Submerged memories: Memory,history,and displacement around Lake Asad,Syria

Abstract

Temporalizing frameworks promoted under Syria’s dominant Baʿth Party have significantly shaped representations of temporality and historicity of, and in, the inhabitants of northern Syria until the early twenty-first century. In particular, the construction of the Euphrates Dam, Baʿthist Syria’s showcase modernization project, between 1968 and 1973, provided a symbolically highly loaded pivotal point for a progressivist discourse about the national historical trajectory which incorporated assumptions of internal temporal heterogeneity in its very core: while it promoted the image of a progressive, modern Syrian nation, it simultaneously removed the inhabitants of this part of the country to the realm of the backward and obsolete recent past and present, thus devaluing their actual lifestyles and aspirations and legitimizing their physical displacement following the submersion of their villages and fields under the emergent lake. Before this background, this article draws on literature research and intermittent ethnographic fieldwork in Syria between 2001 and 2011 to ask how the submerged memories of these people were articulated 40 years after the flooding. By including written, oral, as well as embodied expressions, the article argues that diverse facets of remembering the past in the Euphrates valley were valued very unevenly and that the relations between them were gendered and political.

Keywords

Baʿth Party embodied memory Euphrates Dam gender history orality progress Syria tribes

Submerged memories

This article analyzes multi-perspectival representations of the local past in the Syrian Euphrates valley, 1970s to 2000s. It is based on literature research and intermittent ethnographic fieldwork in Syria between 2001 and 2011.¹ Drawing on outsiders’, as well as locals’, perspectives, on oral, written, and material articulations of memory, the article argues that temporalizing frameworks promoted under Syria’s dominant Baʿth Party have significantly shaped representations of temporality and historicity of, and in, this region until the early twenty-first century. The construction of the Euphrates Dam, Baʿthist Syria’s showcase modernization project, between 1968 and 1973 has provided a symbolically highly loaded pivotal point for a progressivist discourse about the national historical trajectory which incorporated assumptions of internal temporal heterogeneity in its very core: while it promoted the image of a progressive, modern Syrian nation, it simultaneously removed the inhabitants of this part of the country to the realm of the backward and obsolete recent past and present, thus devaluing their actual lifestyles and aspirations and legitimizing their physical displacement following the submersion of their villages and fields under the emergent Lake. “Tribal” identities and lifestyles were centrally targeted by this devaluation. The historical constructions promoted by the political center have decisively and pervasively filtered into wider societal perceptions and informed local actors’ self-representations of their past. Before this background, I analyze a range of local ways of representing the local/tribal past, drawing on written, oral, material, and embodied expressions of memory. Locally, these diverse facets of remembering the past in the Euphrates valley are valued very unevenly: individual voices may shout over, dismiss, and ignore each other. Responding to wider epistemological frameworks, the relations between them are gendered and political.

Baʿthist modernity or sacrificing for the future

Temporalizing frameworks promoted under Syria’s dominant Baʿth Party have shaped representations of temporality and historicity of, and in, this region until the early twenty-first century. As I have shown elsewhere (Lange, 2015), these frameworks have older roots, going back to the Mandate period (1920–1946) and, prior to that, to modernizing discourses in late Ottoman times. The Euphrates Dam, Baʿthist Syria’s showcase modernization project that was formally inaugurated in 1973 by Syria’s president, Ḥāfiẓ al-Asad, has provided a symbolically highly loaded pivotal point for a progressivist discourse about the national historical trajectory which incorporated assumptions of internal temporal heterogeneity in its very core. In this aspect, it resembles many other large dam projects around the world. Both supporters and opponents of such projects have invoked contrasting temporalities to shore up their respective political agendas (cf. Bromber et al., 2014). Critics have opposed dam projects with dire warnings that valuable elements anchoring the present to the past will be lost: the present and future trajectories of communities surrounding dam-building sites may be severed from “traditional” ways of life, age-old environmental balances may be overthrown, and cultural and archeological remains of ancient civilizations will be obliterated forever. Advocates, however, have highlighted considerations of the future, often occluding the detrimental effects of such projects with a political rhetoric highlighting their transformative power: water into electricity, deserts into gardens, and so on (cf. Féaux de la Croix, 2011). The transformative capacity of large dams typically extends to include the human dimension by transfiguring “underdeveloped” populations into modern citizens (Bromber et al., 2014). Conversely, this often means that actual local ways of life, which stand in the way of either the dam building itself or the reservoir lakes created by such projects, have to be “erased” from the national-progressive trajectory together with the communities who live these lives (Routledge, 2003).

