The rules of the road: spectacle, performance and power in Lebanese car culture

ABSTRACT

Cars are a central means by which socio-political information is communicated in Lebanese public space, as is the case in other car cultures around the world. In Lebanon, cars are used to perform and reproduce structures of power within the country’s social hierarchy. In recent years, a highly developed system of automobile symbols and meanings has emerged and driving on the Lebanese roads requires that drivers become fluent in this ‘grammar’ of power. This article reconciles the anthropological ‘turn to the state’ with a growing body of literature on automobility in the Middle East and work on the roles of cars in social and political performance in a wide range of other cultural contexts. Following Mitchell’s theorisation of the ‘state effect’, this article argues that it is through this grammar, interpreted every day on the Lebanese roads, that state power is substantiated. However, Lebanese automobiles add a further layer of complexity to the ‘state effect’ by simultaneously drawing attention to the state’s fragmentation and impotency. They highlight other coexisting and competing systems of power. Lebanese drivers are disciplined in interpreting and acting on these signs on a daily basis. This article is an ethnographic account of the language of power embodied by automobiles. It gives a detailed analysis of the information conveyed by four main visual aspects of cars on the Lebanese road and explores the implications for understandings of statehood and power that emerge.

KEYWORDS:

• Lebanon
• state
• power
• cars
• automobility

‘As you speed down the coastal road one evening, a car emerges from your blind spot, effortlessly overtaking you, and then slows sharply, causing you to brake hard. You reach for your horn for an extra-loud blast, but stop as you see the culprit - a new-model Mercedes with blacked-out windows. The car bears a number plate with only three numbers, and above a red disc tells you that the driver is a judge. It honks its police-siren horn, and traffic seems to melt out of its way. As the Mercedes approaches a police checkpoint it barely slows, and the policeman waves it through without even glancing in the window.’

This encounter, or something similar, will be familiar to anyone who has spent time driving on Lebanese roads. Contained within this vignette is a complex performance of the relationship between power and the state, which the drivers and the policeman participate in reproducing. It has become cliché for foreigners and Lebanese alike to complain about the chaos of Lebanese driving. The absence of legal strictures on Lebanese roads certainly gives rise to some unhinged driving, but traffic quickly reveals itself to be far from the pure anarchy that is often superficially associated with Lebanon. Foreign researchers’ and Lebanese drivers’ complaints about the fawda (chaos) of the roads tend to give way to waxing lyrical about the ‘understandings’ and ‘skills’ involved in negotiating the streets. These accounts concern the flow and movement of traffic, and the complex feelings and relationship between individuals and the chaos.

The car itself is an object from which one can read extensive socio-political information about a driver in Lebanon – it is a key means by which drivers demonstrate power in Lebanese everyday life. There is an abundance of highly systematised symbols and meanings associated with Lebanese vehicles, to the extent that an elaborate and complex ‘grammar’ has developed. Drivers are required to constantly engage in a process of calculation of social information about the cars that they share the road with. By examining the language embodied by automobiles, the Lebanese road becomes a dense landscape of symbolic power. A car is more than a means of transport – it is an identity, a marker of social status and relationship to the Lebanese state. While these types of performative political and social practices are found in many other automobile cultures throughout the world, in Lebanon they notably complex and developed, and act as a microcosm for the way that power and privilege operate in everyday life in the country.

This status is far from a simplistic hierarchy, but rather a code to decipher, which transforms dramatically with social context and combination of signs. It is a deeply relative language – the decorations on a car exist in relation to the person driving behind. Individuals operate in a thick and changing web of social relations, and while driving they must constantly calculate their relative position in the hierarchy, as they decide whether or not to cut someone off or double park. The car facilitates negotiations between drivers on the road, with state security forces at checkpoints, and with pedestrians and shop owners when parking. The correct array of symbols on an automobile can be the difference between being waved through a police checkpoint and being pulled over, or the difference between being harassed by young local men and deferentially welcomed.

Driving in Lebanon means learning to read the political grammar of vehicles, something that is so self-evident and second nature to drivers in Lebanon that it is rarely articulated. This everyday use of ‘common knowledge’ is a rehearsal and reproduction of the Lebanese political hierarchy. As the number of cars on the road increased exponentially after the over the past two decades, privileged drivers developed increasingly complex ways to mark out their cars as ‘exceptional’. Automobiles of the elite are ‘mini-spectacles’ through which Lebanese drivers are disciplined in the complex hierarchy of power and the state. Drivers actively participate in this on a daily basis, negotiating status within the strictures of the Lebanese political system and recreating it through their actions.

In what follows, I give a brief overview of both the anthropological ‘turn to the state’ and the growing mobilities literature in the context of the Levant and more generally. I then explain my approach to researching Lebanese car culture, before giving an in-depth ethnography of the ‘rules of the Lebanese road’. Finally, I reflect on the broader theoretical implications of the complicated relationship between statehood and power that this ethnographic account reveals.

