Social Change in Syria

Family, Village and Political Party

Sulayman N. Khalaf

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781000207057
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politique et relations internationales
• Subtopic: Politique du Moyen-Orient

Studying a rural village in northern Syria during a period of tremendous social and political change (1940s to 1970s), this book offers a unique perspective on how agrarian transformations in land distribution and its use deeply affected social and political relations among a rural community.

Embedding the personal with the local and the global, this work traces the seeds of social, political and economic struggles that are still important and unfolding in Syria forty years on: changes in social relations brought about by land policy and technological modernization, divisions and connections between urban and rural locations, shifts in education and immigration. Thematically, the study is divided into two parts: the first concerns the historical, socio-economic and political changes occurring in Syria from the beginning of the twentieth century, and the second concerns the life histories of particular actors and their perspectives on social changes. This book is the edited and updated version of Khalaf's original work, including an 'updating chapter' which brings invaluable insight about the village and its people at the aftermath of ISIS and the destruction of the war in Syria.

Focusing on the village community of Hawi Al-Hawa, this intensely knowledgeable and personal account — a rare combination — brings village life in Syria strikingly close. The volume is an important contribution to the fields of anthropology, social sciences, Syrian and Middle East studies.

Part 1

Introduction and context

1 The native anthropologist

Socio-economic and political changes occurring within the 1940s to 1980s transformed the life conditions of tribal/peasant communities of the Euphrates valley in the al-Raqqa region of northern Syria. There was first a shift from a semi-sedentary mode of life, characterized by a subsistence economy, to an entrepreneurial capitalist agriculture which developed rapidly during the laissez-faire period of the late 1940s and 1950s. Then, after 1963, socialist agrarian transformations were brought about under the leadership of the Ba’th Party. The Party, relying on mobilizational politics and the peasant collectivization movement, restructured society according to a socialist design, while still accommodating the operation of a sizable commercial private sector.

This book documents these changes at the local level and illustrates the processes through the life experiences of individual actors. Several methodological approaches have been used, such as the compilation of historical documents, the use of available literature about the region and the country, about six months of field research on a particular village and the gathering of several life history documents.

The village of Hawi al-Hawa is representative of Syrian rural communities in the al-Raqqa region whose economies are dominated by cotton production. Hawi al-Hawa is studied in order to generate and examine generalizations about socio-economic change and mobilization politics as they are articulated at the village/region level through the lives of individuals.

Rapid mechanization of cereal agriculture in the steppes of the Jezira and extensive cultivation of cotton in villages along the Euphrates generated a new set of social dynamics. By the mid-1950s local land-owning tribal chiefs through their consociations with outside agricultural operators and city merchants had emerged as ‘Cotton Sheikhs’. They were influential leaders who were able to perform ‘mediating’ functions between their localized communities and the larger national system. Such enterprising local leaders emerged as a new social class in control of economic-political resources, which they effectively utilized to perpetuate their dominant position in society.

However, the Ba’th revolution of 1963 profoundly transformed the whole society of rural Syria. The Ba’th exhibited a capacity to implement radical land reform measures, to build a nation-wide peasant collectivization movement and to develop an extensive mobilizational institutional infrastructure. This produced new forms, modes and strategies of community-nation integration. Consequently, the agrarian base of the traditional Cotton Sheikhs was destroyed and the mediating roles which they had manipulated to their advantage during the 1950s were eliminated as well.

In addition to the documentation of such change, some of the findings are related to a new social type that has appeared in the region to supplant the cultural mediators or brokers of the older entrepreneurial generation. The life history accounts revealed what we have termed the ‘Mukhadram/Collagist’, a type of individual who has responded to the challenges and stresses of a rapidly changing society by developing a particular set of characteristics and capacities. He or she is an individual who relates to larger trends and the local community by combining and recombining diverse cultural elements and opportunities to produce new roles and cultural forms.

Other significant findings are related to the ways in which change was articulated in the areas of education and the relations between generations in the village. It is shown how the traditionally dominant families of the al-Meshrif have educated their youth, and thus have been able to maintain their powerful positions in spite of radical socialist transformations and harsh policies carried out against them by the socialist state. The ways in which social change is articulated through inter-generational conflict is illustrated by describing the new roles of the al-shabab (young men) of the al-Meshrif lineage. Their modern professional qualifications and political affiliation to the ruling Ba’th Party have created many conflicts, but these young men are gradually assuming leadership roles not only in their local village but in the wider region as well.

The native anthropologist and participant-observation

As a student in the late 1970s, I became convinced that anthropology should convey a genuine feel and a real sense of life as experienced by the people being studied, and thus I found myself compelled to use the life history method, the most humane of all humanistic approaches¹. I wish to reproduce here the kaleidoscope of human life as it is projected through tiny individual human mirrors, each gaze reflecting upon itself as well as reflecting the larger beams of history and society.

The emergence of the ‘confessional genre’ in anthropological writing contributed a great deal to the demythologizing of fieldwork experience (Kilbridge 1978, 215). The success of researchers in relating their own fieldwork situation and difficulties to the total sociological encounter rendered their experiences having wider significance and greater analytical value. Using the term ‘participant observation’, we think of anthropological methodology as a continuous spectrum, with pure observation at one end and all-out participation at the other and various combinations in between. Gold (1970) discusses it in terms of variations in the researcher’s role: “the complete observer, observer-as-participant and complete participant.” Awareness of such variations in the researcher’s role enables us to get an idea of the various approaches utilized in ethnographic studies. It is important to mention that all good anthropological fieldwork probably combines all of these methods to some degree or another, but different types of inquiries call for different foci within these role variations.