The disenfranchisement of local populations by big dam and other large-scale infrastructural projects has been described for many different regional contexts. Rather than regarding such processes as merely “collateral damage,” Nixon (2010) has argued that the production of “unimagined” communities constitutes an integral part of nation building or modernization efforts for which big dams stand all over the world. In the case of the Euphrates valley, too, the political rhetoric that accompanied the dam construction claimed a powerful symbolic contrast between different layers of the local past; layers which, despite their differences, shared the same space in the Euphrates valley. One, associated with Mesopotamia being the “cradle of civilizations” and with Syria hosting the remains of some of the oldest human civilizations on its territory, was framed as ancient, distant, and valuable. A considerable number of emergency digs were carried out in the reservoir area by Syrian and international archeological missions to uncover, “rescue,” and “save” the remnants of a distant, ancient past (see, for instance, Orthmann, 1989; Strommenger, 1980 and others). The other type of past, often dismissed as worthless or even detrimental to Syria’s common good, referred to a less distant, more intimately familiar temporal sphere of social experience. Nothing in either the national or the international reactions to the dam construction suggested that this more immediate, lived local past was deemed worth preserving. If officials mentioned it at all, they dismissed it as “backward” and worthless.

Upstream of the Euphrates Dam, people who literally stood in the way of progress were not just physically removed from the sites where modernity was constructed but have also been rhetorically distanced from the realm of the present to that of the past. Local farmers and shepherds were not only physically forced to leave their homes but they were “unimagined” (to use Nixon’s term), their lifestyles discarded as manifestations of “backwardness” (takhalluf), to be replaced by electricity, sedentarism, education, and modernity. The notion that backwardness characterized the population in the region where the Euphrates Dam was constructed was reiterated and echoed by many different proponents, political as well as academic, Syrian as well as foreign. In 1971, for example, the journal Al-ʿUmrān, published by the Syrian Ministry of Local Administration (Wizārat al-Baladiyāt), opened its special issue on Raqqa by praising the Dam as “the wall of glory which our people are building in order to wipe out all signs of backwardness” (Al-ʿUmrān, 1971: 4). A manual for the “education” of Baʿth party cadres on economic policy published in the 1980s (no definite year of publication is given), containing a veritable 21-page section about the Euphrates Dam alone, attributed the area’s persistent “economic and social backwardness” to the lack of political attention paid to this region by political regimes prior to the Baʿth (Ḥizb al-Baʿth, n.d.: 39). Among other factors, the predominance of “the kinship system (niẓām al-qarāba)” was rhetorically associated with the presence of large families in insufficient housing conditions and with exploitative economic relations (Ḥizb al-Baʿth, n.d.: 40, 44).

In 1990, a group of German development experts, closely supervised by Syrian institutions, conducted a survey in 17 villages surrounding the lake. In their summarizing report, they attested that “the Euphrates basin […] is still a backward region at present.” The report related and almost equated the diagnosed backwardness of the area to “the social structure of villages,” namely the “still virile [sic] influence of tribal relations” (Bauer et al., 1990: 1). This assessment echoed perceptions shared not only by Western development institutions since the 1950s (Chatty, 1986: xix) but also by bureaucrats and politicians in Syria and across the Middle East (Chatty, 1973: 28–30, 1986: xviii–xx; Layne, 1989: 26–28; Rabo, 1986: 177; Rae et al., 2001: 16).

The indictment of tribal structures as a “problem” to be solved echoed a mainstay of Baʿthist social policy in Syria’s rural areas. Article 43 of the Baʿth Party’s Constitution, approved in 1947, for example, denounced “Bedouin Life” or “nomadism” (al-badāwa) as,

a primitive social state that […] paralyzes a large part of the nation, making it an obstacle to [the nation’s] development and progress. The Party strives for the sedentarization of the nomads […and] eliminating tribal orders.²

In 1966, 3 years after coming into power, the party denounced tribalism (ʿashāʾirīya), together with “regionalism” and “sectarianism,” as “dangerous social diseases” which had to be fought in order to make “Arabism” victorious:

Membership of a […] tribal community becomes an alternative to being an Arab. In this way the potential for national struggle is paralysed, while the threat which Arab nationalism constitutes to imperialism and [the forces of] reaction is removed. (quoted by Van Dam, 1996: 147)