Automobile state

This study of relationship between power and the automobile in Lebanon reconciles two related bodies of literature. Firstly, it builds on previous investigations into ‘the social life of the automobile’ (Monroe 2014a, p. 520) in the Middle East and in other cultural contexts. Secondly, this article can be understood as building on the anthropological project set out by Sharma and Gupta to ‘bring together the ideological and material aspects of state construction, and understand how ‘“the state”’ comes into being’ (see also Sharma and Gupta 2006, p. 6, Deeb and Winegar 2012, Altorki 2015). I do this by giving an ethnographic account of performative practices of power, sovereignty and statehood as they relate to the physical artefact of the car.

In his landmark intervention, Mitchell argued that the state should be seen as an ‘effect’ of mundane processes of organisation, specification, supervision and surveillance (Mitchell 2002, see also Trouillot 2001). Likewise, for Sharma and Gupta, ‘the state as an institution is substantiated in people’s lives through the apparently banal practices of bureaucracies’ (p.12) They highlight the importance of material artefacts in this substantiation process. ‘Representations, symbols, practices, and materiality are interlinked. Jeeps with official license plates … are markers of power and status’ (p.15). In recent years, research in Lebanon has turned away from the ‘failed state’ paradigm (Kosmatopoulos 2011, Mouawad and Baumann 2017) and there has been an explosion of work addressing the social construction of the Lebanese state and corresponding manifestations and effects (Obeid 2010, Fregonese 2012, Hermez 2015, Nucho 2016, Rivoal 2017, Akar 2018).

My approach of combining research into automobility with studies of power is by no means an innovation: this has been a key focus of the recent burgeoning literature on mobilities (Adey et al. 2014, Urry 2016, Sheller 2018) and the social life of the automobile has been a subset of this. The socio-political and cultural impact of the automobile has been explored extensively, (see, for example Ross 1996, Kerr 2002, Volti 2006, Miller 2020), especially in the United States (Moline 1971, McShane 1994, Lesseig 2001, Jakle and Sculle 2008, Seiler 2009, Lutz and Fernandez 2010). Some particularly fruitful themes of analysis have been the effect of automobility on gender norms (Scharff 1992, Clarsen 2008) and its interaction with racial oppression (Pesses 2017, Seo 2019, Gilroy 2020, Sorin 2020).

In recent years, important research into the social life of the automobile has looked beyond North America and Western Europe (Siegelbaum 2011, Giucci 2012). For example, Clarsen has analysed the development of a distinctive Australian automobility and its interaction with Aboriginal and settler-colonial identities (Clarsen and Veracini 2012, Clarsen 2017a, 2017b). Automobility has been used to articulate, for example, changing class formations in China (Zhang 2019) and capitalist transition in Vietnam (Truitt 2008, Hansen 2017). Compared to recent and wide-ranging work on the African region by Gewald et al. (2009) and Green-Simms (2017), the Middle East appears sorely under-researched.

This is not to say that important work is not already underway. There have been several key social histories of the automobile in the Levant, and this growing relevance is reflected in the recent in the special issue ‘Global Middle East in the Age of Speed’ (Jackson 2019). Tignor (1990) gave an early insight into the socio-economic interactions between the automobile industry and national politics in Egypt. Likewise, Menoret’s (2014) recent monograph on street-racing culture in Saudi Arabia is a seminal example of the intertwinement of car culture, state sovereignty and urban development in the region.

Automobility in the Levant

Sakatni notes that ‘the history of the automobile industry and its social and cultural politics in the Middle East is only beginning to be written’ (2019, p. 160). Monroe (2014a) has shown how changing representations of automobility interacted with restrictive gender norms and a developing bourgeois class and Lebanese national identity during the interwar period. Her findings are supported by Barak’s (2019) account of the role of the private car in gendered concepts of respectability in Egypt. On the other end of the class spectrum, Chatty and Saktani (Chatty 1976, 1977, Sakatni 2019) have both highlighted the rapid transformative effects that automobilities had on nomadic pastoral communities in the Levant, and Pétriat (2021) explored the overlap between caravans and automobiles in the early twentieth century. Focussing on contemporary political developments, McNaught (2013) showed how in neighbouring Syria bus transport networks mapped the growing poverty and disenfranchisement which erupted into the Syrian Civil war. There is a related and extensive body of literature on the way the looming threat of renewed sectarian conflict has conditioned Lebanon’s urban development (Nucho 2016, Hermez 2017, Akar 2018).

The terrible Lebanese public transportation infrastructure serves as a daily reminder of the ‘lack of the state’. Cars are essential for everyday mobility, roads are extremely congested, and traffic laws are rarely enforced. For Hage (2018), this allows for ‘a face-to-face horizontal sociality that is not mediated vertically by the law as a third party’ (p.101). He argues that this creates a sense of ‘jouissance’ whereby his interlocutors will often ‘be crankily caught up in an impossible traffic jam or in trying to negotiate a transaction with the state bureaucracy. Yet despite and alongside all this, people are able to express a certain joy in manoeuvring through these very difficulties’ (Hage 2018, p. 89). Indeed, anyone who has sped the wrong way down a one-way backstreet to avoid a half-an-hour Beirut traffic jam or made use of a friend-of-a-friend to skip some bureaucratic obstacles at General Security will identify with this feeling.

