Sylvain Perdigon

Sylvain Perdigon (born 5 April 1974) is a French Anthropologist. He is currently an assistant professor of Anthropology at the American University of Beirut. His areas of specialization concern topics such as refugee worlds and social exclusion, ethics, Religion (especially Islam), anthropology of violence and law, language and semiotics, gender, sexuality and embodiment, human & non human interactions.
Biography
Born and raised in Saint Etienne, France, Perdigon studied Greek and Latin philology at the Ecole Normale Supérieure in Paris and graduated with a BA in 1997 and a Master (D.E.A) in 1999. He received his second D.E.A from the department of Anthropology in 2001 at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales in Paris. Thereafter, he was awarded a doctoral degree (PhD) in Anthropology from Johns Hopkins University in 2011, where he completed his dissertation titled “Between the Womb and the Hour: Ethics and Semiotics of Relatedness among Palestinian Refugees in Tyre, South Lebanon”, under the supervision of his doctoral advisor; Veena Das. His ethnographic fieldwork was conducted in el-Buss refugee camp in Tyre, Lebanon from March 2006 to January 2008.
Career
In January 2013, he joined the Department of Sociology -Anthropology and Media Studies as Assistant Professor of Anthropology at the American University of Beirut. Some of the courses he has taught include, but are not limited to, “Semiotic Anthropology”, “Ecology of Refuge”, “The Space of Refuge”, “Religion and Society” and “History and Theory in Anthropology”. From September 2016 to 2018, he has served as the Coordinator of the Anthropology Program. Currently, he is a member of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences Research and Library Committees.
Before returning to Lebanon, from September 2011 to December 2012, he worked as Assistant Professor of Anthropology in the Department of Sociology, Anthropology, Psychology and Egyptology at the American University in Cairo. Previously, he was an Instructor and Teaching Fellow at the Department of Anthropology in The Johns Hopkins University from January 2009 to December 2010.
Perdigon has been invited to numerous conferences such as “Metapragmatics of kinterms” during the Conference ‘Identités de papier: Des origines au numérique’ at the ‘Institut Français du Proche-Orient’ of the University Saint Joseph, Beirut. (2019) He has delivered a series of lectures on topics of moral, ethical and ontological inquiries of Palestinian refugee camps in Tyre, Lebanon. To name a few: “Palestinian Refugees and the Space of Appearance: notes on kinship in the camps of Tyre, Lebanon”, School of Social Science Monday Seminar, Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, NJ (2016); “Moral Perfectionism and the Mutuality of Being: on silat al-rahim in the Palestinian Refugee Camps of Tyre, Lebanon”, Workshop ‘Islamic Intimacies’ at New York University-Abu Dhabi, (2015); “From Form-of-Life to Appearance: Palestinian Women and Men Encounter al-Qireyne in the Refugee Camps of Tyre, Lebanon”, Workshop ‘(In)Security in Everyday Life: Perspectives from the Middle East’ at Arab Council for the Social Sciences, Beirut (2018).
At present, he is a member of the American Anthropological Association in the Section “Society for Cultural Anthropology”. He also serves as a reviewer of many peer-reviewed articles from “Cultural Anthropology”, “Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute”, “Culture, Medicine and Psychiatry”, “Contemporary Levant” and “Arab Society”.
Work
Perdigon’s anthropological research covers issues of power and processes of disclosure of selves and lifeworlds in the contemporary Middle East. His works address the ways in which state sovereignty, the narratives of modern nation-states, and refugee policies in the Middle East, and specifically in Lebanon, are incorporated and reflected into the lives of Palestinian refugee communities in their everyday self-making and kinship practices.
Perdigon believes that the “politics of poverty” of Palestinian refugees in the camps of Tyre cannot be viewed merely as a reduction of their lives into what Giorgio Agamben calls “bare life”. Despite being excluded from the labor sector of Lebanon, being deprived of citizenship, and facing hardships perpetrated deliberately by the modern law of the Lebanese state, Perdigon has found that Palestinian refugees do not associate themselves with “political subjects of poverty” and refuse to claim that they are “feeling poor.” Using semiotic interpretative lenses, he explores the bodily and ethical “ways of being in the world” that allow Palestinian refugees to endure their embodied poverty in a futureless present and live their everyday lives incorporating ethical sensibilities. For example, Perdigon argues, that patience, which is cultivated in Islamic ethics, helps refugees to believe nevertheless in some kind of worldly yet indefinite future.