The native anthropologist doing fieldwork in his own community probably represents the furthest extreme in the direction of complete participation. In the field he is more than a complete participant because his own personal identity and membership are involved as well. This situation, of course, carries its own problems. Repeatedly we are told that the major paradox of the fieldworker lies in the fact that he must be involved (intensive participant-observation) to observe, but not so involved as to lose his sense of control, distance and a degree of objectivity. Here I wish to describe briefly how these problems manifested themselves and were handled in my fieldwork experience.

Hawi al-Hawa is not the place where my own family actually lived, or currently lives. It is the village of my kinsmen of the Meshrif lineage, but my family members and I have always related to it as if it is our village too. Multiplex kinship ties make this close identification a real one. My family does not belong to the al-Meshrif lineage, but to another called al-Sahu (Sahu al-Daher). Our lineage and al-Meshrif’s unite in the larger al-Daher lineage.

Marriage ties have strengthened the kinship bond between us and the al-Meshrif. For example, my paternal great-aunt was Hajj Ibrahim’s senior wife and the mother of Hajj Khalaf. His second wife, the mother of Hajj Ramadan and Abd, is from our lineage as well. My own paternal grandmother, Wazna, is Hajj Khalaf’s paternal aunt^. The young men of the al-Meshrif are only my cousins in a classificatory sense. They are not parallel or even true second cousins.

Compared to Hawi al-Hawa our village, al-Jaiyf, is relatively remote and very small, having only about 20 houses. It is located in the hinterland about 15 kilometres north of the Euphrates. I still recall how much I hated to spend my school summer holidays there. As a young boy I mostly saw the unpleasant side of our village: the hot dry summer days, the arid and brown terrain surrounding it from all sides and above all the unending orders of my uncles to help tend to our sheep herd or go on three-hour trips in our horse-drawn carriage to bring drinking water from the river. Unlike the rest of my brothers, I used to flee from this boring place to Hawi al-Hawa, seeking the green scenery of cotton fields, the cool canals and the slow flow of the river, the society of the madafa (guest room) of the house of al-Meshrif and the more colourful and exciting stimulation of my numerous cousins.

When, after eight years away from Syria, I returned to Hawi al-Hawi in the summer of 1973 to do anthropological research, I found myself faced with particular fieldwork problems that I believe are very different from those confronted by the usual ‘outsider’ ethnographer. In the first place, the typical problem of how to gain admission, how to be introduced and be accepted by the village community did not exist. In fact, my problems came from the opposite direction. They did not reside in how to gain admission and subsequently how to acquire a sense of ‘membership’, but to find a means to somehow limit my existing sense of full involvement and personal identification with the village folks. My initial stress and anxieties centred mainly on how to make my own kinsmen in the village view me with some detachment: to relate to me not just as another relative living among them for a summer, but to redefine me as a serious researcher gathering important information for a scientific purpose. I spent the first two weeks preoccupied with this introspective problem. How could I achieve a certain measure of psychological and social distance so that my role-identity as a researcher would be sufficiently projected, so that I might execute my research plan in a satisfactory way?

Due to my long years of education, I was undoubtedly a marginal person in some sense. Yet I felt that I shared this characteristic with many of my similarly aged cousins in the village. The whole idea of youth in general being different seemed to have been interiorized by the villagers, but this sense of accepted marginality predicated on age, solidarity and identification of common education experiences appeared to be insufficient for my immediate purpose. However, I knew that I was slightly different from my cousins simply because of my long educational experience abroad and I tried to develop a role on that basis.

On reflecting on those days during the initial phase I felt that I was experiencing a problem of dialectical nature: how to achieve harmony between my ‘role-demands’ and ‘self-demands’ (Gold 1970, 172). I sensed that my ‘role-identity’ as a fieldworker was threatened by not being able to give it the immediate expression it demanded. For example, I felt shy and awkward to come forth and put detailed and lengthy questions to Uncle Hajj Khalaf or his brothers about how they felt about dividing their land amongst themselves and what it meant personally for each one of them. Also, it was not easy to interview Hajj Khalaf on such economic matters because he hardly ever was alone. He seemed always to be in his madafa in the company of many other men. In Hawi al-Hawa securing a few hours of privacy with someone represented a real challenge.

Moreover, my personal awareness of patterns of respect and social distance customarily granted to elders affected my capacity to play the full-fledged role of a researcher, particularly during the initial phase. In my endeavour to break through this psycho-cultural barrier, I adopted the strategy of asking the elders questions related to the conditions of their social life in previous times. This proved quite successful since they were ready to talk about this subject endlessly.

In my desire to protect my role I often found myself adopting certain behavioural patterns and ‘language’ which, in Goffman’s terms, represented a repertoire for ‘strategic interaction’. For example, I often punctuated my conversations with the village people with words and phrases of formal Arabic. Concerning his fieldwork in a Portuguese village, Cutileiro, who was in a similar situation, remarks, “In order to be able to do service and describe the life of my fellow countrymen I had, as it were, to impersonate an Oxford anthropologist” (quoted in Hayano 1979, 102). Very soon this made them question me as to whether I had really lost my local dialect. In my own labour to protect against too many role-demands I also became very aware of the need to ‘manage’ my behaviour in ways which would offset the precariousness of my ...