are also related by marriage in the sense that ego is related to a web of kin both agnatically and cognatically Affinal relations, however, do not make two groups of people kin, unless they were already related by descent prior to marriage (i.e. close kin marriage).

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(lineage) and the smallest is the bayt (house). In between is the jubb (branch) which denotes the son of an ancestor and his descendents. Thus, members of a house are genealogically closer to those of a branch who in their turn are closer to those of a lineage. This description, however, perhaps better depicts a standard formula of kinship rules rather than actual relationships. While relationships are fixed, amity and transaction shapes their significance. In this sense, two ideals of proximity run simultaneously. One relates to a formal, fixed understanding of kinship while the other is shaped by the performative elements of amity and sociality. The two are not mutually exclusive in such a way that the second by no means denies the first. Although Arsalis consider the quality of kinship relationships to be determined by an element of negotiation and transaction, the relationships themselves are not. Rather than assume that, by acting out certain obligations and exchanges people become kin, i.e. achieve kinship (Carsten 2000), to the Arsalis one is born into certain, if not all, kin relations and it is precisely this that prescribes the obligations required to maintain them. The morality of kinship, which naturalises kin relations, postulates that kin are by definition reliable and trustworthy. Kin bonds are lasting and enduring and will survive breaches, which are expected to occur from time to time. This depiction resembles an older argument made in anthropology about long-term kin relations in which the actor sees himself as forced into imbalanced relationships by morality (Bloch 1973, p. 76; Fortes 1969). In Arsal, while the morality derives from a conception of its endurance, it is reinforced by a religious ethic. Islam places particular importance on respecting both parents, as expressed for example in the verse Rida Allah wa rida al wlidayn (Show gratitude to me and to thy parents) (Chapter 31, Verse 14). The Islamic ethic, through this verse, which speaks of parents, implicitly places the mother on an equal platform with the father. The mother, in Arsal, is the most idealized role. She is the symbol of sacrifice and giving (`at). She provides endless support to her children and is the ultimate source of reliability. The father, on the other hand, is the head of the family, who looks after his children and receives respect and love from them. Mistreating parents is considered an ungodly act. Religion also places great importance on the bond between siblings through the importance of relations of the womb (silat al rahm). Maintaining kin relations, hence, has religious implications. While kin in general must be treated kindly, religion, as the Arsalis understand it, specifies the importance of a narrower kin circle, that between siblings and the mother. But the expression silat al rahm (relations of the womb), like blood-related idioms,13 is elastic and can refer to a wide range of kin or, more important, simply the importance of kinship. These are often invoked when there is a need to assert the long-term nature of kinship and the idea that, no matter what happens between kin, they cannot reverse or undo their relationships. Failed expectations and breached ethics are recognised as part and parcel of the ideology of kinship as proximity creates tension, but, based on moral and religious ethics, the ideology of kinship overrides breaches and surpasses them. While other less imposed relationships are valued in their own right, they do, however, imply that relationships forged by choice can be terminated. Hence, despite the fact that kinship is sometimes
An example is the expression blood can never become water, equivalent to the English expression blood is thicker than water.
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contested because of its imposed nature, the morality it postulates and its binding character constitute the ideal lines along which other relations of friendship, neighbourliness and colleagueship are forged. Kin relations, therefore, operate between an ideology that naturalises the reliability and trustworthiness of kin, and, a reality, in which conflict of interest and individualism rule relationships. It is within this constellation that the brother/sister relationship can be deciphered. The brother/sister complex Like all close kin relations, brothers and sisters are bound by the same ideology of closeness described above. Ideally, to the Arsalis, the brother-sister is one of the closest and most valued relationships. Like Josephs setting (1994), a sister is hanna (compassionate) towards her brother, although the emotions invested in this relation are not expressed in the psychodynamic language of love, but rather in naturalised obligations (wjib). Before marriage, a sister looks after a brother, almost as a mother does. The relationship is one of nurture. The brother, in return, also looks after the sister but, this way round, the relationship is expressed in terms of protection (himya). This is an encompassing idiom that subsumes more than one function, the most important of which is sutra (lit. cover), which suggests maintaining an unmarried womans honour 14 (sharaf) and modesty. But like other kin relations, breaches of such obligations are not unlikely. Tensions particular to sibling relations are expressed in the proverb that Um Ysif used at the beginning of the paper, al-akh fakh (the brother is a trap); the power of the adage stemming from the fact that the words brother and trap rhyme. Yet, although tensions and rifts inevitably could come about between brothers, the idiom is invoked more by sisters because women are threatened by a relationship of dependence on their brothers in a way that men are not. Arsali women, especially those who are unmarried, are in fact quite wary and apprehensive about the significance and implications of mens protection. The value of marriage as an ultimate fulfilment in life was mentioned earlier. A woman who does not manage to marry and make her own house is picked out as especially vulnerable and in need of protection by parents and male kin in particular. It is only marriage that transforms womens status from being girls15 to women, no matter how old they are. If sisters do not marry, brothers are obliged to look after them when the parents, especially the father, die. Although the role of the father and the brother in protection is recognised, in Arsal a key distinction is made: whereas fathers look after their daughters as part of their natural role, protection by brothers is perceived as always at risk of being disingenuous. When the brothers are married men, their obligation to look after unmarried sisters is potentially compromised, their attention divided between their sisters interests and those of their wife. Thus a threat haunts single women: It is believed that, when parents die, unmarried women will have to be
