Syrian dance scholar-practitioner Adnan Ibn Dhurayl published in 1996 what is the singular attempt to document the national folk dance traditions of Syria – dabke and raqs al-semah. Employing a wide variety of approaches including folklore studies, movement transcriptions, cultural histories of choreography and pedagogy, and bibliographic research into Syrian Arabic sources, “Raqs al-Semah and Dabke: History and Transcription” exemplifies the complexities of rendering Syrian folk dance into modern intellectual discourse in the late twentieth century. This paper presents the main findings of the book, recently translated into English by the presenter, with attention to three lines of critique: first, to identify the pedagogical objects and performative subjects configured through folk dance by situating this project within broader nation-building processes; second, to examine the discursive construction of gender, ethnicity, and place within the text; third, to address how the author affixes Western ontologies of dance onto local practices in order to speak more broadly about issues of pedagogy, representation, and knowledge production in Middle Eastern dance. Next, the paper positions this book as an archival object that stands in stark distinction from the embodied repertoire of Syrian popular dance as practiced today among Syrians living inside and outside of Syria. The paper concludes by demonstrating how Syrian folk/popular dance performatively constitutes the non-modern in Syrian culture.