The Scandal of Continuity in Middle East Anthropology

Form, Duration, Difference

Judith Scheele, Andrew Shryock, Judith Scheele, Andrew Shryock

• Publisher: Indiana University Press
• Year: 2019
• eBook ISBN: 9780253043771
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Anthropology
• Index: Social Sciences

Despite a rich history of ethnographic research in Middle Eastern societies, the region is frequently portrayed as marginal to anthropology. The contributors to this volume reject this view and show how the Middle East is in fact vital to the discipline and how Middle Eastern anthropologists have developed theoretical and methodological tools that address and challenge the region's political, ethical, and intellectual concerns. The contributors to this volume are students of Paul Dresch, an anthropologist known for his incisive work on Yemeni tribalism and customary law. As they expand upon his ideas and insights, these essays ask questions that have long preoccupied anthropologists, such as how do place, point of view, and style combine to create viable bodies of knowledge; how is scholarship shaped by the historical context in which it is located; and why have duration and form become so problematic in the study of Middle Eastern societies? Special attention is given to understanding local terms, contested knowledge claims, what remains unseen and unsaid in social life, and to cultural patterns and practices that persist over long stretches of time, seeming to predate and outlast events. Ranging from Morocco to India, these essays offer critical but sensitive approaches to cultural difference and the distinctiveness of the anthropological project in the Middle East.

1

DIALOGUES OF THREE

Making Sense of Patterns That Outlast Events

Andrew Shryock

What was it? A mass of material accumulated over ages, originating as oral history, some of it the same but written down later, all purporting to deal with the earliest record of us…. It was a cumbersome, unwieldy mass and more than one hopeful historian had been defeated by it, and not only because of its difficulty, but because of its nature. Anyone working on it must know that if it ever reached a stage of completion where it could have a name, and be known as a product of scholarship, it would be attacked, challenged, and perhaps be described as spurious.^*

—Doris Lessing, The Cleft

SINCE HIS EARLY WORK ON TRIBALISM IN YEMEN, Paul Dresch has been fascinated by cultural patterns that endure over very long periods of time. Most notable of these is the ancient division between the Hashid and Bakil tribal blocs, but related topics include facets of customary law, statecraft, and durable ways of defining identities and relating them to persons or spaces. It is hard to tell how much of this interest derives from prior commitments to structuralist analytics and longue durée historicism. Dresch traveled to Yemen with a healthy supply of Evans-Pritchard in his knapsack, and if he was not yet carrying Braudel, he certainly had R. B. Sergeant. Yet these predispositions, however strong they might have been, could not have found more fertile ethnographic soil in which to grow. In the northern highlands, Dresch encountered political systems that, for many centuries, had been held together and enhanced by ideologically contrastive principles. One system, still functioning around him, was based on moral equivalence, segmentation, and a language of honor. It produced tribes and their laws. The other, only recently eclipsed, was based on divine revelation and unified moral truths. It produced the Zaydi imamate, a state-like tradition in which Islamic law, scholarship, and prophetic descent were essential to legitimate rule. In numerous essays¹ and in his foundational monograph, Tribes, Government, and History in Yemen (1989), Dresch shows how these worlds were joined in practice to produce a dynamic polity with immense staying power, both in its parts and as a whole. The Zaydi Imams enter Yemeni history in 879 CE and do not leave it until 1962. The tribes have an even deeper history. Hashid and Bakil existed as named groups before Islam, and they are vitally engaged in Yemeni politics today.

Dresch often suggests that this antiquity has a troubling quality, that it poses analytical and moral challenges the modern scholar cannot easily address. It is not the durability of the Zaydi Imamate that produces this sensation, although Yemenis fought a bloody civil war to dispose of it. Dynasticism, as a cultural form, is meant to go on and on, and moderns have found several ways to include it in their republics and parliamentary democracies. Rather, it is the persistence of tribalism that seems especially scandalous, and the observers who might draw this conclusion do so from diverse points of view. For centuries, Zaydi imams colluded and collided with tribes, commanding them as “our servants”—never, Dresch notes, as allies or equals—denouncing them as “the fang of a cur in a cur’s head.” Modernists of Arab and Western vintage see tribalism as backwardness, plain and simple; and Yemeni nationalists, even when they portray “their” tribes as essential to Yemeni identity, will argue in the same breath that tribes are a source of political discord and that progress will inevitably wear tribalism away. Across these interpretive positions, tribalism is (at best) a deficient moral space that generates many problems and few solutions. Analysts who linger in this space, as Dresch has done throughout his career, will draw the critical attention of those who oppose “tribes” as a term and a tradition.²

