Opened in 2008, the Lebanon Mountain Trail (LMT) links Lebanon’s North to its South through 470 km of paths and a network of Muslim, Druze, and Christian homestays. Although similar heritage trails exist elsewhere the world, the LMT runs through a landscape fractured by sectarian division and scarred by war. Drawing on fifteen months of ethnographic fieldwork conducted between 2017 and 2019 that included walking alongside Lebanese and international hikers over the trail’s 1,100+ km length, this dissertation explores how the practice of long-distance hiking creates and mediates feelings of national and cultural belonging– feelings of territorial, social and national attachment – under fraught circumstances.
This research found that Lebanese hikers developed a new and heightened sense of belonging to Lebanon as nation and to regions of the country where they had previously felt unwelcome. These attachments were produced by bonding experiences along the trail that created a shared ritual frame in which hikers perceived Lebanon as if it were unified and acted as if sectarian differences were not a divisive category. By walking the trail together, hikers constructed and inhabited their own fleeting dreams of Lebanon as they would have wished it to be. They imbued this as if Lebanon with a variety of different personalized meanings, ones that enabled hikers to resolve ambiguities in their own lives. For most participants, these attachments were time delimited and could only be sustained by returning to the dream worlds they enacted on the trail through repeated trekking. For others the experience was so profound that they incorporated elements of the experience into their everyday live.
While this research adds to the existing literature on the study of trekking and trails as engines for cultivating belonging, it breaks new ground by examining how this occurs in landscapes where evidence of past wars is ever present and sectarian divisions still unresolved. The ability of the LMT to produce such attachments for Lebanese hikers complicates our understanding of the relationship between walkers and the landscapes they encounter, giving the cultural landscape as much significance as the natural landscape.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:bu.edu/oai:open.bu.edu:2144/44100 |
| Date | 30 March 2022 |
| Creators | Boueri, Kevin Francis |
| Contributors | Barfield, Thomas J., Anderson, Betty S. |
| Source Sets | Boston University |
| Language | en_US |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Thesis/Dissertation |
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