However, Kanafani (2015) sees the need be ‘constantly attuned to the other’ when driving in Lebanon as decidedly inegalitarian. She argues that automobility entails a delicate and complex performance of power and opposing claims to ownership and belonging in the state and urban space. It is a negotiation by people assessing each other’s position in the social hierarchy and does not suggest an absence of the state, but rather locates the state in everyday practices (Kanafani 2015, p. 125). Kanafani’s ethnography shows how the act of parking one’s car in Beirut is full of performative political significance. In her vignettes, she highlights how the ‘parking negotiation’ encounter is laden with economic, patriarchal, and geographical hierarchies. Interlocutors are forced to abandon discourses of ‘rights’ to public space, and instead engage in haggling over access with local custodians which exist on the border between the formal state apparatus and the local community. Her interlocutors read and make use of repertoires of belonging and deference to access public parking, always aware of a latent danger in each encounter – misreading the unwritten rules of Beirut parking can lead to slashed tires, fines, or outright violence.

Monroe similarly notes the class-based component of Beirut automobility, where problems are frequently blamed on the ‘visible and vulnerable’ service taxi drivers (Monroe 2014b, p. 125, 2016). She says that ‘driving, as a specific form of spatial movement, had to do with one’s right to take up public space and was an entitlement possessed unequally by Beirut’s residents’ (p.120). Echoing Hage, she too notes the ‘horizontal comradeship’ expressed by Lebanese drivers (p.112) and notes that this is a means of discursively constructing the Lebanese ‘nation’ as a shatir (clever) and self-determining people who are not constrained by rules (Monroe 2011).

Monroe has also addressed automobility from the perspective of the state, in her account of the beleaguered Traffic Management Centre (2017), documenting the failure of projects to apply traffic codes consistently and transparently in the face of competing claims by individuals to be above the law (p.331). Political struggles often spill over onto the Lebanese roads – in 2020, a farcically complicated dispute over several million dollars in revenue from Beirut parking metres between the municipality and the Traffic Management authority has meant that for several months, the city has been without traffic lights (Rose 2020). Internal Security Forces (ISF) traffic enforcement is almost entirely absent outside of Beirut and its suburbs aside from an occasional and largely symbolic visit to one of the other coastal cities.

Lebanese car culture

This article builds on this previous scholarship on automobility and statehood in the Levant and more broadly. It does so by focussing on the car as an individual artefact, and how it is imbued with discursive and symbolic significance, and I have used the material object of the car as a guide for analysis. In doing so, my approach draws inspiration from other analyses of automobiles as customisable sites of communication and contestation (Bloch 2000, Chiluwa 2008, Young 2017), and also ethnographic accounts of driving practices (Monroe 2018, Qamhaieh and Chakravarty 2020).

I first began to think about the grammar and symbols of cars in Lebanon when working for an NGO in South Lebanon in 2016. I noticed how traffic seemed to slow and part for certain cars and not for others. I saw that, when faced with certain cars, otherwise reckless colleagues would all of a sudden deferentially give way, or pass up on a tight parking spot they normally would have swerved into. After a while, I found myself slowing down, not beeping my horn, or overtaking so aggressively. These changes in my driving were not fully conscious, but often an almost reflexive physical response.

I began to keep a list the unwritten rules of the road and the meanings of different symbols, and I actively pursued this project whilst undertaking anthropological fieldwork in the Biqa’a valley from 2019 to 2020. My fieldwork focussed on the relationship between Lebanese farmers and Syrian refugee-labourers, and mobility was a common feature of everyday life, so it was easy to continue documenting the rules of the road. Conversations on the topic came naturally, as I asked my interlocutors to explain certain aspects of car decorations or driving practices that I had observed in previous days. Often, this would lead to a much broader conversation about other aspects of the Lebanese roads and hierarchy and wasta in other aspects of life. Wasta is a very commonly used Arabic word which refers broadly to political connections, and there is an extensive body of literature exploring the concept (see, for example, Cunningham et al. 1993, Ramady 2015, Egan and Tabar 2016). These rules and meanings tended to be so self-evident and mundane to many of my interlocutors that they found my interest amusing. I would then cross-check rules with other interlocutors, who would confirm or dispute my other friends’ interpretations. Often, once this topic was broached, my interlocutors would continue to articulate more and more complex and obscure rules, and test me to see if I remembered rules mentioned in previous conversations, enjoying their role as experts in Lebanese wasta, educating the novice ajnabee (foreigner).

This knowledge was not the domain of any particular sub-group of Lebanese society. My interlocutors were both women and men and came from the complete spectrum of social classes, sects, ages, regions and incomes. For example, I was told a rule by a middle-aged, middle-class male Christian accountant, which was corroborated by a working-class Shia farmer. Another rule was suggested by a teenage Syrian refugee, which was then expanded on by a wealthy, cosmopolitan Lebanese woman. These discussions could be with people who drove on a daily basis and others who rarely did so, and even non-drivers would be more than happy to pitch in as well. There was perhaps a slight bias towards younger men taking a greater interest in the topic, but this article should certainly be understood as an ethnography of ‘common knowledge’.

