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"Group identity Syria Damascus"
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A new old Damascus : authenticity and distinction in urban Syria
[F]illed with rare encounters with Syria's oldest, most elite
families. Critics of anthropology's taste for exoticism and marginality will savor
this study of upper-class Damascus, a world that is urbane and cosmopolitan, yet in
many ways as remote as the settings in which the best ethnography has traditionally
been done... [Written] with a nuanced appreciation of the cultural forms in
question and how Damascenes themselves think, talk about, and create them. --
Andrew Shryock In contemporary urban Syria, debates about the
representation, preservation, and restoration of the Old City of Damascus have
become part of status competition and identity construction among the city's elite.
In theme restaurants and nightclubs that play on images of Syrian tradition, in
television programs, nostalgic literature, and visual art, and in the rhetoric of
historic preservation groups, the idea of the Old City has become a commodity for
the consumption of tourists and, most important, of new and old segments of the
Syrian upper class. In this lively ethnographic study, Christa Salamandra argues
that in deploying and debating such representations, Syrians dispute the past and
criticize the present. Indiana Series in Middle East Studies --
Mark Tessler, general editor
eBook
Agency, Resources, and Identity: Lower-Income Women's Experiences in Damascus
Drawing on theories of structure and agency, this article assesses how women in lower-income households in Damascus use existing gender schemas to avoid unattractive employment and improve their access to income and employment. It highlights the overlapping effects of economic policy and gender dependency schemas on both the need for additional income and women's employment opportunities. While providing greater access to resources, women's accommodation to gender dependency schemas also helps to maintain domesticity and dependence on men. Agency for these women draws on and reinforces a collectively gendered sense of self that is central to the process of both obtaining resources and doing gender.
Journal Article
Roots of Alawite-Sunni Rivalry in Syria
Before independence, Syrian nationalists were represented in the National Bloc (al-Kutla al-Wataniya), a confederation of veterans of various backgrounds and interests who were united in the struggle for independence. When the mandate ended, the urban Sunni elite inherited the Syrian government. After independence, the Syrian government's major goal was to reduce, and gradually to abolish, regional and communal representation in the parliament, where those who had benefited from French rule were mainly the compact minorities. A major step in this direction was to abolish certain jurisdictional rights that were granted to the Alawites and the Druze by the French mandate. The abolition of jurisdictional rights in order to establish a centralized rule in Damascus ignited confrontation among the minorities. The Sunni rulers in Damascus integrated Latakia into Syria and abolished the Alawite state. The Alawite seats in parliament and the courts that applied Alawite laws of personal status also were abolished. The Alawites became reconciled to common Syrian citizenship and gave up the dream of a separate Alawite state. This change of outlook, which seemed to be of minor importance at the time, actually led to a new era in Syrian politics: the political rise of the Alawites. Adapted from the source document.
Journal Article
The Kurds of Damascus in the 1930s: Development of a Politics of Ethnicity
In the 1930s, certain Kurds in Damascus mobilized in support of Kurds from the Jazira, the remote north-east of Syria (then under French mandate), who were demanding the establishment there of a Kurdish autonomous zone. Why did they do this? Rather than assuming that it was a political action flowing from a self-evident sense of Kurdish identity, this article explores the micropolitics of Damascus under French rule, and the effect of the development of the nation-state form in Syria, to account for the origins of a new politics of ethnicity.
Journal Article
PRESENTING THE “TRUE FACE OF SYRIA” TO THE WORLD: URBAN DISORDER AND CIVILIZATIONAL ANXIETIES AT THE FIRST DAMASCUS INTERNATIONAL EXPOSITION
International fairs—the “folk-festivals of capitalism”—have long been a favorite topic of historians studying quintessential phenomena of modernity such as the celebration of industrial productivity, the construction of national identities, and the valorization of bourgeois leisure and consumption in the late 19th and early 20th centuries in Europe, the United States, and Latin America. To date, however, such spectacles occurring in the modern Middle East remain largely unexamined. This article, an analysis of the discourse surrounding the first Damascus International Exposition in 1954, is conceived in part as a preliminary effort to redress this historiographic imbalance.
Journal Article
Ethnicity and the city: the Kurdish quarter of Damascus between Ottoman and French rule, c. 1724–1946
This article concentrates on the Kurdish quarter of Damascus and investigates the relationship between communal/ethnic identity, spatial organization and the socio-political structures of the city. It challenges the notion of quarter as an ‘ethnic cluster’ by examining historical processes of integration of the Kurdish community in the body politic of Damascus. In the colonial period the emergence of new arenas of public action for the Kurdish community are analysed with reference to the emergence of new ideas of class and community.
Journal Article
THE 'DRIVER'
On the night of Feb 12, 2008, an overweight middle-aged man with a light beard walked from his apartment in the Kfar Sousa district of Damascus to his silver Mitsubishi Pajero, parked in front of his building. It was already 10:15, and he was late for a meeting with Iran's new ambassador to Syria, who had arrived in the country the night before. There was good reason for the man's tardiness: He had just come from a meeting with Ramadan Shallah, the leader of the militant group Palestinian Islamic Jihad, and before that had spent several hours talking with Syrian President Bashar al-Assad. The man was Imad Mughniyeh, the world's most wanted terrorist not named Osama bin Laden. His true identity as the violent mastermind of Hezbollah would have come as a shock to his Damascus neighbors, who thought he was a chauffeur in the employ of the Iranian embassy. Adapted from the source document.
Magazine Article