Beyond the level of purely ideological rhetoric, the party command threatened,

[t]o pursue all elements which introduce […] tribal points of view and to take the most severe punitive measures against them […] To play the card of […] tribalism is a vile method which only serves imperialism’s plans to tear up society. (quoted by Van Dam, 1996: 150)

The construction of the Euphrates Dam promised to put an end to lifestyles that were thought to foster such “obsolete” social relations:

[…] a large part of the population of that region belongs to nomadic tribes that move from place to place in search of pasture; after the [full] implementation of the project these tribes will find themselves not in need of constant movement because of the provision of rich pasture with the necessary fodder. Thus, the problem of the nomads and their sedentarization, and making them an effective part of society, will be solved. (Ḥizb al-Baʿth, n.d.: 50–51, emphasis in the original)

More “modern” forms of cooperation and association were expected to replace descent- and kinship-based social ties: the creation of cooperatives, implication of agrarian reform schemes, organization and training of “workers,” as well as the removal of the peasants from the reservoir area, were praised as measures to end “man’s exploitation of his brother, man” in this area (Ḥizb al-Baʿth, n.d.: 44; see Hinnebusch, 2010 on agrarian reform schemes in Syria as part of Baʿthist policies). In other words, the dam construction was promoted as offering a range of solutions to the particular social “problems” constituted by the prevalence of descent-based social groups, or “tribes,” in the reservoir area.

The social and economic effects of the Syrian Euphrates Dam have been examined by authors from academic and development-oriented perspectives (e.g. Bauer et al., 1990; Meyer, 1982, 1984, 1990; Mikael, 1987; Rabo, 1986). Lake Asad, the reservoir which filled upstream of the Dam, flooded up to 300 villages, inundating houses, pastures, and fields, and displacing an estimated number of 60,000–70,000, perhaps even 122,000 (Bārūt, 2013: 742), people.³ The intense political rhetoric accompanying the dam construction cast them as a backward population, clinging to a “tribal” lifestyle that was a relic of the past that had to be overcome. Indeed, the displaced people largely identified with one of Syria’s tribal groups (ʿashāʾir). Many of them were resettled in new villages that formed a so-called “Arab belt” in the largely Kurdish-populated Syrian Jazira—the displaced villagers thus sacrificing to and simultaneously profiting from larger Arabization schemes in Syria’s Kurdish Northeast.⁴ Many others remained in the Euphrates valley, constructing new villages—without any state support—on the banks adjacent to the emergent lake. The space for mobile pastoralism, supplemented by seasonal agriculture, shrunk, while labor migration to Syria’s metropoles, Aleppo and Damascus, as well as neighboring countries (notably Lebanon and Jordan) accelerated drastically. Relatives who had previously lived in close physical proximity were now often separated by hundreds of kilometers and met only on social occasions provided by funerals, weddings, or religious holidays (cf. Lange, 2012).

Futures past

The promises and claims of progress associated with the Euphrates Scheme—including the Dam construction itself as well as the development projects such as irrigation canals, pumping water for potable water, state farms, and so on associated with it—for which the local population had to sacrifice their present and their past, were in many instances belied. Ten years after closing the dam, the extension of the newly developed irrigated area had still not equaled the cultivated areas submerged by the Lake (Fischer, 1987: 121). After 30 years, still only 150,000 ha were being irrigated from the Lake (Ababsa, 2005: 1). Moreover, even the newly developed land did not evolve into the blossoming, fertile gardens projected by Baʿthist rhetoric, as salinity and the high rate of gypsum in the irrigated soil quickly led to serious problems in the badly drained, newly irrigated areas.

Historian Reinhart Koselleck (1979) coined the term “Vergangene Zukunft,” later translated into English as “futures past,” to refer to bygone imaginations and visions of the future as they were articulated in the past. In this case, the “future past” rooted in the 1960s and 1970s continued to linger on during the 2000s, as the nation continued to impose sacrifices on the inhabitants of many villages upstream of the barrage. More often than not, the material changes wrought by the Euphrates Scheme benefited northern Syria’s urban centers, but not all of the villages near the reservoir. According to the official Syrian newspaper Tishrīn, as late as 2004, more than half of the people displaced by Lake Asad had not yet received any compensation, either for their destroyed houses or for their livelihoods that had also drowned under the water (Al-Maḥmūd, 2004). Moreover, even the secondary modernization projects following the dam construction were often carried out at the expense of the local population. Considerable material shortcomings of government policies toward the peasants in the Euphrates valley persisted through the 2000s. At the time of my fieldwork in the 2000s, many roads linking the settlements of the area to each other, and to the larger towns from where regular transportation to Aleppo, Raqqa, or Manbij was available, were not asphalted and were full of potholes. In summer, driving on these roads raised big dust clouds; in winter, the precipitation and lack of drainage made the roads muddy and slippery. By the mid-1990s, 56% of the households in the Euphrates Basin were said to enjoy running water (Saleeby, 2012). Until the mid-2000s (and possibly until today), a number of villages in this region, who had sacrificed their pastures and fields to provide drinking water to Aleppo and other parts of the country, were still did not linked to the drinking water system themselves.