People in Lebanon spend huge amounts of time behind the wheel. Lebanon has woeful public transportation, aside from the reliable number four bus loop in Beirut (on this, see Samaha and Mohtar 2020) and a handful of other intercity connections. Due to this dismal infrastructure and poor urban planning, many essential aspects of life were greatly impeded by lack of access to a private car. Car ownership exploded with the huge influx of wealth that followed the 2006 war, with sales more than doubling from fifteen thousand to almost thirty-five thousand purchases of private vehicles in one year (CEIC Data 2019). One of the main physical manifestations of the Lebanese state are military or police checkpoints, which are dotted on most main roads and intersections, and the car mediates these everyday encounters with the state apparatus. Similarly, since many Lebanese use the car every time they leave their house, a huge proportion of encounters with the public, and public space, are once again mediated by their car. Given this role of the car in everyday life, it is perhaps no coincidence that one of the most common forms of political protest is saker al tariq (close the roads).

I have noted in my own fieldwork in rural communities a very ‘Lebanese’ manifestation of the intertwinement between masculinity and ownership of a vehicle which can be found in a plethora of other contexts. Male interlocutors who did not own a vehicle, and who were thus reliant on others to move between the village and the city, were often treated with pity bordering on contempt, and in turn expressed a deep, almost existential frustration.

The centrality of cars and appearance builds on more longstanding cultural practices of performing power. Gilsenan’s (1996) fieldwork in a remote Akkar village in the early 1970s, for instance, highlights the importance of ‘being seen’, and this extended to the performance of cars and driving even then:

‘The older chauffeurs knew that a serious demeanour, a suit, a pair of dark glasses, a Belgian revolver in the waistband, and a heavy imitation gold watch carried real weight when they purred up the road past the mosque in the Buick belonging to the beys. They would leave it to a kid to swirl his Massey Ferguson round on its axis for all the world as if he was a great horseman on a tractor, and would drily comment on the expense of ruined tyres. Style and form remained important to them too, but they demonstrated their status in appropriately modern ways of dress and ornament.’ (p.286)

Modern readers who have lived in rural Lebanon would note that little has changed. I have witnessed this vignette Gilsenan describes several times over the course of my fieldwork fifty years later, but the Belgian revolver is now a Glock and the Buick has become a Toyota Land Cruiser.

War and the state are constantly manifest in these objects and the practices that surround them. In my Biqa’a valley field site, several of my villager friends drove beaten-up old flatbed trucks. Sitting in the back, I noticed a few strange holes in the truck bed. My friend, a Shia Hizbollah member said, with a cheeky smile ‘Oh, those are from the war. I bought this truck from a Christian who was in the qouwet’, which was one of the main far-right Christian militias in the civil war. ‘There was an M50 machine gun where you are sitting’ he laughed. Likewise, in Biqa’a villages, there is a prized early 1990s-model Range Rover with a V8 engine which is seen as being nigh-indestructible. In my field site, there must have been at least twenty of these Range Rovers in the village, but only two were properly licensed and so could be taken ‘down to Beirut’. The process of licensing older cars for an ordinary villager is complex, risky, and prohibitively expensive. There is the labyrinth of opaque bureaucracy to navigate, which would often require invoking some form of wasta to successfully negotiate, and any number of unexpected costs or days spent waiting in grim government buildings once the process was started. It was widely rumoured that the owners of the two legal Land Rovers in the village would never sell, no matter how much money you offered them. This in turn leads to strange practices, where interlocutors who owned two (unregistered) cars and a motorbike would ask for rides in my legally registered car when they wanted to head further afield than the regional capital of Baalbek.

Lebanon’s neo-liberal experiment kicked off with the end of the civil war, and car dependency was widespread by the 1990s (Perry 2000), but my interlocutors tended to date the automobile revolution as beginning much more recently. The broad historical narrative is as follows. Prior to the colossal influx of cash in 2006, power and wealth were relatively simple to perform. Variation was essentially limited to two axes: the make of car and the model. Basically, a Mercedes or a BMW were the only respectable brands, and the newer the model, the better. While there was a huge increase in disposable income amongst previously poor communities in the 1990s, this was not really sufficient to translate into new cars for everyone. The main beneficiaries of the rebuilding contracts and neoliberal reforms in the 1990s were predominantly a small, already relatively privileged group. The real transformation occurred in the aftermath of the July war between Hizbollah and Israel in 2006. As one of my interlocutors described it:

‘Man, there was too much money after 2006! I mean bags of cash, dollar bills. You didn’t even need to count it, because it was all serial numbers in order. If your house was damaged [by the bombings], they just gave it to you, no questions asked.’

Huge amounts of money began to flow from the Gulf and Hizbollah channels after the 2006 war, and this time it was distributed amongst a much broader segment of society (for more on this, see Al-Harithy 2010, Mollica 2014). All of a sudden, everyone could afford a new(ish) BMW or Mercedes. The elite needed new ways to distinguish themselves, and they did so not only through demonstrating wealth but through activating and performing wasta.

I will give an account of what I see as the four primary sets of grammatical rules in the language of power in Lebanese automobiles: license plate numbers, license plate types, decorations, and brands. The following rules are by no means exhaustive and opening up this topic with Lebanese drivers will inevitably lead to the discovery of a new rule or detail. In giving this ethnography of Lebanese automobiles, I hope to make two main contributions. Firstly, I am adding to a growing body of work building on the theoretical insights of Mitchell (2002) and Sharma and Gupta (2006), giving an in-depth, empirical case study of the ‘state effect’ and how it is reproduced through everyday disciplinary practices. Secondly, I think that this Lebanese case study complicates some of these theoretical assumptions. Much of the ‘state effect’ embodied by Lebanese automobiles serves to highlight the very messiness and inconsistency of the Lebanese state, simultaneously reinforcing other networks of disciplinary power.