In Arsal also other areas of Lebanon there is an underlying assumption that women will only achieve sutra upon marriage. People use himya protection and hifz preservation much more than sharaf honour (Abu-Lughod 1986, Antoun 1968, Fernea 1985) to refer to sexual modesty. But concerns about modesty, according to my observations, were generally not significant and certainly did not haunt women and their behaviour. 15 The assumption is that women loose their virginity upon marriage and so they remain girls in the eyes of society until they marry.
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subjected to the rough mercy of the brother who is sure to succumb to his wifes demands at the expense of his sister, thus mistreating and abusing her. The mistreatment is often construed in the image of the sister who is made to serve (takhdum) the brothers family by undertaking domestic duties that ought to be the wifes. In this sense, while there is an underlying tension between trust and betrayal within the ideology of kinship in general, there is a particular tension in the brother/sister relationship. This derives from the obligation of brothers to protect and look after their sisters and the far greater threat of a breach due to a conflict of interest with the brothers wife or with their new families. The apprehension of unmarried sisters is understood in a context where it is believed that when women marry, the protection they need is then due from their own husbands. When women marry, the ideology of patrilineal descent predominates; women b-titla` (depart) and belong to their husbands houses; they become the husbands responsibility and the relationship is expressed in terms of a shift in belongingness, sarat lahum (she belongs to them). In practice, despite the ideology and the language, women upon marriage are not given up. A strong connection with natal families remains. Particularly if problems occur in marriage, it is womens natal families the males, especially the father and brothers who are expected to settle womens rights. But, officially, the sole responsibility is the husbands. Despite their scepticism towards brothers, women still expect them to take care of them. Even when a womans belongingness and responsibility shifts to her husbands family upon marriage, she maintains her relationship with her natal family and she would still expect her kin to stand by her should she need them.16 Avenues and compromises Faced with pressures to marry and make a house on one hand and the threat of being enslaved by a brother and his wife, on the other, unmarried women find themselves looking for avenues which provide opportunities, but not without compromise. As love marriages take over exchange and arranged marriages in Arsal, women whose chances have decreased move away from love marriages and accept suitors whom they would not have under other circumstances: widowers, older men, or polygamous marriages. At one of the NGOs, we sipped tea as a discussion of this issue started when a worker a woman in her early 50s had agreed to marry a man whose wife had passed away two months before. Nervous about her decision, she was reassured by her colleague, an unmarried woman, also in her 50s, who encouraged her by saying I wouldnt want anyone to enslave me, at least you will have your own house, and no one will control you. You will live with your husband and not a sister-in-law. These concerns haunt younger woman as well. Fattm was 31 when a suitor from a herding family proposed to her. His parents lived five minutes away from her parents house and were known to be good people. She was the eldest unmarried woman of her 11 siblings. Her father owned fruit orchards and three of her younger brothers operated a garage outside their house. The suitors family treated their daughters-in law quite well, it was said. But Fattm spent sleepless nights before she made a
The importance of maintaining ties with natal families is expressed particularly strongly whenever the topic of marriage in Syria comes up. Arsalis are very critical of some villages in Syria where men sell their daughters by receiving a marriage settlement, a practice which enables the groom and his family to have full control over the wife. They recount stories about two of those women who were bought by men from Arsal and whose parents have disowned them: The men can do whatever they want with these wives and no one will ever ask about them. These women have no ahl (kin).
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decision. She was getting older and no other suitor was proposing. She had no particular problem with the suitor or his family but she did consider very seriously and with reservations the fact that she was going to become a herder, an occupation she was apprehensive to embark on. I am not used to living alone in the wilderness, she fretted, and I do not know how to do any of their [herders] work. Her parents made inquiries and assured her that she was not to worry about heavy work. The suitors house was known for the fact that it was men who milked and not women milking being one of the most demanding tasks for herders.17 All she needed to do was replicate her housework in the village and approach the situation with an open mind about living outdoors, in a tent-house; an idea, as mentioned previously, which defied the new model of modern households. Fattm then accepted the offer, bearing in mind the risks of declining. The implication here with cases like these is that the compromise of being with an otherwise undesired husband is better than the permanent status of being a