Among the Jasmine Trees. Jonathan Holt Shannon
that refers to the indexical and pragmatic processes of context marking, framing, and creation (Crapanzano 1992; Silverstein 1976). Performance serves as a central organizing motif in this work, and I strive to discuss aesthetic practices and discourses as they arise in specific performance situations. Yet, performance can mean a number of very different things: music making, poetry readings, colloquial speech acts and genres, and so on. Beyond the particular acts and events of performance, I address performance as a mode of being and as a strategy of framing and differentiating diverse modes of practice and being (Bateson 1972; Bell 1992, 1997; Erlmann 1996; Goffman 1959; Schechner 1985). Therefore performance, when understood as a particular strategy of acting, can include a much wider range of behaviors and contexts than what we normally understand to be “performance.” This is especially the case in the performance of emotion and sentiment in discourse and in the gestural economy of Syria’s music cultures in which the intersubjective and reflexive characteristics of performance as a strategy are most apparent (see Kapchan 1995). Indeed, emotion if not emotionality is in many ways the centerpiece of the aesthetics and kinesthetics of musical and other modes of performance in Syria, and this accounts for the centrality of sentiment in what I am arguing are the outlines of a Syrian alternative modernity.
In the Syrian aesthetics of authenticity, aesthetic judgments are based first and foremost on the degree to which any given cultural object is considered to be authentic (aṣīl). Criteria of authenticity (aṣāla) include an object’s relationship first and foremost to the Arab cultural heritage—itself a manifold of conflicting terms and concepts. The criteria of authenticity are filtered through the dialectics of local and the international, the city and the country, center and periphery, the modern and the traditional; conceptions of the self, the emotions, creativity, and the imagination; discourses of religion, language, and identity; and the reality of politics and patronage. It is this complex web of interrelated discourses and practices that I explore through analysis and interpretation of important currents in contemporary Syrian music. Modeled in some ways on a musical mode, which allows modulation to related modes, this ethnography modulates to themes that elucidate the depth and potential of the primary theme of authenticity—modernity, emotion, memory, and temporality are among the collateral themes.
Borrowing from the conventional structure of the genre of instrumental improvisation called the taqsīm, I open each chapter with a maṭla
In writing, I have adopted a number of narrative strategies that suggest some Syrian forms of cultural expression. These include a heavy reliance on anecdote, for much of what I learned about cultural life in Syria was taught to me by my friends and acquaintances through the medium of the well-phrased anecdote. “Let me tell you a story . . .” (baḥkīlak
It is also worth remembering that ethnography is the result of a largely collaborative process of research. I was in Syria not only to receive knowledge from informants but to engage in scholarly debate and research with them. Many of the musicians with whom I studied and performed also consider themselves to be scholars and researchers; some present papers at international conferences and write articles and books on their music. Acknowledging the mutual constitution of knowledge in fieldwork helps overcome the tendency in anthropological and ethnomusicological research to construe the informants as Others residing in some Other time, namely, “tradition,” even when they are engaged in what we characterize (caricaturize?) as a “struggle for modernity” (Fabian 1983; see also Blum 1990: 417–19). My participation in this process was as a co-researcher, lover, and novice performer of the music, and certainly as a junior partner in the overall efforts of a certain group of artists and intellectuals to understand and document the richness of their music. Nevertheless, I participated as one who potentially might “discover” something, and so many of my interlocutors exposed this expectation—or ridiculed it—by asking me, “What have you discovered?” (shū iktashaft?). My simple performances and demonstrations on the oud, my interviews and public lectures, and my lessons and interactions with so many musicians all attest to the mutuality of this process. I mention this not to trumpet my own achievements—modest as they were—but rather to raise the question of how our complex and compound identities as researchers imply a different sort of practice of anthropology, one closer to the practices of artists and musicians themselves, who often stress “complementarity” (Blum 1990: 418; Turino 1990: 409–410) and not the subject-object division common in so much traditional ethnography.
Therefore I strive to keep the voices of my interlocutors in the foreground in order to emphasize the collaborative nature of the research. As I have written this manuscript, at each turn I asked myself, “What would so-and-so say?” “Is this in line with what I learned in Aleppo?” and so on. At the same time, we need to follow Vaclev Havel’s advice (cited in Blum 1990: 418) to “distrust words,” especially when they come from those occupying positions of power who construe themselves as centers of truth. Certain of my interlocutors occupied positions of authority and had strong connections to local centers of political power. Others less well-connected also occupied certain positions within Syrian society that conditioned their forms of discourse and practice. All of them articulated ideological stances that need to be taken into account. So it is not merely a matter of giving voice to a multiplicity of actors but of contextualizing these voices in the overall fabric of Syrian society in which musical and other cultural practices are made meaningful.
Qafla
In the following chapters, I explore the question of modernity through analysis of discourse about authenticity in contemporary Syrian music. Chapter 1 provides an overview of debates over musical authenticity in Syria, and outlines the major genres of Arab music performed in Syria today as well as the primary performance venues. I discuss some of the contexts and strategies of learning music in Syria and show how the local “cassette culture” (Manuel 1993) plays an important role in defining conceptions of musical and cultural authenticity. In chapter 2, I trace a genealogy of some of the keywords