Based on E. Habibi’s developed concept of “Pessoptimism”, Perdigon explores further the relations of hope and despair to an unpredictable future. Conducting a short ethnography, he raises the importance of the “mutuality of being” for Palestinians, through which hope and despair are simultaneously coexisting. In a state, where the political, social, and economic forces have created severe dispossession of action and ban on the property of things (prohibition to own taxi licenses, to secure home ownership, etc.), Palestinian refugees have to constantly face discouraging representations of anticipated future. However, at the same time, the sentiment of hope extending to other bodies and the attachment and care for one’s family create a space for the refugees to steam ahead:
“To pawn one’s hope, as I believe Abu Saeed then did, to somebody else’s presence, is also to constitute an extended, virtual body, that may include other persons and things, an abode of virtual actions, which bears witness to yet another dimension of the connection of hope and care”. He argues that those families’ exceptionality must be analyzed beyond the conception of a “traditional, good Arab family”. He finds that the everyday self-making of Palestinians is deeply anchored to the kinship ties they develop based on a sense of ethical and moral obligations towards their relatives. Through kinship networks, they seek to create a sense of futurity in their community, and possible escapes or coping mechanism from the biopolitics of the refugee regime and the uncertainty of their environment. For example, Perdigon has discovered that emigration, especially to Germany, has become a way to escape from the precarious and unstable labor conditions, “the only thinkable, desirable, route”. He observes that marriage has moved away from the traditional, and has acquired instead alternative ethical values. For Palestinian youths, marriage is seen as an opportunity to emigrate and become a recognized citizen, but most importantly, to escape from a dead end future and inhuman impossibility created and enforced by the modern Lebanese state. Referring to H. Arendt’s notion of stateless refugees deprived of “a place in the world which makes opinions significant and actions effective”, he takes the example of al-Qreene to argue that the lives of asylum seekers or refugees should not be merely analyzed as tangible entities created and controlled by state policies. Rather, he traces a space of appearance, an ontological event, upon which specific forms of life emerge based on linguistic ideology shared by Palestinian refugees. Perdigon once again uses linguistic interpretations to depict the inequalities of the lives of refugees, claiming that the latter cannot be worldly enough, and cannot establish their identity and ways of being in the world, since there is no space for the amplification of semiotic and material appearances in their current existential conditions. Therefore, he illustrates the struggle of Palestinian refugees to anchor themselves into a reality and a world, where social insignificance, unworthiness and delegitimization constitute real barriers to their everyday lives.
Awards
Perdigon has been the recipient of numerous grants and awards such as Research Grant from WEFRAH Initiative organized by the American University of Beirut, for the project: “The Sheep from the Future? Steps to a new coupling of pastoralism, ecosystems and consumers in an age of environmental degradation” (2019); Summer Research Grant from the Program for the Study of Women, Gender and Sexuality at The Johns Hopkins University, (2004); and a Membership from the School of Social Science at Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton. (2015-16)
He has held numerous positions, including Doctoral Research Fellowship in Palestinian Studies, Palestinian American Research Center (2005); a Fellow of Mellon Fellowship at the Center for the Arts and Humanities of American University of Beirut (2018-19); Dean's Teaching Fellowship at The Johns Hopkins University (2010); Teaching Fellowship at the Center for the Study of Women, Gender and Sexuality of The Johns Hopkins University, 2009; and International Dissertation Field Research Fellowship of the Social Science Research Council (2006).
Selected Publications
* Perdigon, Sylvain. 2018. "Life on the Cusp of Form: In Search of Worldliness with Palestinian Refugees in Tyre, Lebanon." HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 8 (3): 566-83. Published in December 2018.
* Perdigon, Sylvain. 2017. As'lem, forms of life, uncertain otherwise: A response to Fassin, Wilhem-Solomon and Segatti. Current Anthropology. Current Anthropology 57 (2): 181-182.
* Perdigon, Sylvain. 2015. 'For us it is otherwise' : Three sketches on making poverty sensible in the Palestinian refugee camps of Lebanon. Current Anthropology 56 (S11): S88-S96.
* Perdigon, Sylvain. 2015. Bleeding dreams: Miscarriage and the bindings of the unborn in the Palestinian refugee community of Tyre, Lebanon. In Living and Dying in the Contemporary World: A Compendium. Ed. Veena Das and Clara Han. 143-158. Los Angeles: University of California Press.
* Perdigon, Sylvain. 2015. Ethnography in the times of martyrs: History and pain in current anthropological practice. In Wording the World : Veena Das and Scenes of Inheritance. Ed. Roma Chatterji. 21-37. New York: Fordham University Press.
* Perdigon, Sylvain. 2010. L'ethnographie à l'heure des martyrs: Histoire, violence, souffrance dans la pratique anthropologique contemporaine. Les Annales HSS 65 (4): 971-996.
* Perdigon, Sylvain. 2011. "The one still surviving and viable institution". In Palestinian Refugees: Identity, Space and Place in the Levant. Ed. Sari Hanafi and Are Knudsen. 165-179. London: Routledge.
* Perdigon, Sylvain. 2010. Bachelors' corniche: Transnationality and the unmaking of intimacy among Palestinian youths in Jal al-bahr, South Lebanon. In Manifestations of Identity : The Lived Reality of Palestinian Refugees in Lebanon. Ed. Muhammad Ali Khalidi. 93-108. Beirut/Washington DC: Institute for Palestine Studies.
* Perdigon, Sylvain. 2008. Yet another lesson in pessoptimism — A short ethnography of hope and despair with one Palestinian refugee in Lebanon. Asylon(s), no. 5. .

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