“I came to your house and did not find you” - Gendered Perspectives, Memories and Silences from/on rural northern Syria

Gendered Perspectives, Memories and Silences from / on rural northern Syria

Katharina Lange, ZMO

In the months since the fall of the Asad regime and the takeover of power in Damascus by the HTS-led government under Ahmed al-Shara’, reporting on the situation in Syria has given much attention on possible political trajectories and lines of conflict, often - once again – foregrounding a view from Damascus. Offering an alternative perspective, this lecture turns to the rural margins of northern Syria, (re)visiting a (tribal, Arab, Sunni) community on the Syrian Euphrates that the author knows closely from earlier fieldwork and visits in Syria between 2000 and 2011.

Drawing from fieldwork conducted before 2011 as well as a recent visit, the lecture shows that some of the changes that have affected this community were caused by war and conflict, while others have their roots in the more distant past, raising the question how to understand the “postwar” character of current Syrian lifeworlds. This is underlined by ongoing political tensions. Today situated on the frontlines of the confrontation between the HTS-led government in Damascus and the Kurdish-led Autonomous Administration of North and East Syria, the history of this community sheds light on the long-standing entanglement of Kurdish and Arab experiences in Syria.

Before this background, the lecture adopts an ethnographic perspective to trace how members of this community organise and envisage their everyday lives, not only across the considerable geographical distances created by (more than) a decade of flight and displacement, but also between memories and silences of the past and an uncertain future. The ties that bind community members to each other today are multiple and extend from the Syrian Euphrates to Lebanon, the Kurdish-ruled Syrian Jazira, Europe, and Africa. Touching on everyday concerns such as education, income, housing, health, and family, the lecture asks what “community” looks like in a context marked by geographic dispersal and social fragmentation. The answers are ambivalent, even contradictory: while communal ties remain vital for living in a precarious and unstable context, they are also seen (and mourned) to be weakening and disappearing.

Katharina Lange is an anthropologist with fieldwork experience in the Middle East, notably Syria and the Kurdistan Region of Iraq. Her research interests include oral history, the effects of war and violence on everyday life, rurality, agriculture, and human-environment relations. A Senior Research Fellow at ZMO, she holds a PhD (2001) and a Habilitation (2018) in Cultural Anthropology from the University of Leipzig, Germany. Her work has been published in Economic Anthropology, Nomadic Peoples, JESHO, Memory Studies and other venues. 
 

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