Power, Sect and State in Syria

The Politics of Marriage and Identity amongst the Druze

A. Maria A. Kastrinou

• Publisher: I.B. Tauris
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781784532208
• eBook ISBN: 9780857729552
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Anthropology
• Index: Social Sciences

The Syrian state's rhetoric of Arab nationalism left little room for the official recognition of minority identities in pre-war Syria. Yet in practice, the state continually engaged with the Druze and other minorities to reinforce its legitimacy, often through cultural policy. Uncovering this neglected aspect of pre-war Syrian politics, Kastrinou explores the cultural politics of marriage in Syria, primarily among the Druze, to reveal how practical rituals of marriage inform sectarian and national identity formation.Challenging the assumed inherence of sectarianism and Druze endogamy, the book provides an historical and ethnographic account of political power and its relation to social control in Syria. It demonstrates the centrality of the body to Druze cosmology and how ritual performances of birth, marriage and death maintain and negotiate sectarian cohesion. Connecting these struggles to national and international politics, Kastrinou examines how both the Syrian government and the European Union have sponsored marriage-themed dance performances in Syria, each leveraging its cultural importance to legitimise their own policy goals.
The book establishes marriage as a pervasive idiom for the construction of collective identity in Syria, which is appropriated by individuals, sects, states and intergovernmental organizations alike. Its conclusions are relevant to scholars of Middle East studies, sectarianism, anthropology and politics.

CHAPTER 1

INTRODUCTION

Power, Sect and State: An Introduction

Caught between conflicting historical fantasies of an exotic Orient and images of the oppressive and threatening Other, Syria embodies both the colonial attraction of Arabesque par excellance simultaneously along with images of violence, sectarian warfare and fears of civilisation clashes. In anthropology, the road to Damascus is a road less travelled, a road perilously understudied.¹ Venturing on such a road, this book is one of few contemporary ethnographic accounts situated amongst the Syrian Druze.²

Anchored in political anthropology, this work focuses on power, sect and state in Syria and how these become articulated through the intersections and interstices of global geopolitics, statecraft and the embodied cultural politics of everyday life. Its main aim is to describe and analyse the formation and dynamics of power relations within and between the Druze religious community, the state, artists and intellectuals. This is achieved by analysing the poetics and politics of embodied social ritual formations and transformations, specifically through acts of marriages, practised in the community, and staged through state-sponsored cultural festivities and in European-funded art performances.

Marriages, in most cultural contexts, are pivotal transformative rituals that sanction and appropriate unions, that perform and embody the social reproduction of communities and society at large. In pre-war Syria, however, marriages were something more, and they were everywhere: on television, in folklore festivals, in independent dance performances, and in everyday discussions. Practised beyond the confines of religious and ethnic locales, these nuptials were the ritual metaphors that reified sectarian communities and saturated national policy. This book ethnographically details contests between and within sect and state through social and political struggles upon and for the body – particularly the nuptial body. Specifically, the book shows how marriage practices rather than being homogeneous and traditional are the intimate and violent sites of gendered, classed and sectarian struggles. As sites of struggle, marriages tell us a lot about local power relations and politics. As embodied performances, marriages are instantiations of a nuptial intimacy: the reification of abstract notions such as ‘sect’ or ‘state’ through the idiom of marriage in everyday practice. Inspired by, but not completely loyal to, Herzfeld's notion of cultural intimacy (2005 [1997], see Chapter 4), intimacy is traced in movements, bodies and relations through which people, places, institutions and other abstractions come closer, and become tactile, specific, familiar. Violence within the realm of intimacy (Appadurai 1998) refers particularly to the poetics of violence as a result of closeness and intimacy, as the result of the touch (Deleuze and Guattari 2005 [1987]; Manning 2007). Power relations are traced through the construction of nuptial bodies as relational spaces and sites of intimacy and violence, or violent intimacy, in contemporary Syria. An alternative political view to kinship theories, this book argues that bodies become intimate through relational practices such as marriages, but this is a form of intimacy that may readily turn into violence. In this direction ‘nuptial bodies’ and nuptial power relations refer to two interrelated notions: first, to the nexus of pervasive relations that are created and sustained through the idiom of kinship and the practice of endogamy; and secondly, as a form of governmentality, of knowing and conducting relations in and beyond marriage in contemporary Syria.

