A life with birds: the ethnography of a passion for pigeon keeping (Lebanon)

Based on an ethnography carried out in a Beirut slum, this article focuses on pigeon-keeping (kashsh ḥamām in Arabic).
To explain its practice in this urban setting, the study applies Clifford Geertz’s conceptual framework related to social semantics to understand how the practice of pigeon-keeping is used to convey the narrative of their owners’ self-disclosure and to describe their semi-permanent existence as refugees. Nonetheless, the kashsh ḥamām cannot be reduced to a simple reflection of social reality; it also constitutes a space-time where men allow themselves to dream of a world other than the one in which they are “encaged”.