dependent who will be exploited. It must be noted here that marriage, although perceived as the right route to a healthy life-cycle, is attributed to fate. The fatalistic usage of the expression ija al nasb18 the coming of fate to signify marriage tends on one hand to add an element of mystery to the institution of marriage, for like fate marriage constitutes the unknown.19 This type of apprehension is arguably pertinent to a setting where marrying a complete stranger was not uncommon (particularly through exchange and arranged marriages). On the other hand, the expression reflects a sense of waiting, especially in employing its negative to describe unmarried people, ba`d ma ija al nasb the fate has not yet come. It is as if ones fate is only realized once marriage takes place,20 hence the centrality of marriage to this society. Although this outlook applies to both genders, it seems to put women under more pressure. But the logic of fate has room for those who are not lucky enough. Hence, by no means am I arguing that unmarried women are social rejects. Many of those who do not marry, whether or not educated, seek to be economically productive, despite the limited opportunities, which they believe will give them a degree of clout in their homes and spare them this feared exploitation on the grounds of being single and financially needy. In fact, many of the women I worked with, particularly those working in carpet weaving and food cooperatives had a respectable status in their homes and some even acted as breadwinners. Work also enhanced their status as active decision-makers in the household. Even so, elevated status within the house does not compensate for a lower status within society as far as these women remain girls who have not lived up to values of domesticity. 21 So unmarried spinsters, although not any less respected, do receive sympathy feel for their qillat nasb (lack of lot). Female altruism Having explored notions surrounding the tension in the brother/sister relationship, it must be stated that not all brothers will dig a trap for their sisters. But the overSome households could own up to 1000 heads that need to be milked up to four times a day. The expression ija al nasb and its negative are used in this context as pronounced in colloquial Lebanese rather than classical Arabic. 19 Other sayings reflect the same idea of the unknown, marriage is like a battkha (watermelon), one cannot know its insides until one breaks it, i.e. marriage is only revealed after it takes place. 20 Nasb is also used for all sorts of events such as divorce, death, bad luck, good luck, etc. 21 See Sa`ar (2004) for a discussion of the diverse roles unmarried Israeli Palestinian women undertake as spinsters.
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riding self-interest of a brother is at the heart of how the relationship with his sister is conceived. This is in opposition to the sacrifice (tadhiya) that women in general are expected to make. Such sacrifice extends to material rights particularly inheritance which are due to women under Islamic Law, as Arsalis are Sunni Muslims who generally think of themselves as believers and followers of Islam. But, although people are aware of rules of inheritance in Islamic law (a female is entitled half the share of a male), women never really ask for their rights and men overlook this issue. The reluctance to give women property was confessed to me by a herder before the engagement of his daughter. I had asked him whether the Arsalis, like other herding societies, give the daughters a herd upon marriage. He admitted, the truth is we are not very fair because we ignore [daughters rights]. It is harm because religion [Islam] says we should give them, but we dont. Among us, a generous man might give a daughter two or three heads, but it is unusual. Although women can in principle seek litigation, no woman would actually do such a thing because it would contravene her role as righteous daughter and sister and the expected female altruism manifested in relinquishing such rights. When women hold land, it is usually a one-off case and is considered an anomaly. One woman shocked her family once when she approached her brother and asked for her share of their fathers inheritance. Her brother, being a fair man, called for a meeting with the other brothers who all conceded their sisters rightful demand. But when they were about to go to the official clerk (kteb `adl) to make the formal land transfer, their sister changed her mind, reverting to the expected model of female altruism. When I asked the narrator why his aunt had demanded her rights in the first place if she was going to relinquish them later, he felt that she may have just been testing the limits. Khawla, who had been complaining about womens complicity, added rather sarcastically, In our context, it is abnormal for a woman to demand her rights. Even I would give land back if my brothers gave it to me! The only property that is given to unmarried women is the parental house. Since there are tensions between Personal Status Law 22 and Civil Law, fathers play around the system by selling houses to their daughters, who have passed the age of marriage, for insignificant amounts (such as the equivalent of one USD) in order to secure the daughters rights after their death. While other ethnographies on the Arab World have shown the importance of the material (Peters 1980, Maher 1974) and the jural (Mundy 1995) in shaping and governing kinship ties, in Arsal there seems to be a greater emphasis on the moral. Unmarried women, therefore, seem to be trapped in a web of pressures revolving around their lower status of incompleteness for not fulfilling their fate. They expect to rely on kin, especially the brother, to look after and protect them. The brother/sister relationship, like other kinship relations, is construed along ideals of trust, compassion and protection, but, at the same time, it imparts a tension between brothers and particularly unmarried sisters who abide by models of female altruism thus relinquishing their material rights in return for the promise of protection of the brother upon the death of the father. But the breaking of the promise is inherent within it, as far as native theories go, because the brother would ultimately privilege his own interests when his loyalty is pledged to his own wife, thus exploiting the sister and
22