The rules of the Lebanese road

License plate numbers

The first source of data on the vehicle is the license plate, which contains a large amount of information about the driver, which hovers between the formal state apparatus and the informal networks which permeate it. The license plate is the mark of the state upon the car, ascribing it legal status. Thus, in Lebanon, the first thing to look for in one’s assessment of a car, as the negotiation begins, is whether or not it has a license plate. Cars may be unregistered for a wide variety of reasons. For example, if a person is driving in their home village or neighbourhood, there is no need to register the car. It is common for people to have unregistered vehicles ‘for the village’ where they are sovereign and state laws do not apply. If the person is an outlaw, the car may be similarly unlicensed – this is especially common in the Biqa’a valley. This rejection of the state also signals its existence – in descending from the village, people will change cars, tacitly acknowledging the formal state sovereignty down in the valley. Of course, the opposite may be the case – powerful politicians may drive cars without license plates, demonstrating that they are above the law.

Assuming the car in question has a license plate, we can potentially learn a lot about the driver. License plates in Lebanon consist of a letter followed by a series of numbers ranging from one to six digits. Personalised number plates are by no means unique to Lebanon but the practice of illicitly trading and gifting license plates through wasta is widespread. Roughly speaking, the fewer, and more ‘beautiful’ or aesthetically pleasing the combination of numbers, the more connected and wealthier the driver is. A similar market exists for telephone numbers (this is mirrored in Iraq (Salim and El-Ghobashy 2018)), and some Lebanese drivers even strive to have their mobile phone number match their license plate.

A car with five or more random numbers on the plate is a ‘normal’ car. At the time of writing, four numbers cost around $2,000 and three numbers approximately $10,000, but of course this must be coupled with the driver’s wasta with state employees. The shorter number, then, reflects an ability to mobilise wealth through wasta on a whim and prices increase from there. The Tripoli MP Mosbah Ahdab tried to buy his great uncle’s coveted 777 license plate, only to find that the asking price had risen to $250,000 (Braun 2004). The numbers 1–120 are generally known to be reserved for members of parliament, and different politicians are known by their license plates or even their personal car (Rivoal 2014, p. 8). This practice of trading in license plate numbers is so lucrative in Lebanon that the previous Interior Minister Raya al-Hassan tried to formalise and regulate it (The Daily Star 2019).

In Lebanon, this performance of wealth and connections may have very practical, visible benefits. A soldier or policeman is far less likely to stop a car with 3 or 4 numbers, and a driver of average social status is more likely to be wary of bumping or scratching the car. The other driver is obviously a person who has enough money and connections to use them on superfluous vanities, so imagine what force they could bring to bear on issues with more gravity. The letter, meanwhile, denotes where the car was registered (for example T for Tripoli, Z for Zahleh) and while not a certainty, this can tell you if the driver is from the region or not.

License plate types

The second source of information from the vehicle comes through types of license plates. Variation and hierarchy are further formalised through the state apparatus, and the colour of the plate reflects an individual's position in society and the extent of their wasta. A white plate with a blue edge denotes a ‘normal’ private car. A red plate is for a taxi, although some ministry employees also have red plates, so it could also denote a high ranking official – one must use other data available, such as the value of the car. Green plates are rental cars, and orangey-yellow are he’a siyasiyeh, political groups and most often diplomatic cars. Yellow means that it is a show car and is registered to a dealership. There are then the license plates of officers in the various security services – they may be official or private cars. The army, mukhabarat, General Security and other security services all have black license plates. The plate number and the name of the security branch is written in barely legible white. On top of this, fully blue license plates are for cars registered to members of parliament, and so denote even more extensive wasta. Lower down in the rankings are red outlined license plates for judges. Similarly, large international organisations are marked out as exceptional. UN personnel have their own special license plates, as do UNIFIL forces. UNHCR Toyota Land Cruisers are easy to spot, as are the UNRWA license plate and distinctive white Fiat car model. The Red Cross also have their own license plates.

In light of the power that comes with specialised license plates, it was inevitable that drivers would seek to find ways to trick the system. Fake license plates became widespread, and relatively risk free – a policeman who holds up a car to investigate the license plate risks incurring the wrath of a powerful and connected person if the plate turns out to be real. Purportedly in order to combat this problem, the state launched a renewal of license plates in 2018 (The Daily Star 2017). Cars were to be taken in and a new ‘unforgeable’ license plate was to be bought. Aside from the fact that fake versions of these new license plates immediately emerged, this attempt at reform simply created a new layer of variegation. In order to purchase the new license plate, all the car’s paperwork, most importantly the annual mu’ayaneh (vehicle inspection) must be up to date. Many cars have lapsed on their mu’ayaneh for several years, and they would have to pay all those previous years in one fell swoop in order to update their license plate. The grace period for updating the license plate has been repeatedly extended, and many drivers have simply not bothered to update their plates. The state’s attempt to control license plates thus inadvertently added another sign of differentiation between drivers.

