Yasemin Ipek’s latest article published in American Ethnologist (AE), anthropology’s flagship journal

Yasemin Ipek’s latest article published in American Ethnologist (AE), anthropology’s flagship journal

Yasemin Ipek, assistant professor in the Global Affairs Program, has published her most recent article on Lebanon in American Ethnologist (AE), one of the most prestigious journals of the anthropology discipline. Titled “Entrepreneurial activism: Ethical politics and class-based imaginations of change in Lebanon,” Dr. Ipek’s article examines activist biographical accounts that tied entrepreneurialism to imaginations of change and revolution in Lebanon. She shows that translocal encounters between the middle class, the aspirational middle class, and the returning diaspora entangled globalized projects of active citizenship and social entrepreneurship with lived experiences of war and leftist legacies in Lebanon. What Dr. Ipek calls “entrepreneurial activism” refers to a form of ethical politics that draws on complex global and local genealogies of activism and entrepreneurialism to animate systemic change. Her article demonstrates that entrepreneurial activism was simultaneously a creative political response to Lebanon’s longstanding problems and a site of classed elitism. In engaging with anthropological literatures on ethics, activism, and neoliberalism, the article reveals both the possibilities and limitations of the middle-class politics of entrepreneurial activism.

This article is part of Dr. Ipek’s broader ethnographic project, which offers a study of the emergent forms of activism and political subjectivity in contemporary Lebanon in relation to lived experiences of crisis. One of the main findings of her study was that combining entrepreneurialism and activism has been one of the most popular political practices in contemporary Lebanon. Since 2012, when Dr. Ipek began her 24 months of fieldwork, she has heard many in Lebanon invoke entrepreneurialism and activism together as a cure for Lebanon’s crises, which include social polarization, corruption, state failure, infrastructural collapse, and unemployment. To understand larger effects and implications of combining activism and entrepreneurship, Dr. Ipek conducted in-depth interviews with more than forty middle-class and low-income activists who self-identified as both activists and entrepreneurs, as well as participant observation of their everyday lives; media analysis; and the institutional ethnography in several NGOs in Beirut. She found out that entrepreneurial activists’ ethical claims to embody non-sectarian, autonomous, and patriotic citizens who fervently work for political change mobilized previously apolitical or cynical Lebanese to participate in mass protests and formal politics.

In exploring new ethical and political meanings attributed to entrepreneurship and complex rationales behind endorsement of entrepreneurialism by many activists in Lebanon, Dr. Ipek demonstrates that neoliberalism should not be the only lens through which we interpret entrepreneurial subjectivity. She emphasizes how particular political histories and cultural legacies can generate complex articulations of entrepreneurialism. Even though entrepreneurial subjectivity is a sine qua non of neoliberalism, as many anthropological works have noted, in the case of Lebanon, the construction of entrepreneurialism as characterizing authentic national identity and the local association of the term with change and revolution amplified the political and moral underpinnings of using entrepreneurship for activism. Dr. Ipek suggests that attending to how complex moral and political sensibilities are entangled in shaping activist subjectivities can help us better understand the possibilities and limitations of emergent visions for change.