As a student of tribalism in Jordan, I deal with similar trends, but the temporal scale is more compact. Hashemite dynasticism, its prominent tribal backers and opponents, and the local geography of state-like and tribal identities in Jordan all seem shiny and new by Yemeni standards. The ‘Adwani and ‘Abbadi tribal confederations among whom I have done the bulk of my fieldwork took shape in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, after the collapse of the Mihadia shaykhdom, a complex alliance of local tribes that exists today only in the stories told of its demise.³ There was no pre-Hashemite political tradition that resembled the Zaydi Imamate, and the tribal system itself was based on high rates of turnover. In the Balga of central Jordan, tribes routinely displaced each other, and newcomers aligned with older groups, sometimes coming to dominate and absorb their hosts. In Yemen, the boundaries of Hashid and Bakil have shifted surprisingly little for centuries, despite political conflict and population movements within and across these blocs. Tribal sections are apparently equal to each other, oriented serially, and defined by oppositions that work synchronically; the average tribesman cannot, off the top of his head, produce the name of his own great-great-grandfather. It is not possible for a tribe or section to describe its own past from an internal perspective; its particularity can be defined only in balanced contrast to other tribes and sections. “A great deal happens,” Dresch says, “but little is conceived to change” (1989, 179).

In Jordan, the tribal system is oriented toward inequality and diachrony. It is replete with client and follower tribes, weak and strong tribes, fragmented and unified tribes. Groups like ‘Adwan and ‘Abbad are opposed to each other, but it would be hard to argue that they are morally or politically equivalent, and oral tradition is dedicated to proving their conflicting claims to distinction. Genealogical knowledge is robust among Balgawis, who must know the names of at least four patrilineal ancestors to participate in tribal law cases that involve homicide or personal injury. My ‘Adwani informants could often name up to twelve. In the Balga, one might even say that men, events, and collective attributes define tribal sections, and entire tribes, from the inside out. The Bani X are known for having fertile daughters; the Bani Y are generous to a fault; the Bani Z have betrayed their allies many times (and probably will again). Each of these groups tells stories about where its first ancestor came from, and the value of each is enhanced, or diminished, by the deeds of its shaykhs. In the Balga, tribes are not defined simply by way of balanced opposition, like the white and black squares on a Saussurean chessboard.

What I find most interesting about these contrasts is, in a sense, how little they matter. In both systems, tribes claim to be old, and their durability is problematic. The literal amount of durability in a tribal system—is it two hundred years or one thousand years?—is of less importance than the social boundaries that are defined and transgressed by this durability. The literate historicism Dresch locates in the Zaydi half of his Yemeni reality is present, in my work, among tribal historiographers themselves, who are busily adapting their oral traditions to print. These men see their work as controversial, even dangerous, not simply because oral histories are contentious but because local tribes preexisted the Hashemite state and therefore represent (potentially) alternative frames of political loyalty. In short, the persistence of a tribal system in Jordan is considered a challenge in much the way it is in Yemen. Tribes carry a “still/even” stigma. Bedouin heritage can be redeemed as national decor perhaps, but for many Jordanians it is shameful that tribes still exist today, corrupting bureaucracy and national elections with their clannish habits. For critics who have attained postcolonial sophistication, it is wrong to say that Jordan is still beset by tribalism, since this assumes that the tribes of today existed even then, before the British arrived to administer and reinvent them, before the Hashemite state co-opted them to the task of creating a national culture that casts Palestinians as nontribal, as outsiders, and therefore as second-class citizens. All of these claims can be argued on an evidentiary base, and they correspond to legal and policy issues that are pressing in Jordan, but they carry a rather obvious bias against political actors who define themselves in explicitly tribal terms. Giving attention to tribes is quickly assimilated to a language of advocacy or affront.⁴

