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This Thesis Has Been Submitted in Fulfilment of the Requirements for a Postgraduate Degree (E.G This thesis has been submitted in fulfilment of the requirements for a postgraduate degree (e.g. PhD, MPhil, DClinPsychol) at the University of Edinburgh. Please note the following terms and conditions of use: • This work is protected by copyright and other intellectual property rights, which are retained by the thesis author, unless otherwise stated. • A copy can be downloaded for personal non-commercial research or study, without prior permission or charge. • This thesis cannot be reproduced or quoted extensively from without first obtaining permission in writing from the author. • The content must not be changed in any way or sold commercially in any format or medium without the formal permission of the author. • When referring to this work, full bibliographic details including the author, title, awarding institution and date of the thesis must be given. The Memory of Generations: Time, Narrative and Kinship in Damascus, Syria Bethany Eleanor Honeysett Ph.D in Social Anthropology The University of Edinburgh, 2013 Abstract ‘Bless you, may you bury me’ is a common refrain among older people in the Syrian capital Damascus, directed especially towards children and young adults when they help with daily tasks or provide joy by their play or achievements. The sentiment expresses the hope that the old may die before the young and be mourned by them. It makes explicit the interlocking of life-cycles, through aging and mortality, and presumes an understanding of ideal kinship temporality where successive generations succeed one another in their proper order. It also hints that there is no certainty in this process. Sustaining these ideals is contingent on persistent material and symbolic work, a tempering of hope with memory and experience. These types of daily reckoning of personal and kinship time through mortality and life courses are rarely explored in the literature on Middle Eastern kinship. But how do these formations of time and generation sustain and transform? Anthropological theorising on the ‘Arab Family’ models it as cyclically reproducing roles, while socio-historical discussions of regional ‘transformations’ in politics and society understand them as lineal and successive. Both contain implicit speculations about the perceptions of time and the role of generations. Neither model, however, fully addresses the instrumentality of the types of temporality and generation they presume. What is it about the unfolding of familial and social generations and the temporality they imbue that is so integral to the models of kinship and society used to understand the region? And what is happening when historical change and familial generations interact? Based on 18 months of fieldwork, this thesis explores the interrelationships of Damascene life courses and their reciprocity with the historical context in which processes of birth, maturation, procreation and death take place. It describes subjective dispositions manifested at specific points in the life course and the manner in which individuals relate to past, present and potential selves, through memory, narrative and historicity, and through the unfolding sensual experience of time, place and objects. These inter-generational relationships illustrate not a recycling, but rather an historical and historicising process through transformative exchange and reciprocity. By tracing the shifts in the narratives of kinship in and through time, I consider Damascene history and time as emergent properties of inter- and intra- generational dynamics within a supple kinship system. I assert that however much kinship activities such as eating together, transmitting property, marrying, bringing up children and giving them names may be concerned with maintaining order and propriety, they are also contentious creative forces whose tensions and joys are paramount to Syrian social transformation. 1 Declaration I declare that this thesis is entirely my own work based on my original research, with acknowledgement of other sources and references, and that the work has not been submitted for any other degree or professional qualification. Signed: Dated: 2 Acknowledgements This research would not have been possible without the ESRC 1+3 funding award from the Department of Social Anthropology, School of Social and Political Sciences, The University of Edinburgh. I owe a large debt of gratitude to all of the people in Damascus who so generously gave me access to their families, homes and lives. I thank them for sharing their memories, narratives, hopes and dreams and including me into spaces and sentiments to which they had no reason or obligation other than their kindness. I hope that in this work my representation has some resonance with the ways they wished to present themselves. I would especially like to thank the family I lived with for the unprecedented access I received to family life, biographies and networks of kin and friends. Many