ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on two spaces of social marginality in Beirut: the Sunday market in Sin Al-Fil and the Sabra market in the Palestinian camp of Sabra-Chatila. It analyses the issue of socio-ethnic stigmatisation in relation to the social composition of the sellers and buyers, and how this stigmatisation is reflected in the media. The study deals with the roles of these markets as gates of the city and as places of consumption for a population on the urban fringe. Furthermore, it examines how these markets mirror a different form of globalisation, which disseminates recovered products bought and sold by the city’s largely undesirable persons, and which contrasts with the kind of prestigious cosmopolitanism represented by the new souks of Beirut.