A law based on religious laws, it differs from one religious sect to another. Matters considered personal status include marriage and inheritance and are adjudicated by religious courts.

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enacting an expected moral failure. In this context, women negotiate avenues to elevate their status but this often comes about with compromises ranging from accepting undesirable husbands or finding economic opportunities that give them clout in their households but bring them the stigma of the spinsters who have to work.

Rethinking the power of the brother

In this section, I would like to go back to Um Ysif and consider why it is that women who belong to her generation, married and established, are still articulating the tension in the brother/sister relationship, when it is unmarried sisters who are usually the ones to express such apprehension, even anxiety, about their fate with their brothers. The structural changes in the village have given way to changes in gender roles and household relations. Women today seem to have access to lives which were entirely different to their mothers: education, work, love marriages and generally more choice than their female ancestors had. Perhaps it is this realisation that triggers reflection on their own roles and relationships within these changes. So, in a way, we cannot in this case understand kinship without an account of gender. They become analytically intertwined and realized together in particular cultural, economic and political systems (Collier and Yanagisako, 1987 p.7).

Whenever Um Ysif talked about her problem with her brother, she reverted to incidents in her past in which she and her sisters shared the position of victims of male bias and favouring sons over daughters. That her own mother took no stand against the brother who upset Um Ysif was yet another manifestation of those long standing discriminations. Um Ysif recounted stories and decisions that took place before her marriage more than 45 years ago but about which she was still bitter. She remembered how she was made to carry coal, tend to the herd and take charge of household chores from the age of seven, while her brother who was almost her age, was becoming a renowned medical doctor. She and her sisters were deprived of any school education: now, it seems, satellite television especially her favourite station Iqra23 has made Um Ysif realise what she missed out on: Why do I have to wait for television to learn to read a verse or two from the Qur`n when I could have learnt all of it? This kind of gender bias was not specific to Um Ysif but was practised on her entire female generation to such an extent that I do not know of a single literate woman of her age. However, while her emergent sense of discontent could easily be attributed to exposure to the modern media and the general tatawwur (progress) of the village, other stories that she tells seem to surface from a deeper level, though only recently brought to the surface. At the heart of some of Um Ysifs perceived injustices is the way that her mother distributed family resources and therefore her emotions. Years after Um Ysifs father died, Um Ysifs mother decided to divide the family house into shares,24 but these were unequal. Um Ysif protested to her mother, How can you divide the house among the three of you [the three eldest brother] when there
23 24

A Saudi-owned Islamic TV station that broadcasts religious educational programs 24 hours a day.

It is unclear whether Um Ysifs mother was the heir, or whether she just succumbed to the older brothers decision on dividing the late fathers property. In all cases, Um Ysif sees her mother as the person in charge.