The Lebanese state continues to multiply the means by which license plates are a means to demonstrate state and individual power. With the onset of the coronavirus pandemic, one of the key means by which the Lebanese state attempted to stop the spread of the virus was through travel restrictions. This mechanism was based on license plates – three days a week only license plates with odd numbers were allowed on the road, and three days a week even. The result was, of course, that drivers would circumvent these rules through changing license plates and activating wasta on the days they were forbidden from driving.

On top of this state-facilitated hierarchy of license plates, there are various other stickers which can be found on license plates indicating the owner is an employee in various ministries – the emblem of the Ministry of Defence is the most common of these small discs that are seen added to license plates. Mukhatir (Local Notaries) used to add a yellow disc to their license plates, though this practice has been discontinued, and they have begun adding an official looking certificate to the dashboard. The various members of professional associations have different certificates that they may put on the front dashboard, indicating membership and the privileges that come with it (for example, pharmacists and doctors). The Lebanese Engineers Association have a quite recognisable yellow and black sticker. My interlocutors frequently reminded me that the law was changed a few years ago, and adding discs to the license plates has been banned, but that has had little impact in practice. After all, which lowly policeman would dare to challenge a high ranking official in the Ministry of Defence?

These are all ways in which the license plate denotes the relationship of the driver to the Lebanese state, and thus his wasta. Some cars have foreign license plates, denoting a wide range of relationships to the state. Syrian license plates, for example, indicate lowliness in the hierarchy. Recently imported cars, often from the USA or the Gulf, will still have the original foreign license plates. Previously, this was a sign that the owner was dodging import duties – there was a loophole in the law via which import duties had to be paid within a year of importing the car. However, if you imported a car from the abroad, you could simply drive it to Syria and ‘re-import’ the car every year. Now that this loophole has been closed, the foreign license plate (most often from California) tends to be a way of announcing that the car is a new import. This means that it is good quality, since it has not spent long on potholed Lebanese roads, and is a good advertisement/guarantee if the owner is looking to sell.

Decorations

The third source of information from the vehicle are other, less bureaucratic (though not necessarily distinct from the state) symbols to be gleaned from a vehicle. Often, there is a rosary bead sticker or a fish symbol denoting that the owner is a Christian. There is a slightly different rosary without the crucifix, or more often a Quran on the dashboard, signalling that the driver is a Muslim. This can be more specific, with ya ali stickers telling us, for example, the driver is a Shia, and a picture of Saint Cherbil telling us the driver is a Maronite. A multi-coloured pentagram dangling from the rear-view mirror indicates a Druze. The meaning of these sectarian symbols is then contingent on the viewer’s own sect, changing national and local inter-sectarian political dynamics, and personal lived experience.

Soldiers or soldier’s families who are not officers and thus do not qualify for the black license plate may put the Lebanese Armed forces insignia on their windshield, demonstrating their allegiance and connections. Family members may put up pictures of martyrs (often Hizbollah, but certainly not exclusively) on the windshield. In a few cases near to Palestinian camps I have seen cars with the iconic Palestinian Handala cartoon character on the back, announcing their nationality to the road, and in the Biqa’a valley, I have seen cars with clan names written on the back. In Lebanon’s sectarian political system, these markers of religious and national identity are inseparable from political claim-making.

Despite political parties’ centrality to the Lebanese social hierarchy, membership is rarely clearly denoted on vehicles. Perhaps because of the possibility of inviting conflict, parties tend to operate one step removed. For example, while there are plenty of cars with Hizbollah insignias and decoration, this almost guarantees that the driver is not an active Hizbollah member. Instead, members may be given a lajneh amniyeh (security committee) card, which they show to avoid being stopped at checkpoints. These cards, too, have a hierarchy, with different cards working in different places. The various branches of the security services such as the mukhabarat al-jaysh and the Intelligence Branch distribute different cards for tashil al-murur (ease of movement), and these can be acquired through political and family connections. Tinted car windows require a license, so a vehicle may be stopped or waved through a checkpoint, depending on if the driver can flash his card to the soldier in question. A similar system exists for firearms licenses, with members of the security services distributing them to friends and family members as gifts.

Car customisations are more complex to decipher. Tinted windows could have several meanings, depending on the location – it could be licensed, in which case it demonstrates that wasta has been activated to get this permission. On the other hand, unlicensed blacked out windows demonstrates a disregard for the law. This may indicate that the driver is already an outlaw or is in his hometown and so is sovereign with regards to state automobile regulations. The same rules apply to personalised horns, which imitate police sirens. Indeed, it is unlikely you have ever heard a police siren in Lebanon, since they are almost all attached to private cars.

Given that many Lebanese are aware of these symbols, it is also important to note that they can be used to deliberately mislead. For example, I know of a car dealership operating in a Shia Muslim city that used to buy cars and put crucifix stickers on the rear windshield before selling them on. This was due to a generally held prejudice that Christians are better at maintaining their cars that Shia Muslims, and so he hoped to inspire confidence in potential buyers. Syrian interlocutors also often left the previous Lebanese owner’s decorations on the car, in the hope that it would allow them to pass as Lebanese to the uninquisitive eye.