However, any criticism of the practical politics surrounding the Euphrates Scheme was politically highly sensitive and potentially dangerous, as it could be read as critiquing Baʿthist Syria’s path to national prosperity, security, and progress. When I conducted ethnographic fieldwork in this region between 2001 and 2011, fear of the various powerful internal intelligence services (mukhābarāt) and their informants was omnipresent, and the lasting political sensitivity of the displacement caused by Lake Asad often resulted in silences on details of this subject. Many of my more “public” conversations on the history of the area and its people touched, at best, only fleetingly on issues associated with the resettlement and its consequences, while “safer” subjects such as genealogies, colonial politics, and anti-colonial resistance were discussed at great length (cf. Lange, 2006, 2014, 2015)

Double marginalizations

Notions of temporality and historicity voiced by different actors during the Baʿthist era have decisively and pervasively filtered into local actors’ self-representations of their past and were still evident in the first decade of the twenty-first century. In formal, as well as more quotidian, contexts, locals rhetorically inserted themselves—abjectly or affirmatively—into larger narratives of progress, modernity, and backwardness.

In the 2000s, a growing number of books presented Syria’s long-silenced tribal history, thus (re)claiming for Syria’s tribal groups (qabā’il or ‘ashā’ir) a legitimate position as historical actors (cf. Lange, 2014, 2015). Büssow (2012) has termed this literature, which echoes older developments in other Arab countries (cf. Shryock, 1997), a “Bedouinist” genre. As I have explored in detail elsewhere (Lange, 2015), authors used the hallmarks of “modern” and “historicist” knowledge to skilfully reinsert Syria’s tribal communities in larger narratives about history and temporality. Their books partly echoed oral narratives about tribal history that were being told in the local guest halls (oda, maḍāfa) of tribal notables and sheikhs. By adopting keywords of a nationalist historical discourse such as waṭaniya (patriotism), speakers and writers simultaneously inscribed these concepts with a distinctly local, or tribal, perspective. Both oral historical narratives and the published versions of tribal history focused strongly on events of the mandate era, highlighting acts of resistance against the French. They made the men of the past visible as subjects acting heroically to maintain their (and, by implication, their tribes’) honor as generous hosts, brave fighters, and shrewd political actors. Thus, they reframed tribal identity as conveying a virtuous, Arab authenticity, rather than a shameful and primitive social state. For many, stories about their ancestors’ experiences and actions during the mandate era offered an opportunity to counter the wide-spread disdain with which many Syrians regarded this part of the national population. Their authors, to some extent at least, implicitly wrote against previous dismissals of Syria’s tribal communities as marginal to the national historical trajectory.

However, at the same time, the proud renaissance of previously marginal historical actors within the national historical trajectory functioned to marginalize another set of historical experiences in this region. The emergent voices presented tribal history in a carefully weighed way to the outside world, highlighting aspects that were more compatible with dignified, heroic narratives and downplaying or leaving out more quotidian, or divisive, aspects. Issues such as possible character flaws of tribal notables of the past, but also inequalities, processes of domination and conflicts within the tribal unit and other perceived signs of communal weakness tended to be downplayed or even excluded from such “resolutely polite” (Shryock and Howell, 2001: 249) accounts of tribal history, be they oral or written. Economic hardships and working routines, intersubjective rivalries and envy, all these features of daily life which decisively shaped quotidian experiences (cf. Lange, 2007), were largely moved aside in order to let the more heroic and, at the same time, perhaps more stereotypical and uncontroversial aspects of tribal history take central stage. Another facet of this marginalization of “other” subaltern experiences was the gendering of historical representation. As I have shown elsewhere (Lange, 2014), the reinscription of tribal perspectives into narratives of Syrian history tended to make tribal history appear as a purely male endeavor, obscuring female experiences by rendering them “not important” to tribal history (similar, perhaps, to older European understandings of what constituted proper history before the turn to “history from below” in the 1970s). Moreover, local publications on tribal history tended to edit performative elements such as gestures and movements, sensually evocative references, and reflections on women as actors and subjects of history, out of representations of these communities’ history, thus devaluing and silencing these forms of expressing historical experience, and of relating (to) the local past (cf. Lange, 2014).