By looking at marriages in three different but interconnected public arenas, the book is able to locate and analyse those contentious spaces in which local religious communities, authoritarian state policies, and agents of neoliberal globalisation converge and collide, and thus offer a grounded empirical depiction of contemporary social and political struggles in Syria. Furthermore, looking at everyday and state politics immediately prior to the so-called Arab Spring, the war in Syria and its sectarian ripples across the Middle East, this book contributes to understanding the causes of social change from the micro-level perspective of local communities.

Finally, I hope that this work provides the reader with a critical analysis to the political economy of social identities. By looking at how secularist, nationalist, Islamist and sectarian identities are formed, transformed and mobilised, I have attempted to locate how representations, practices and geographies of the nation and the sect may challenge, reinforce or bypass state sovereignty and form alternative political imaginaries and forms of belonging, hence capturing ethnographically the unequal co-construction between formations of the state and the politics of identity and belonging. In this way, I hope, that its ethnographic detail will contribute to larger debates regarding the role of the state and the nation, and the political subjects these summon.

Since my initial study amongst the Druze community in Damascus, much has changed in Syria and the wider Middle East. Whilst in the short space of four years the country has been traumatically transformed, the original research findings enclosed in this book, not only offer a glimpse of pre-war Syria but also underscore the covert kinds of violence that pre-dated the current war. The war in Syria has necessarily extended my own research beyond its original scope in order to make sense of the current conflict. Henceforth, beyond ethnographic foregrounding, I have found it necessary to perform a double act: in the first instance, I have been forced to ‘dig’ into the past in order to understand the historical emergence of sectarian identities as forms of political representation from the late Ottoman Empire to the contemporary Ba‘th regime. This move was not stylistic but necessary since the date for the first ever ‘sectarian’ conflict in the Levant goes back to 1860. If we could ‘date’ sectarianism, then surely this demonstrates that explanations for the war as the latest expression of an Islamic conflict between Sunnis and Shi‘as dating back to ad 300 are somewhat problematic. At the same time, understanding sectarianism as a historically contingent socio-political project that creates specific politics of statecraft and particular political subjectivities is crucial to understanding those processes, dynamics and alternative forms of belonging that are being generated. As my research on the historical formations of sect and state continues, I have opted here to include in this introduction a brief overview of the historical formations and transformations of sectarian identities as the background to the ethnography that follows in the later chapters.

The second part of this double act was to move beyond my anthropological comfort zone of local politics and into the realm of international politics and the economics of war. This was a necessary move because the war in Syria cannot be understood as only a ‘Syrian’ war; more importantly however, I delved into international politics and economics in order to be true to the basis of the anthropological profession, namely the responsibility to take our informants seriously (Kirtsoglou 2013). This obligation became all the more astute in the aftermath of the chemical attacks in the Ghouta region of Damascus in August 2013. Trying to make sense of the tragic and absurd information that we got from media sources, both my research assistant in Jaramana, the Druze neighbourhood close to the site of the chemical attack, and me in the United Kingdom, were constantly exchanging and cross-checking the latest news from social media and local contacts. As the shocking realisation of what had happened soaked in, along with the confusion and uncertainty as to the identities of the perpetrators and their motives, Tariq told me: ‘I wish they could both [government and opposition] go away. Just take their war in another place. They fight we die.’

Tariq's words denote the increasing desperation of Syrian civilians, initially minorities but increasingly majorities as well. This loss of hope that best characterises Tariq's comments, comes at the realisation that this war in Syria now, is somehow a much larger war, a war that essentially is not being fought for them. And hence the sadness and the cynicism in my friends’ voice when they tell me of yet another death: ‘He died,’ they will say, followed by ‘He was martyred. And for what? Ya haram.’ Dying for no cause is equivalent to living for nothing, and this is precisely how many of my friends describe the situation. As an anthropologist, then, my obligation is to investigate, describe and analyse who ‘they’ are that make the ‘we’ in Tariq's quote die, who ‘they’ are and what are they fighting for? In effect, taking our informants seriously means situating them within the global power struggles in which they are enmeshed, taking seriously their desperation, their sense of powerlessness.