friends must remain anonymous in name if not in spirit, but of those I may name, I would especially like to thank Hiba for your friendship, Amer for your openness and Mazin for your critical expertise in Arabic and Damascene sociality. My fieldwork experiences were made easier by friends like these and the times spent with Iris, Nicola and Rasha. Fieldwork offers rewards far beyond the eventual research outcomes and I thank all my informants and friends for the other ways of doing family, memories of times and delicious recipes shared. I hope soon we will be able to do so again. My warmest thanks go to Dr Toby Kelly and Professor Sandy Robertson for the help and support they have given me during the processes of writing-up an amorphous project. I thank Toby for his ability to critically extract the kernels of argument from my work and help me build upon them, for his patience and disciplining guidance. I thank Sandy for his insatiable curiosity and intellectual expansiveness which has forced me to think through the concepts I have used. I would also like to thank Dr Iris Jean-Klein for nurturing my interests in Middle Eastern kinship and pushing me to not be content with polemical platitudes. The feedback I received from departmental writing-up seminars and the Scottish Training in Anthropological Research events challenged and inspired and I would like to thank all of my peers for their interest and suggestions. I would especially like to thank Ruth and Mihirini as fellow travellers from start to finish. Finally I would like to thank my family for their support. I really could not have completed my thesis without them. Thank you, Lawrence, for all your help and patience, and sharing the experience with me. 3 CONTENTS Abstract 1 Declaration 2 Acknowledgements 3 Note on Transliteration 5 Introduction 7 Chapter 1. Photographs in Time: Curating Incarnations 38 Chapter 2. The Time & Work of Becoming Married 78 Chapter 3. Time, Marriage & the Mahr 120 Chapter 4. Food, Home & Time: Stored & Storied Tastes, Smells & Memories 157 Chapter 5. The Transmission of Property: Old Hands in the World of Goods 188 Chapter 6. Names & Naming: Time, Personification & Moral Grammars 216 Chapter 7. The Making of Moral Futures 239 Chapter 8. Reflections on Theory & Methods 260 Conclusion 297 Bibliography 304 4 Note on transliteration Within this text Arabic terms and phrases, shown in italics, have been transcribed based on the system employed by Cowan’s translation of Hans Wehr’s dictionary with the following simplifications: ṯ as th, ḵ as kh, ḏ as dh, š as sh and ḡ as gh. The hamzah is denoted by an apostrophe. The velarized or ‘emphatic’ consonants are transcribed with a dot under the letters: ḥ, ṣ, ṭ, ẓ, and ḍ. These sounds have a ‘heavy’ resonance which is in contrast to the ‘lighter’ or ‘thinner’ sound of corresponding plain consonants (transcribed without a dot). Long vowel sounds are represented as such: ā for aa, ī for ee and ū for oo. All formal or classical terms such as legal, official or religious nomenclature are transcribed in accordance with Cowan’s translation of Hans Wehr. Due to the verbal and narrative content of the ethnography presented the majority of Arabic words and phrases are transcribed in accord with the manner spoken by my informants which does not always correspond with classical or standardised vocabulary, morphology and syntax. As a result Stowasser and Ani’s dictionary of spoken Arabic and Cowell’s A Reference Grammar of Syrian Arabic, which both use Damascene Arabic as their basis, are employed to help capture the dialect. In particular short vowel sounds may not be consistent with classical and standardised renditions. In addition the common term for house/home I have rendered beit rather than bait which is unsatisfactory for English readers. Spoken Damascene Arabic is very similar to that spoken across the Levant. It contains several distinctive qualities which reflect its place as an urban dialect and can be heard in its playful, evolving slang and the constant give and take between written and spoken forms as well as the different groups who populate the city. As a consequence variation within and between common terms permeates the speech recorded here. Dialect is interspersed with quasi-classicisms and the conscious use of characteristic colloquialism for their expressive effect is demonstrated. Thus the purely dialectical term for ‘officer’ ẓābet may often be interchanged with the classicism ḍābet under the influence of increased literacy. Similarly, although officially expunged from modern Arabic, terms and forms of Ottoman Turkish 5 pepper daily speech. A distinctive quality of Damascene speech is the merger and replacement of the q (qaf) sound with the hamzah or glottal stop (a practice akin to dropping ‘t’ in some British dialects), meaning that for example the common word for ‘heart’ qelb is pronounced ‘elb. Because some classicisms such as huqūq, meaning law, are pronounced with the true q I have transcribed all words as if the q is voiced.
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