Everyday memories

Formalized accounts of “history,” understood as the compilation of genealogies and narratives of war and conflict, were articulated almost exclusively by men who drew on their familiarity with oral traditions, but increasingly also on their access to documents, books, and formal education, to shore up their authority in a highly contested field (Lange, 2015). In contrast, many of my interlocutors—in particular, but not exclusively, women—in the villages around Lake Asad, who, in many cases, were barely (or not at all) able to read and write, abjectly denied that they had any knowledge of history. They not only claimed to be ignorant but even discouraged me from questioning them, insisting that they “knew nothing” about history and that for the purpose of my research, it would be useless to speak with them. However, many of those who initially claimed to be ignorant about “history” were, at closer acquaintance, able and ready to share a wealth of personal, intimate recollections about their lives in the past. They demonstrated another kind of knowledge; an intimate, embodied familiarity with past lifestyles that had been lost and that were links to the marginalized, tribal past. They did not necessarily verbalize all of their memories but used verbal statements and narratives as well as embodied practices and interactions with specific material objects to convey their experiences. Both dimensions, the verbal and the non-verbal, were intertwined in acts of remembering which also involved touching, drawing, pointing to and holding up, as well as working with objects that incorporated the past as well as the present.

The disparity between speakers’ disavowal of knowing anything about history, and the tangible knowledge of the past they embodied and conveyed, points to two things. First, it demonstrated that my interlocutors did not necessarily equate intimate familiarity of the past with “historical knowledge.” Second, it spoke about local constructions of authority in the realm of “knowledge” which responded to considerations of gender, age, and generation, but also to context and situation. In such a setting, visceral familiarity and proficiency in working with implements associated with the past could convey a more authoritative stance and additional self-assurance to speakers who evaluated past lifestyles against the present. In such vernacular accounts, material objects and bodily practices acted as bridges in a number of ways. First, they could bridge over silences through expressing a relation to the past in ways which words (alone) could not do. Second, this mode of engaging with the past significantly had the potential to also bridge the supposed gap between past and present, which many textual representations, relying on linear understandings of temporality, maintain.

These accounts addressed a range of themes that did not constitute part of the history presented in the more formalized accounts recounted in gatherings or published in the above-mentioned literature. Past everydays were, for many of my older interlocutors, structured to a large extent by seasonally mobile pastoralism. Memories of this time were “entombed” (Glassie, 1975: 621) in particularly light or mobile types of housing, in implements used for milking and processing milk, and in particular tasks and practices associated with pastoralism. However, the memories enshrined in these things were unquiet ghosts (to play on Glassie’s metaphor) which could be summoned through touching and working with an object or conjured through sketchy drawings of such things or breaking them out of storage. Through the physical handling, touching, as well as gazing at and speaking about certain objects, practices and routines of the past were enacted and brought into the present: present-day experiences provided a commonsensical background against which representations of the past were (implicitly as well as explicitly) compared and judged. Moreover, working routines and implements occasionally “extended” from the past into the present, where they held a different significance than they used to do: whereas in earlier days, they were unquestioningly and matter-of-factly present in most villagers’ lives, at the time of my fieldwork they had become survivals of a quaint, old-fashioned lifestyle. Depending on speaker, audience, and context, they could now stand for either a “purer” (more innocent and authentic) or a “dirtier” (more backward and primitive) way of life (cf. Hamilakis and Labanyi, 2008: 5–6, for their interpretation of Bergson’s notion of durability, durée, applied to material objects and things which are rooted in different temporal scales and contain or embody references to these different scales at the same moment in time).