I locate sectarianism historically and discursively, beginning with the late Ottoman Empire. The sections that follow foreground historically and analytically the main terms of this study: sectarianism, state, identity. The chapter synopsis is followed by a brief note on methodology.

Locating Sectarianism: The Historical Making of Sovereignty in Syria

In 1860 unprecedented violence climaxed in Mount Lebanon. It is estimated that 10,000 people died, hundreds of villages were pillaged and burned, and a massive exodus of the Druze population took place from Lebanon to Syria. Known as the Druze–Maronite massacre – a peasant uprising led by Tanyus Shahin turned into the first distinctly modern sectarian conflict. The violence, and its closure, assembled all the major forces and players of the time: the Ottoman state and European powers, local notables and village populations (Makdisi 2000a). This assemblage foreshadowed the things to come: the break-up of the Ottoman Empire, European colonialism and imperialism in the Middle East, the transformation of notable families into national elites, the ushering in of mass politics and hence the transformation in forms of loyalty and political belonging from peasant to citizen. Since then, sectarianism – namely affiliation or alliance within a religious or ethnic sub-group – often features as the natural, primordial basis of citizenship in Lebanon and Syria. For example, Rabinovich argues that:

Syria's repeated oscillation between unity and fragmentation left an obvious mark on the relationship between the ‘compact minorities’ and the Syrian State […] Small minorities that have practiced and developed the art of survival dread the need to choose between conflicting demands for their loyalty and commitment.

(Rabinovich 1979: 696)

Writing on sect–state relations in Syria in the aftermath of the Ottoman Empire until the end of the French Mandate, Rabinovich describes Druze and Alawi communities as ‘compact minorities’ based on the similarities between them, such as being ‘closely-knit communities based on the solidarity of underprivileged and radical Shiite sects’ (Rabinovich 1979: 694). In this classic description an inherent divide between Sunni and Shi‘a is presumed to exist and to shape politics, alongside the assumed unchanging homogeneity of the two populations. That the Druze spearheaded the national revolution against the French in 1925–7 is analysed as a strategic manoeuvring of Druze elites: ‘The political programme of the Druze Revolt was couched in Syrian and Arab nationalist terms, but this should not be taken to mean that the Druze community […] sought to amalgamate themselves into the Syrian State’ (Rabinovich 1979: 702). Although both ‘sectarianism’ (ta'ifiyyah) and related notions such as ‘tribalism’ are increasingly questioned by historians (Neep 2012; White 2012) and anthropologists (Chatty 2013; Gonzalez 2009; Salamandra 2013), in understanding current political conflicts they are still deployed in softer forms, as the ‘natural and culturally specific bases of politics in the Middle East’ (van Dam 2011: 144).

In his compelling study of mass politics in Syria between 1918 and 1920, Gelvin argues that the historical inquiry of nationalism in the Middle East has but ignored or deemed as anomalous mass politics and mobilisations, instead focusing on narrow intellectual elites and their renditions of political ideologies (1998: 1–11). According to Gelvin's critique of idealist (intellectual) history:

Because the full recovery of the Arab ethnie merely awaited the proper speculative advancement and political conjuncture, historians of nationalism in the region have spent an inordinate amount of time attempting to uncover the contributions made by various intellectuals to the ‘rediscovery’ and elucidation of that identity, the chain through which an Arab ‘protonationalism’ and nationalism were transmitted from generation to generation, and the time of diffusion of a paradigmatic nationalism throughout the population of the Arab Middle East.

(Gelvin 1998: 6)

This critique applies to narratives of sectarianism, confessionalism and communalism, as the unchanging primordial basis of political belonging in the Middle East. In more ways than one, ideologically homogenous and historically static renditions of sectarianism, vis-à-vis its apparent antithesis in universalist renditions of political Islam, continue to shape portrayals of the participation, representation and conflict in and beyond Syria, Lebanon and Iraq (Eickelman and Piscatori 2004; Haynes 2010). These particularist or universalist ideological formations have often been studied as the main setbacks to the realisation of Arab nationalism, and hence the modernisation of state and citizens (Gelvin 1998: 5–8). Middle Eastern states, then, are described as ‘failed’ because modernisation processes have not produced a singular and secular political imagination out of the dissonance of Arabism and nationalism (Smith 1991).

