Out of the Ground

Abstract This article thinks ethnographically with phylloxera, an insect with a lethal proclivity for Vitis vinifera. The infamous louse traveled from North America to Eurasia during the nineteenth century. Fatefully, this tiny bug's journey to Lebanon overlapped with the Jesuit Return Mission to the Orient, which began in 1831. Around 1882, Jesuits successfully imported “French” grape vines that would eventually displace local varieties as well as the bodies of knowledge and taxonomies about them. The tiny bug, barely visible to the naked eye, crept into Jesuit correspondence about these plantations. Creepy-crawly feelings of phylloxera also plagued the oral histories and conversations of residents across the Bekaa Valley that the author documented during fieldwork between 2006 and 2008. By examining these entwined disjointed feelings forged over generations, the article explores how humans and bugs appeared to one another as they sensed dislocating worlds that surfaced in the political afterlife of colonialism. By doing so, it traces the seemingly incorporeal legacy of the Jesuits across Lebanon's viniculture landscape to a colonial logic aimed at generating life in terms of its properties.