Dispossessing Property

Abstract This article ethnographically examines the efforts of a group of women to form a new Orthodox monastic collective amid the collapse of Lebanon's sectarian neoliberal economy and the perpetual threat of war with a particular focus on the way property as a concept necessarily misrecognizes their struggle. The article engages with the specific history of the waqf, known today as a “religious” endowment, in the Levant and its novel configuration in the conjuncture of primitive accumulation. It argues that making waqf lands into property occasions a spontaneous idealization of these relations as sectarianism, the belated juridical force of which instigates a temporal and spatial cleavage, an interior exteriority, marked by a temporal “prior” that is also a spatial margin (the “domestic” space of women and religion). The mode of monastic action, dispossession, teaches that the accumulation of capital, sectarianization, is not the auto-generation that property conceptually proffers. In the falling away of property's effect as an “always already,” monastic struggle marks an activity of collective reorientation occasioned by dispossession.