I myself have been involved in these practices of dissimulation. Whilst conducting fieldwork in a Sunni Muslim Syrian refugee camp in Biqa’a, a couple of my interlocutors were making fun of how dirty my car was, and how no-one would respect me if I didn’t get it cleaned. Then, one of the more mischievous of the shebab wrote with his finger in the dirt of my rear window the Shia Muslim slogan ya ali. ‘There,’ he said, grinning widely, ‘now everyone will think you are a Shia and they will let you pass freely!’ In doing so, he was simultaneously educating me on the rules of the road, reflecting on his own subordinate position as a Sunni in a Shia dominated area, and ridiculing what he saw as Lebanese obsession with appearance and privilege.

Brands

A fourth and final means to convey information about the social status of the driver is the model of the car. Mercedes-Benz, and to a slightly lesser extent BMW, are by far the most favoured brands in Lebanon. This in itself has economic and practical implications. The parts are easy to come by, whereas American or East Asian models are more difficult – to have, for example, an American car like a Ford can be very expensive if it requires new parts. Police cars are the exception. If you see a beaten-up late-2000s model Dodge Charger, it is instantly recognisable as a member of the ISF. This serves as a reminder of better times, when back in 2008 the US ironically gifted around 200 of the impractically large vehicles to the ISF to build Lebanon’s ‘sovereignty and security’ (U.S. Department of State 2009). In the Biqa’a valley, certain clans are known to have a preference for specific brands and models. The Toyota FJ Cruiser is so favoured by the Ja’afar clan, for example, that it is jokingly said that the initials FJ stand for the common Biqa’a woman’s name Fatmeh Ja’afar.

Certain families have monopolies (known as wikaleh hasariyeh) on imports of certain brands. For example, it is common knowledge amongst my interlocutors that the only licensed importer of new Mercedes is the company Toufic Ghargour et Fils (TGF) Thus, the only way to declare that you bought your Mercedes brand new min ash shirkeh (from the dealer) is if it has the initials ‘TFG’ written on the back. In neighbouring Syria, the Mercedes concession has been the site for political contestation and is a case study of the centralisation of economic power in the hands of a new generation of oligarchs that occurred after Bashar al Assad’s accession to the presidency. In 2004, oligarch and brother-in-law to the president Rami Makhlouf attempted to take control of the Mercedes concession historically owned by the Saqtani family, which resulted in Mercedes car parts being cut for the region. This was a step too far even for the Assad regime and, after a brief power struggle, the concession was returned to the Saqtanis (Landis 2004).

Certain models of Mercedes and BMW are held in such high esteem that they have nicknames. The most famous is the shabih (ghost), a large Mercedes with a boot big enough to fit kitchen appliances to smuggle to Syria. This nickname has entered into everyday vocabulary, and some claim that the name of the Syrian shabiha (regime thugs) derives from their propensity to drive this model of car (Mohammad 2012, Salih 2014). But amongst the shebab (young men) there are many more nicknames. There is the ghawasa (submarine), the nimleh (ant), the watwat (bat), the bumeh (owl) and the boy. There is Im murmoush (mother of eyelashes), and Im ayoon (mother of eyes). Then, there is the bata (duck), an old model BMW which is held in high esteem amongst the shebab, which will often be modified. It is very much a ‘bad boy’ car, and people will pay well over the market price for one in good condition. Some of my interlocutors play games, challenging each other and their children to correctly name old models while driving, subtly educating their children on how to read this vehicular landscape.

Two other models worthy of note are the older model Mercedes. Most taxi drivers have a certain kind of Mercedes, and outside Beirut they drive them exclusively. The older version is nicknamed the qatash, and has round headlights, a newer version is the lif (curve), so called because of the way the lights curve around the edge. Outside Beirut, one does not need a license and a red number plate to operate a taxi – if you have the correct model of car, people will be happy to get in. In fact, the opposite applies – a fully licensed taxi driver can struggle to find work in Lebanon’s peripheral regions if he is not driving an old Mercedes, despite his red license plate.

The hierarchy above is not an exhaustive list – I have not even begun to consider motorbikes, public transport, tractors, nor have I tried to decipher the aesthetics of delivery vehicles. In restricting my account to the material artefact that is the car, I have left out a huge body of related, even more complex rules. For example, I have not dealt with the process of legally registering a car and the need for a simsar (broker) in order to undertake this mundane bureaucratic procedure. Nor have I explained the wakil practice of buying a car from a wealthy person with connections, who will then give you a paper from the local notary giving you the right to drive the car, or the various ways Syrians navigate this legal maze. This is in part due to considerations of space, and also simply because these rules and practices are less accessible and my own understanding of them is still developing. Comparative analysis with the ‘rules of the road’ in other contexts would be illuminating. It remains a fruitful area for further research, and new layers of meaning are constantly emerging: despite the ongoing economic crisis, the Lebanese state continues to massively subsidise fuel for the general public, though supply cuts have been steadily increasing and prices are soaring. Officers in the security forces are given free petrol and diesel. As the economic collapse continues and subsidies are removed, new layers of meaning and symbols will emerge associated with access to fuel and parts.