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are ten of us? None of the daughters received a share. The married ones were automatically ruled out and the youngest, a spinster, lives in the house anyway and she has a steady job in a nearby city. Therefore, Um Ysif believes her mother was unfair because she denied her daughters, to the benefit of her sons, a level of comfort she could have easily provided. While Um Ysif raises her claims through talking about material matters, she does so only to contest the moral breaches committed by her brothers and mother. As mentioned above, Um Ysif s material shares were not starkly different from those of her cohort. Education and property were not rights that were granted to women in her generation. Except for education, women today, in principle at least, do not receive more than Um Ysif did. It is interesting, therefore, that, at her age and position in life-cycle, she raises concerns that contest her mothers and perhaps also the larger societys gender bias towards sons, which mainly derives from an ideology of descent. As daughters, women are expected to shift belongingness to their husbands lines. Should fate fail them by their becoming spinsters, they have to succumb to their brothers whims. In both cases, whether through descent or affinity, their lives are cast in the shadow of their male kin. This issue confirms the anthropological claim that gender and kinship can only be understood through a unified analysis, combining gender and kinship perspectives, since assumptions about gender and the way people construct them lie at the core of kinship (Collier and Yanagisako 1987). Now that the village in general is changing and, equally, social relations, Um Ysif finds it appropriate to rethink her relationship with her natal family and to articulate ambivalence towards the unquestioned power of the brother. The unquestioned power of the brother was also articulated by other women of her generation. Khadja, for example, was forced to marry a cousin at the age of 11 only because her brother decided to offer her as a replacement for the cousins bride whose parents changed their mind last minute. Against all protests, her brother refused to break his word and honour and left her with a miserable marriage that has survived 40 years and an everlasting feeling of betrayal. This kind of behaviour is highly frowned upon in the town today. No brother can force a sister into marriage or exercise any form of violence over her with impunity (social and moral at least). While both Um Ysif and women like Khadja do not necessarily break away from cultural constructions of gender roles, they do nevertheless question them. This is reinforced, on the one hand by their exposure to changes in the village and the values they learn through their window to the world satellite television. On the other hand, their own life experiences and the roles their own daughters are assuming have given them new insights on notions of equality and justice. Um Ysif, for example, lives in a feminised household in which she has had to raise four children in the absence of a husband who chose to live in the capital for more than 30 years, visiting her occasionally (sometimes as rarely as twice a year). Her unmarried daughter, who works at a local NGO, makes enough money to provide for her mothers house and to help her two brothers, one of whom is married with children. In Um Ysifs house, the men depend on the women. While her daughter sees this as a sign of independence, a source of self-esteem and a compensation for not marrying, Um Ysif considers it a form of breach of the expected roles and a failure on the part of her male kin: her husband left her to deal with raising a family and her brothers failed her at several

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times of need in her life. While a brother is expected to look after his own interest, breaching trust and betraying a sister is no longer tolerated as it once used to be. The problem between Um Ysifs son and her brother opened old wounds and pushed her to rethink her relationships and the associated injustices inflicted by her brothers and her mother. But, in a context where a particular morality governs kinship, Um Ysifs grievances become meaningless. Despite her feelings, Um Ysif agreed to a reconciliation with her mother and brother without a material settlement or compensation: she did this only to prove the power of the moral (and religious) and the importance of living up to the ideal of kinship that values siblinghood. On the occasion of the d al Fitr, the feast that falls after Ramadan, her brother paid a visit to her house where he was offered sweets, where he chatted with her and her children informally and then left. His initiative and Um Ysifs hospitality in return were a statement that the problem was over; reconciliation had taken place albeit without recognition of the injustice. God sees, Um Ysif said, resigned to the idea that in the end only God grants justice. But God has asked us not to cut the relations of the womb (qat` silat al rahm), she concluded.

Conclusions
This paper has explored the relationship between brothers and sisters in a Lebanese town which has been undergoing economic and social transformations. Changes in livelihoods have had an impact on the organisation of production and the social fabric. The paper teases out the tensions created between a fixed ideology of kin solidarity which presumes trust, reliability and moral obligations and a reality which favours individualism and a breaking away from the family unit. I argued that we can only understand the brother/sister relationship in light of the analytical links between gender and kinship as they can only be constituted together within particular social and economic contexts. The changes in gender roles and the new opportunities available for women today, as limited as they are, have given room to rethink the tensions inherent in the brother/sister relationship in which women are articulating scepticism towards the dependency on the brother created by the lack of status from being an unmarried woman in a society that values domesticity. The tensions become all the more tangible with the pressures of abiding by the moral and the religious implications of kinship ideals. Rather thank taking Arab kinship or kinship in general for granted, the paper hopes to make a case for the importance of documenting changes in how kinship relations are conceived in different ethnographic contexts.

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