Lost homes

Perhaps not surprisingly considering the recent history of the area and considering, in particular, the displacement suffered by many people of the older generation, recollections of past homes made changes over time manifest and tangible. As in many other parts of rural Syria, house constructions in the Euphrates valley have changed considerably over the last decades of the twentieth century (cf. Pütt, 2005). Different types of housing were associated with specific modes of sociability and work. Tents, hardly used any more at the time of my fieldwork, were a recurrent subject of such conversations. Some had sold their tents to families who still practiced a (seasonally) nomadic lifestyle; others kept them stored and wrapped in a corner of the new, permanent houses. But for my interlocutors, the tent stood not only as a comfortable symbol of home, and of a past lifestyle, but was also very concretely associated with physical, hard work. Umm Sālim recalled,

Every winter, we moved into the steppe, coming back for the harvest in spring. The work with the tent, that was women’s work, but the men helped with the heavy work. […] I learned how to build the tent from my husband, and from the neighbours. Our tent had three poles. It was so very exhausting to build the tent […] Thirty years ago, we went out with the tent for the last time. That life is over now […]⁵

Other older women shared similar memories. Besides the tents, memories of the pastoral lifestyle that had shaped many older people’s lives in the past also resided in a number of implements that were used to process milk into yogurt and butter and for storing these products. Such tubes or sacs, made from tanned sheep hides, were called shichwa (shikwa in standard Arabic) or mizbād (the “butter-maker”).⁶ Their production, as well as their everyday utilization, was female work, and the procedures involved were not only frequently explained by different interlocutors but—in those few instances when these implements were still at hand—also demonstrated to me.

In April 2003, for instance, I visited Umm Khalaf in her home. As one of the few women in her village who still kept a (albeit small) flock of sheep, Umm Khalaf had invited me to see how the ewes were milked and how the milk was processed. When I arrived at her house early in the morning, Umm Khalaf and her daughter-in-law were already in the process of milking the 15 sheep of their household (a procedure that was repeated in the afternoon). Throughout the morning, we continued to talk about how life used to be and how it had changed. While we were talking, Umm Khalaf did not stop working. Moreover, she commented not only on the work she was doing but also on our conversation itself (and thus, on the nature of my own “work”), punctuating her conversation repeatedly with the murmured assertion that “work needs effort [literally pain], not talk” (shuql yirīd ādhāb mā yirīd ḥachī).⁷

As a more visceral or “limbic” way of engaging with the past, recalling through words, movements, and things evoking past work routines and other bodily practices could be more significant for creating an affective aura than the mere verbal narration of past experiences and events. It could also serve as a basis to engage ethically with the passage of time, by comparatively evaluating the merits and disadvantages of particular ways of living, rooted in different temporal scales. Moreover, occasionally they offered a way of (albeit obliquely) addressing the social and economic consequences of displacement without entering the sensitive territory of explicitly critiquing Baʿthist modernization. Take, for example, Umm Sālim’s account that evokes the detrimental effects of the secondary infrastructure derived from the Euphrates Scheme: in this case, the plant which purifies the Euphrates water and transforms it into drinking water (Maḥaṭṭat Muʿālajat al-Miyāh, in local usage referred to as “al-maḥaṭṭa,” “the Station”). The maḥaṭṭa consisted of a large compound encircled by a cement wall encompassing the technical facilities as well as housing and infrastructure for several hundred employees with their families. This large structure had been erected right next to the home of Umm Sālim and her family: “Each of my sons used to farm between 13 and 14 hectares,” Umm Sālim told me. “Then the maḥaṭṭa came and took some of the land, and now they have only 10 hectares between them.” Like Umm Sālim, many of her neighbors and relatives had received no compensation of any kind for the loss of their land, which had, at any rate, been classified as “state land” (mīrī) rather than private property (tāpū), she said.⁸

Many, if not most, conversations about the past were strongly inflected with affective and normative overtones. They aimed not only to reconstruct how things had been and how they had changed but also to evaluate these changes, to judge the way things had been going, and to—implicitly—deduce orientation for living in the present and in the future. The notion of temporality they deployed spoke of (moral and social) decline in the face of material and educational progress. Many older women emphasized the need for hard work and criticized the present generation’s unwillingness to engage in it. While individual experiences and life stories differed from each other, even between members of—roughly—the same generation, and from neighboring villages or even from the same extended family, general patterns emerged. The theme of hard work as a characteristic of the past, and its enactment by older women in the present through the perpetuation of more old-fashioned working styles, brought forth embodied, material, but also affective and ethical dimensions of remembering. Many—especially older—villagers referred to the collective past, and, in particular, to the time before the flooding of Lake Asad, in overtones of nostalgic longing. When denouncing deficient present-day relations and circumstances, many of them invoked visions of a “purer” past. This purity was discursively constructed through claims of more wholesome social relations untainted by the present-day existential scramble for cash money and its attendant consequences, such as labor migration, scarcity, and “greed.” Other sites of lost purity were seemingly more mundane concerns such as home-made versus store-bought food and associations of physical health. Umm Ṣāliḥ, for instance, described the time “before the flood” (gabl al-ghamr) as a time of purity, beauty, and health to me, two of her daughters, and two nieces:

A wedding procession (zaffa) of camels and horses used to come to fetch a bride from her father’s house. Pure-bred horses! Nobody used cars to get the bride. What a wonderful picture (manẓar) that made. […]

And everybody helped everybody out, without money [changing hands] of course. […] There used to be fezʿa (mutual help) every day, everyone helped the others out, in turn.