Why should this be so? We know that tribal structures are patterns that outlast events, but why is their durability a problem, and how does it become a moral and political problem? In thinking about these issues, I want to move away from the familiar idea that tribal populations are not neatly contained within states (because often they are), that they are points of resistance to centralized polities (because often they are not), or that they preexist the national cultures they inhabit (because, for the most part, they are in and of those cultures now). Rarely are Arab tribes treated as “indigenous people” on the Amazonian model, and scholars of the Middle East whose politics are self-consciously progressive—who are warm to indigeneity as a platform for inclusion or autonomy in other parts of the world—are not always sympathetic to tribal people, much less tribalism, in Middle Eastern contexts.⁵ The study of these populations is nowadays widely considered retrograde. Deeb and Winegar, in their recent summing up of anthropology in Arab-majority societies, put it bluntly: “Tribal social organization has practically vanished as a topic of concern for scholars, though not for policy makers, right-wing analysts, and anthropologists embedded with the U.S. military, many of whom persist in using stereotyped notions of tribal structures to explain political violence” (2012, 540).

Of course, the trending topics of Arab world anthropology (gender, Islam, politics and popular culture, and reform-oriented social movements) are also of interest to policy makers, right-wing analysts, and military types. If a critical take on US power in the region is an intellectual goal, then ethnographers should be flocking to the tribal zones, where some of the most visceral, ideologically driven, and technically complex encounters between Western imperialism and Arab (and Pakistani, and Somali, and Afghan, and Kurdish) societies are happening. Tribal social forms are crucially entangled, and disproportionately so, in the making and breaking of the political structures on which global security, human rights, and national identification are based. The tribal zones are often dangerous places, but as Dresch reminds us, they are oddly accommodating as well. They are filled with structures “in whose nodes and interstices fieldworkers perhaps might thrive”—alongside the Islamist militants, journalists, aid workers, prophets, descendants of prophets, colonial officers, oil company engineers, and cigarette smugglers—“and so they do, in distinctive ways.”⁶

The Name/Space

The moral challenge of tribalism is situated precisely here, in an alternative model of secure space. It is a simple model, and Dresch has defined it for us clearly on many occasions. “Were one looking for a single attribute that characterized tribalism,” he writes, it would be “moral reciprocity that turns on protection” (1990, 255). The idea of “social organization” is not adequate to capture what is at stake.

Far from tribes cohering unthinkingly as wholes around men at odds, men are constantly being moved back and forth through the system and being “covered” for a time from the view of their antagonists: the verb commonly used to describe this action is tahajjaba, from the same root as the word for a veil or for an amulet that covers someone from envious eyes. The tribal answer to men’s general vulnerability is often temporary refuge. Similar concepts of covering pervade the whole ethnography [of Yemen] and relate directly to a language of honor that applies to collective identities and to persons equally. (ibid., 255–56)

This system is durable, yes, but the zones of protection it creates are fragile and impermanent, as if by design. Dresch calls the system a “half-world.” It seems too simple to generate the complex political events that surround it; hence, it leaves scholars (and politicos) with too much or too little work to do. It is geographically widespread, yet it delimits regions and identities wherever it travels; hence, it facilitates othering as much as incorporation. The phrase “language of honor,” for instance, will set off alarms. Finally, this system is old, very old, but hardly peripheral. It pervades the literate and scriptural traditions of the same “high cultures” that stigmatize and marginalize tribal populations; hence, it both encourages and blurs the self/Other distinctions on which ambient notions of “civilization” and “the primitive” depend. One suspects that all these ambiguities are essential to how covering and refuge operate, and I have recently argued that tribal storytellers in Jordan, European philosophers like Kant and Derrida, and social theorists like Mauss use similar ideas of protection—ideas of house and hospitality—in explaining human sociality and in moralizing about it (Shryock 2008, 2012). Whether the issue is gift giving, citizenship, or the respect owed even to hostile or offensive guests, the context of moral evaluation is always a “name/space” somehow marked as vulnerable.

