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INTRODUCTION
By positing, as others have done, that childhood, far from being a stable, timeless, and universal category of life, is rather a historical invention or even a social institution, whose meaning and social force have changed over time, this essay investigates the political significance and changing nature of conceptualizations of childhood in French Mandate Lebanon (1920-1942). In doing so, I discuss the ways in which parenting became an important political act for some Lebanese in the aftermath of the First World War, which not only reflected critical transformations in French-Lebanese relations but also contributed significantly to the process of state formation.
Most of the existing scholarship on childhood in Lebanon is ethnographic or deals exclusively with questions of development, education, poverty, or social welfare. This material, however, tends to make broad generalizations about "Arab childhoods" or "new generations" and to place undue emphasis on Islam as the major factor differentiating children of the Middle East from Western children, when in fact many of the ideas about children frequently labeled misleadingly as "Muslim" or "Islamic" are much more complex and defy such restrictive religious signifiers.1 Literature situating children in any historical context in Lebanon is also liable to frame childhood in highly static terms and to underestimate its significance in a matrix of other social, cultural, political, and economic forces. The historical reading of childhood in this article, in contrast, attempts to problematize these assumptions by exploring the various ways in which childhood was defined, understood, and even deployed-sometimes accidently, sometimes polemically-by various actors. In doing so, I emphasize how a debate on the public/private nature of home life enabled the discourse of childhood to emerge as one in which the formation of Greater Lebanon and the characteristics of a modern Lebanese identity might be negotiated.
Similar to the way in which Beshara Doumani has illustrated how the "traditional Arab family" was "a recently invented abstraction imposed on the past in order to create a static backdrop against which the lively stories of modernity can be narrated," I demonstrate how the idea of childhood was articulated, or re-articulated, in Mandate Lebanon as a concept upon which the project of Euro-American modernity and its contingent anxieties were projected.2 Much of the literature I analyze throughout...