Includes bibliographical references and index.

Front Matter -- Copyright page -- Dedication -- Acknowledgements -- Figures -- Notes on Names and Transliteration -- Introduction: Border Lives in Changing Times -- Sociality between Movement and Space -- Living Well: Experiments in Livelihoods -- Pastoralists: Living the Past in the Present -- Marriage between Love and Fate -- Suspicion and Scorpions: The Morality of Kinship -- Local Elections: Politics at the Margin -- What the Future Hides -- Back Matter -- Bibliography -- Index.

Border Lives offers an in-depth account of how people in Arsal, a northeastern town on the border of Lebanon with Syria, experienced postwar sociality, and how they grappled with living in the margins of the Lebanese state in the period following the 1975-1990 war. In a rich ethnography of ‘changing times,’ Michelle Obeid shows how restrictions in cross-border mobility, transformations in physical and social spaces, burgeoning new industries and shifting political alliances produced divergent ideologies about domesticity and the family, morality and personhood. Attending to metaphors of modernity in a rural border context, Border Lives broadens the sites in which modernity and social change can be investigated.