[Katharina: For which kind of work?]

For all sorts of work.

[K: But don’t people still help each other out?]

Nowadays, only friends or close relatives help each other; before [auwalī] it used to be everyone, all the neighbours. […]

And back then, everyone was in the village, all the men were there. Nowadays, all the men are gone [to work in the city or abroad].

And there were no doctors then. There were doctors only in Aleppo. But back then, nobody fell sick, we did not need any doctors! […] All that changed with the flooding (al-ghamr).⁹

The insistence that illnesses were not known before the flooding, making the presence of doctors or other medical facilities superfluous, makes an interesting counterpoint to the recurrent Baʿthist emphases on the improvement of medical services in the countryside around the emergent lake in the wake of the construction of the Euphrates Dam. Similar sentiments were voiced by Umm Ṣāliḥ’s own mother, Umm Aḥmad, who was in her seventies when I first met her in 2002. She described life in the past (al-ḥayāt auwalī) to me and to a group of her own female relatives at a morning visit in her son’s house:

Today there is everything, but back then, our life was hard. You see that one [she points at her oldest daughter, herself a grandmother]. I gave birth to her at night, and in the morning, they sat me on a donkey, we took down the tent, and went on. […] We went as far as from here to al-Mahdūm [a distance of about 25 km]. I had to ride on that donkey, the child in my arm, and go on. No doctor, no hospital! Not like today, today there is everything. Those [she points to her daughter, daughter-in-law and a niece who are also present] don’t know what effort is. [The visitors murmur in agreement, although they, too, have often complained to me during or after their daily occupations that “their lives consist only of work and toil” (ḥayātī bes shuqhl wa-ṭaʿb)]. Yes, our life was hard. But there was no sickness! We ate only khāthir (yoghurt), honey, and samn ʿarabī (clarified butter made of sheep milk). We were never ill, we never saw a doctor. My children did not even know what a “doctor” was. Only now, since we began living in these houses and eat that city food, and nobody knows what they put in it [do we fall ill and need to see doctors].¹⁰

These recollections were instructive in a number of ways. They expressed a nostalgic longing for the past, constructed as a counterimage to the present situation, which was implicitly criticized. Whereas Umm Khalaf and Umm Aḥmad criticized the supposed laziness of today’s young women when compared to the work and hardships endured by their mothers and grandmothers, Umm Ṣāliḥ’s critique addressed a esthetic dimensions (the beauty of the wedding processions made up of horses and camels as opposed to today’s usage of cars and motorcycles), but most centrally, it focused on the transformation of social relations. Her insistence that mutual help used to be given “without money” was indicative of the changing importance (and its contesting evaluations) of money in this local setting—a transformation that other interlocutors also evaluated negatively. Umm Ṣāliḥ portrayed village society of the time before the flooding as intact—in contrast to the contemporary situation. This was expressed by her emphasis on social and working relations being characterized by pervasive, quotidian social solidarity, encompassing the whole village. While she admitted that mutual solidary help still existed, the perimeter of the social circle on which one could rely for help had shrunk. According to her opinion, rather than including the whole village, in the early 2000s, it comprised only close relatives and friends, indicating the transformations in the social ties which bound the villagers in this area to each other at the time of speaking.

