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Physicalizing and Pluralizing the Syrian Geo-Body in the Syrian Geological Journal
Abstract by Miranda Meyer On Session   (Geobodies and Geographies)

On Tuesday, November 12 at 2:30 pm

2024 Annual Meeting

Abstract
This paper examines the Syrian Geological Journal from 1978-2000 as a window into the construction of Syrian territory, suggesting expansions on the notion of territory as the “geo-body” of the nation. While the geographic concept of a geo-body introduced by Thongchai Winichakul has been applied to Arab countries, these studies tend to center on abstractly comprehensive representations of territory such as cartographic outlines and logos. The Geological Journal, however, renders the geo-body in physical-geographic terms by stitching it out of stone, water, metals, and chemical deposits; an early issue goes so far as to refer to geologists performing a national survey as “doctors” who restore the land’s body from implied colonial ravages “limb by limb,” bringing forth “wealth upon wealth for its sons.” As this language indicates, in the 1970s the journal and associated Syrian Geological Society were eager to place geologists at the center of the Ba‘th Party’s Arab Socialist development vision. The dual registers in which this eagerness is expressed reflect the plural territorial visions for Syria in play at the time: the Party terminology of al-qatr al-‘arabi al-Suri, indicating a subsection of an Arab whole, and the more typically romantic nationalist language treating land as a body and a parent. Over time, the geo-body represented in the journal’s pages pluralizes further. Coding each issue’s contents reveals a decline in the number and length of geological scholarly publications, and increases in advertisements from various government bodies, progress reports from minor Party officials, and material praising Hafez or Bashar al-Asad. While this shift is easily understood as reflecting the state’s increasing institutionalization of and imbrication with civil society organizations such as the Geological Society, the paper argues that it is productive to consider all the journal’s latter-day contents as composing a Syrian geo-body or -bodies too: still made up of stone and waters, but also numbers, a complex institutional terrain, and the President. Particularly in the context of the corporatist institutional style of Syrian statebuilding and the al-Asad personality cult, the appearance of these seemingly unrelated bodies in the pages of a geological journal can be read not merely as artifacts of the publication’s context but as revealing further dimensions of what it means to call territory the body of the nation.
Discipline
Geography
Geographic Area
Syria
Sub Area
None