Dresch is reluctant to generalize about the name/space, despite its ubiquity, and he refuses to explain its durability in ecological or economic terms. His preferred strategy is to characterize it as a set of relations, show how it works through examples, note its impressive age or spatial distribution, and then delicately back away, as if saying anything else would put him at risk. This maneuver, which creates a feel of mystery, even taboo, is on display in several of Dresch’s best essays. In “Mutual Deception” (1998), he explores how Maussian concepts of exchange differ from Abrahamic ones, to which the name/space is essential. Working through a diverse range of cases, Dresch shows how Middle Eastern materials are organized around notions of autonomy; endogamy; unbalanced, irregular exchange; and debilitating generosity, all of which enhance the reputation of the name/space, often at the expense of the socially conscious giving endorsed by Mauss. “We have moved,” Dresch observes, “from the Qur’an to the ‘age of ignorance’, to Arabia a millennium and a half later, and from there to stories of nineteenth-century Baluchistan. There may be a real coherence. That point I shall not argue (not here at least)” (1998, 116; emphasis added).

The same dodge appears in “Aspects of Non-State Law” (2012b) where Dresch analyzes Yemeni legal traditions that go substantially unchanged for centuries at a time. It is hard to determine exactly how this continuity is reproduced, he claims, but what “we do know is that every time we gain a glimpse of tribal affairs, through a document-find or through anecdotes in a chronicle or learned biography, we find much the same logic of mutually-recognized protection” (2012b, 171). In a tantalizing footnote, Dresch suggests that a hidden replicator is at work: “Texts provide our evidence, but one doubts that texts alone explain continuity. Nowadays in Yemen one finds not only copying back and forth of documents, but people who quote word for word early texts they could not possibly have read and have not heard of. Yemen at least has texts; so perhaps does Oman (Schacht 1964: 77). But resemblances become deeply unsettling when, in the absence of any institutional or documentary connection, one finds sometimes the same turns of phrase in Sinai, the Egyptian desert, or North Africa. Contemporary anthropology and history seem ill-equipped to describe this” (171n).

The descriptive toolkits nearest to hand are those designed for work on “invented traditions,” but the problem Dresch pinpoints here has little to do with the realization that nation-states are not in fact ancient or that ancestral Scottish kilts are in fact new.⁷ The persistence of customary law, for which there is abundant empirical evidence, must be explained by entering the world of tribal knowledge production and working out logics of transmission appropriate to it. That is the underlying problem. The durability of this world—its location before, within, and possibly after the universal claims of empire, Islam, secular democracy, the market economy, or modernity at large—is itself a kind of trespass. Surely it is a kind of history as well, not simply a lack thereof, yet even Dresch sees this alternative historicity as horizontal in configuration and concerned with the (balanced) opposition of moral equals. Historical accounts of tribal worlds must be pieced together using data found outside them, he concludes, because tribal actors “have no unified story to tell, only the indefinitely fragmented body of heroic tradition” (1990, 258).⁸ I think this conclusion is problematic in several ways, and it is the utility of Dresch’s analytical concepts, their rightness in the ethnographic contexts I know best, that makes me think so. In the remainder of this chapter, I would like to show how the name/space is itself an effective means to historicize patterns that outlast events. The ethnographer’s passage through tribal space, if it is correctly routed through name/spaces, will produce the continuities and the evidence of connection that “texts alone” cannot explain.

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The choreography of published work is often misle...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Map
• Introduction: On the Left Hand of Knowledge
• 1. Dialogues of Three: Making Sense of Patterns That Outlast Events
• 2. Totality and Infinity: Sharia Ethnography in Lebanon
• 3. A Mirror for Fieldworkers
• 4. Who Are the Taliban? The Deflection of Truth among Tribal Pashtuns in Pakistan
• 5. Secrecy and Continuity in Rajasthan
• 6. The Place of Strangers in Moroccan Domesticity: Nostalgia, Secrets, and the Continuity of Scandal
• 7. Claiming an Individual Name: Revisiting the Personhood Debate with Afghan Poets in Iran
• 8. Segmentation versus Tyranny: Politics as Empirical Philosophy
• 9. The Republic of Precarity: ‘Abd al-Fattah al-Sisi, Trickster Politician
• Afterword: Experience and Its Modes
• References Cited
• Index