Dissertation Defense: Idun Hauge
Candidate: Idun Hauge
Major: History
Advisor: Judith Tucker, Ph.D.
Phoenician Merchants and Ladies of Culture: Lebanon’s Tourism Industry, 1943-1975
In Lebanon’s “Golden Age,” tourism was widely celebrated as the largest contributor to the national economy after finance. Lebanese imagined tourism as the savior of the Lebanese economy and a source of equitable wealth distribution and development. Tourism became a prominent feature of mainstream media culture in the 1960s. The industry and the media recruited Lebanese to play the role of hosts by performing Lebanese hospitality for Arab and Western tourists as a shared nation-building project.
While this perception of tourism has proved enduring and inspires nostalgia for a pre-Civil War Lebanon defined by cosmopolitanism and tolerance, my dissertation discusses the prominent role of the Lebanese tourism industry in the troubled ideological landscape of independent Lebanon until the outbreak of the Lebanese Civil War. I ask how local actors in the bureaucracy, tourism industry, and the media adopted, reinterpreted and appropriated global forces and trends of capitalism, globalization and increased global mobility within a domestic political context. My dissertation shows how upper class women, bureaucrats, and hotel owners sought to change the ways in which Lebanese perceived their own national heritage and history, and explores how Lebanon’s tourism culture influenced conceptions of gender, nature, development, heritage, and identity. It discusses the resulting anxieties about the foreign gaze, cosmopolitanism and public morality as well as opposition to tourism as a hegemonic force of development.
My dissertation argues that while tourism was successfully promoted as a unifying force of nation-building, tourism was an ideologically capitalist project that was pro-Western and sectarian. Tourism naturalized growing economic inequalities and promoted policies and “beautification” projects over the population’s needs. It promoted ways of conceptualizing history and heritage as well as the natural and cultural environment that painted Lebanon’s laissez faire policies as a defining national marker. Imbedded in Cold War politics and Lebanon’s culture war, the tourism industry helped mainstream Christian narratives of Lebanese history and identity that excluded Muslims and Islamic heritage. As an industry that disseminated a unified sectarian narrative despite its intersectarian composition, the dissertation prompts us to rethink sectarianism by prioritizing class and capitalism over sectarian belonging.