***

With sectarian clashes having a profound impact on both Syria's society and sovereignty, this section takes claims of ‘sectarianism’ seriously by combining historical and political economy approaches towards an anthropologically and historically grounded understanding of sovereignty and representation in the historical area of Greater Syria (Balād al-Shām). In this way, the first aim is to dislocate the presumed naturalness of sectarianism; to achieve this, ‘sectarianism’ is set in historical context and redefined within the political economy of the Syrian state and the shifting aesthetics of political representation. This objective fits within a growing body of literature that questions modernity as a Western ‘export’ whilst detailing relations between persons and objects in Ottoman Syria (Mundy and Smith 2007); and investigates the political economy of authoritarian resilience (Haddad 2012). If sectarianism is not a natural, unchanging characteristic but a historical phenomenon, when and how did it come to be? How did it affect or transform social and political forms of belonging? And, are such transformations in belonging and political subjectivity in any way related to broader transformations in state formation? How may anthropology aid in the understanding of political subjectivity amongst not only elites but everyday people too?

In order to answer these questions, the historical emergence of sectarianism is traced as a dynamic but particular dialectical relationship between political subjectivities and the state, its connection with popular demands for political representation, and the consequences of using religion as the basis of imagined state communities. To achieve this, sectarianism is first defined in terms of identity formation, practice, ideology and the political subjects it produces. Secondly, this definition needs to be set in a historical context: what were the historical processes in the Middle East and Europe before the sectarian massacre of 1860? Finally, how, for the first time in Mount Lebanon, did an uprising led by a peasant help to radically transform ‘common villagers’ (ahali) from politically abject into modern political subjects?

Steps Towards a Definition of Sectarianism: Identity, Subject, State

Defining sectarianism is a difficult endeavour because the word simultaneously connotes social practices, cultural ideas about the person and its relation to the cosmos, as well as relations of power between state and subject. Because sectarianism evokes a wide range of social practices, cultural identities and political relations, its boundaries are not clear. In Rabinovich's argument, religious and social practices of collective identities are treated as evidence of a distinct political consciousness inherent in ‘compact minorities’: compact here appears to mean homogenous social, religious and political identification. But are sectarian practices, such as endogamous marriage, or religious beliefs, such as same-sect reincarnation, evidence for political autonomy? Do sectarian practices and beliefs influence personal or collective relations to a central state structure and affect governmental representation? In order to disentangle the social from the religious and the political in defining sectarianism, this section briefly positions sectarianism within broader debates of identity and history, before providing the schema for a definition of sectarianism.

How people identify with one another, form groups and differentiate themselves is a key question in and beyond anthropology. Answers to this question range widely, some of which include, for example, Huntington's thesis on the clash of civilisations: that there are inherent, essential and insurmountable cultural differences between Christian West and Muslim East (Huntington 1993; cf. Ali 2003). Instrumentalist theories in political science describe identity formation within the context of rational individuals manipulating political identities towards the fulfilment of their own ends (Halliday 2000). Anthropologically informed perspectives view identity as a relational process of boundary formation, inclusion/exclusion (Barth 1969), used often as an idiom for kinship (Banks 1996), and as a practice through which peoples and bodies become produced, reproduced and socially transformed (Bourdieu 2005 [1990]; Carrithers et al. 1985). Following this line of enquiry, in order to interrogate the dynamics of identity as the formation of political subjects and subjectivities, and in order to probe how political subjects emerge historically, the analy...

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Note on Arabic Transliteration
• Glossary
• Acknowledgements
• Preface: Now and Then
• 1. Introduction
• 2. Sect and House
• 3. Birth, Death and Reincarnation
• 4. Marriage and Politics in Jaramana
• 5. Marriage, the State and Folklore Festivals
• 6. Power, Resistance and Youth Politics
• 7. Dancing Marriage with Leish
• 8. The Intimate and Violent Struggles Ahead
• Notes
• Bibliography