Towards an Ethics of<i>Being-With</i>: Intertwinements of Life in Post-Invasion Basra

Abstract

In this paper, I turn to Oum Hassan, a woman who works as a cleaner in a hotel in Basra, and show that her life is as much a life for her niece and sister as it is about maintaining her own existence in the face of tremendous pressures. Where anthropologists have insisted on the primordiality of social relationship to the constitution of personhood, I am wanting to recast some of this interest into a language of an ethics of life and being-with.