The sense of the past as a realm of a lost “purity,” balance, and innocence was also articulated through an evaluation of social relations, often expressed through norms regarding gender relations. An example is the account of how the annual pasture migrations of the sheepherders of the Euphrates valley were carried out, told to me by Umm ʿAbbūd. Her family had owned a large number of sheep. Every winter during the annual migration “in the steppe,” moving from the Euphrates valley toward Tadmur/Palmyra, Umm ʿAbbūd told me how occasionally her parents stayed behind to take care of the fields on the Euphrates or remained in one particular place in the steppe, while she—who was then still unmarried and called by her given name, Fiḍḍa—moved further into the steppe with the sheep, accompanied by a shepherd, ʿAbd al-Aḥad, who worked for the family but was not related to them through kin ties. ʿAbd al-Aḥad took care of herding, while Fiḍḍa and her sisters were responsible for milking the sheep and processing the milk, producing yogurt, butter, and cheese. All of them shared the tent of the family. At the time of my fieldwork, such sleeping arrangements would have been considered deeply inappropriate for young girls, whose movements and comportment were subject to ever more control: concerns and expectations of “propriety” included an increasingly strict separation between males and females (cf. Lange, 2012). However, back then “nobody said anything—it was normal,” Umm ʿAbbūd said, “because there used to be amān (safety) back then.”¹¹

Umm ʿAbbūd’s recollections indicate a real, experienced, and embodied loss of liberty of freedom of movement, and a limitation of sociability. Far from being an individual experience, similar observations were recalled by other women of advanced years. In a sense, this seems to echo older assumptions, articulated by many outside observers of Arabian steppe dwellers, that females in the countryside, and notably in nomadic communities, enjoyed greater “freedom” regarding social relations with males than their counterparts in urban settings.¹² However, it must be noted that in many parts of the Middle East, even in urban contexts, codes of female dress and bodily comportment have changed toward a greater degree of gender segregation in recent years when compared to earlier decades.

Claiming the past as the site of a lost, purer way of life, therefore, indicated perceptions about an actual loss of “rights” while simultaneously expressing a discourse of nostalgic longing. However, this discourse also incorporated—and glossed over—inherent contradictions. While a lifestyle associated with seasonally mobile livestock raising, involving herding, milking, and processing the milk, moving in the steppe with tents, and so on, was remembered with fondness and longing as a past activity, such practices were disdained by many when regarded in the present (cf. Lange, 2007). Similar contradictions, although less sharply articulated, pertained to valuations of agriculture, but also to other social and cultural fields, where valuations of the past oscillated between articulations of a nostalgic longing and disdainful rejections as expressions of backwardness and ignorance. Divergent attitudes toward, and valuations of, past versus “modern” occupations and lifestyles were partly structured by generational belonging, as well as changing gender roles and relations.

Conclusion

The recent history of the area around Syria’s Lake Asad points toward multiple layers of marginalization in Syria. These multi-layered experiences of marginalization have been represented as well as challenged through powerful invocations of temporality and historicity. State representatives justified (infra)structural violence, namely the large-scale displacement caused by the dam, as well as continuing infrastructural neglect in parts of the region, by making reference to what they perceived as the illiterate and socially backward character of the local population. Baʿthist state and party representatives and foreign experts contrasted the past glory of the ancient civilizations to the more recent past, perceived as a devalued obstacle to progress and a brighter future. In the 2000s, local authors used the newly emergent genre of “Bedouinist” publications on tribal history to implicitly counter these dismissals by highlighting the historical agency of the local population and, thus, write them back into larger historical narratives. However, these narratives, focusing on heroic figures, battles, and genealogy, in turn marginalized and overlooked more quotidian forms of knowledge about the past.

In this context, memories of past everydays, of working routines, and ways of living were submerged not only by the rising water of Lake Asad but could also be drowned out by vocal contestations over the historicity as well as the future of this part of Syria. However, in particular constellations, these submerged memories resurfaced. Female, and also male, villagers on the Euphrates who claimed “ignorance” about history shared their personal experiences and perceptions of socio-economic change. Speaking from personal experience, they articulated their sense of a decisive rupture, rather than a gradual change, between past and present. They associated this rupture with the construction of the Euphrates Dam and the ensuing relocation processes which were seen to have widened social and economic distances between relatives. From their point of view, significant intergenerational changes characterized the transition from a strongly pastoral (and seasonally mobile) to a settled village lifestyle and, increasingly, urban lifestyle. Older women, in particular, questioned and occasionally contested these changes, based on their experiences of greater mobility and audibility in the past.

Footnotes

Notes

Author biography

Katharina Lange is an anthropologist of the Middle East with extensive fieldwork experience in Syria, as well as the Kurdistan Region of Iraq. She is a Fellow at Leibniz-Zentrum Moderner Orient in Berlin (Germany) and holds the title of Privatdozent at the University of Leipzig. She has published on the indigenization of Arabic anthropology, the historical anthropology of tribal communities, the politics of history and memory in Syria, and is currently engaged in a research project on revaluations of rural land in Kurdistan-Iraq.

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