RGP Cycle 5 Grantees and Projects

Investigator: Elizabeth Saleh, Asfari Institute for Civil Society and Citizenship

Country: Lebanon

Grant Type: Individual Grant

Project Title: Salvaging Labor Time: Scrap Metal and Syrian Workers inside Beirut’s Informal Economy

The proposed research is an anthropological study of informal Syrian labor inside Lebanon’s scrap metal industry. Scrap copper and iron are two of Lebanon’s leading exports. The scrap business relies heavily upon migrant waste pickers based at small scrapyards who then sell their findings on to larger scrapyards on the outskirts of Beirut. There, metal bought with prices subject to the fluctuations of global markets, are further broken down in preparation for shipment. On the one hand, this high level of informality reflects global economies of recycling where scholars observe that the shift in mainstream analytical attention to the movement of material has marginalized the value of labor. On the other, the effects of the Syrian conflict and policies in Lebanon towards migration, labor and waste management continue to shape the features of the industry. By focusing on a network of Syrian workers who successfully opened a small scrapyard in a predominantly working class area of Beirut, this ethnography examines the political reconfiguration of labor and commodity as a result of the changing political terrain.

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Elizabeth Saleh works in the fields of political and economic anthropology, with a special focus on labor. She obtained her PhD in Social Anthropology from Goldsmiths, University of London. Her doctoral research examined the entrepreneurial strategies of members of the wine industry as they converged in the Kefraya region of the West Bekaa. In 2015, Elizabeth commenced a new ethnographic study examining the reconfiguration of Syrian labor at the interface between Beirut's formal and informal economies. Most of her fieldwork takes place at a scrapyard in a working class neighborhood in Beirut, where she explores the effects of the Syrian conflict and the policies of the Lebanese state toward migration, labor and waste management in relation to the prosperity of the scrap metal industry. Elizabeth has held posts at the American University of Beirut, Orient Institute in Beirut, the London School of Economic and Goldsmiths.