Conclusion

The above account demonstrates there is a vast and complex grammar pertaining to the physical artefact of the car. The car, and the symbols it bears, is a means through which drivers on Lebanese roads communicate their power and relationship to the Lebanese state with one another. This grammar is as much for the ISF and army as it is for other drivers and pedestrians. As was highlighted by Kanafani (2015), it is through these practices embodied in the artefact that the abstract notion of the ‘state’ becomes real, and this ethnography supported Monroe’s claim that ‘Vehicular automobility … is a powerful and insistent instrument through which we can understand no less than the configuration of the biopolitical order’ (2018, p. 134). The rules which I have outlined give the tools to decipher what is happening in my opening vignette – automobiles demand ritualistic, embodied deference to symbols such as a black license plate, and this is not a singular event, but rather a constant, self-reproducing disciplinary practice.

To characterise this as evidence of ‘the lack of the state’ would be a simplification. The role of the state is deep in each of these pieces of knowledge, but not as an impartial, abstract body, but as a source of latent power and connections ready to be activated by each driver at a moment’s notice. This power must be performed, otherwise it does not exist – certainly, you could be a billionaire Member of Parliament, but without the blue license plate, tinted windows, and the police siren horn, Beirut traffic simply will not part for you. However, the grammar of the automobile is not limited to declaring connections to the state apparatus – it is also a site in which hierarchies of religion, nationality, and locality become real. You know that you can honk your horn and overtake a car with a Syrian license plate more aggressively, and that when parking, you should be careful not to block in a judge’s red-license-plated car.

The above account shows that cars are a manifestation of more general cultural practices of performing power. Gilsenan establishes the idea of ‘to see and be seen’ as central to his now classic account of power in rural Lebanon. ‘Powerful men mean to be in view, are expected to be in view, personally seen by inferiors who are both socially and in this case physically below’ (Gilsenan 1996, p. 4), and ‘the spectacle of appropriate forms of power’ adheres to clear, context specific rules. For example, in Beirut, a wealthy politician must smoke cigars, but ‘in the village his nargileh is the appropriate sign of his status.’ Material objects are both ‘marks of status and necessary for the show of force’ and also for use. For example, ‘weapons are a visible sign of the personal power the lord wields, a sign to opponents of the force he can direct in service of his interests and necessary protection to his person’ (p.21). The automobile on Lebanese roads can be seen as a sort of ‘mini-spectacle’, which has developed in response to changing material and social conditions.

The ‘rules of the road’ show how individual subjects are disciplined in social hierarchy in Lebanon through everyday usage of ‘common knowledge’. Wedeen built upon the role of spectacles in the Levant, arguing that we should ‘think of spectacles not merely as representations of state power, but also as themselves instances of that power‘ (Wedeen 2015, p. 19). In her study of power and authority in Syria, she argues for a differentiated application of Foucauldian discipline. Syria ‘is a long way from the “carceral society” Discipline and Punish claims to discern in Western nations’ and the impersonal disciplinary technologies are largely absent (p.19). She locates discipline in political spectacles, which meet many of the requirements of Foucauldian technologies. They regiment bodies for political obedience, dramatise state power, and visually anchor otherwise abstract political ideas and self-conceptions, framing the ways people see themselves as citizens. She says that ‘spectacles make power palpable, publicly visible, and practical. Bodies serve as the apparent and immediate site upon which participation is enforced’ (p.22). The automobile in Lebanon is a daily performance of power, which substantiates this system of authority and hierarchy. Since the public space increasingly consists of cars, rather than bodies, the automobile serves as the site upon which disciplinary power operates. Individual drivers participate in the reproduction of this social hierarchy every time they get behind the wheel, by deferring to those above them and domineering those beneath them through the symbolic language of automobiles.

This study also reveals a more complicated relationship between performances of power and the ‘state effect’. For Sharma and Gupta ‘representational techniques such as organisational charts, official seals, and photographs of state leaders help suture the various levels of bureaucracy into an apparently neat, organised, distinct and coherent whole, and define state functionaries’ relation to this larger system. By lending to the state a veneer of consistency, systematicity, centralised control, and wholeness, and by thus eliding the messiness, contradictions, and tensions that states congeal, statist representations play a crucial role in entrenching the borders and vertical authority of the state and in shaping resistance to the state’ (p.19). The opposite is the case in Lebanon, as this ethnography shows – the symbols in question here are a constant reminder of precisely this messiness, and the extent to which state acts as a vehicle for personal power. Borrowing from Aretxaga, these practices ‘alert us to the fact that the power of the state is harnessed not so much from the rationality of ordering practices as from the passions of transgression, in which the line between the legal and the illegal is constantly blurred’ (Aretxaga 2003, p. 403). The state is substantiated through everyday disciplinary practices, but attention must be paid to precisely how it is substantiated, and what other structures of power are simultaneously being constructed.

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Nora Stel, Marie Odgaard, and China Sajadian for reading and commenting on earlier versions of this article. Thanks also go to Boutros Kattoura and Hassan Shreif for the many evenings spent discussing and correcting my understanding of Lebanese car culture. Last but not least, thanks to my mum, for reading and correcting so many early drafts of my work.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Jacob Cassani

Jacob Cassani is an anthropologist currently completing his doctorate at UCL. His research focuses on the relationship between Syrian refugees and Lebanese hashish farming communities in the central and Northern Biqa'a valley. He is interested in rural labour organisation, refugee/camp governance, and questions of statehood and sovereignty.