AME-Tribe and Diatribe: Anthropology Meets Political Science
Panel 121, sponsored byAssociation for Middle East Anthropology (AMEA), 2013 Annual Meeting
On Saturday, October 12 at 8:30 am
Panel Description
The purpose of this panel is to explore the diverse ways tribalism is perceived in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) and to encourage discourse among anthropologists, political scientists and journalists on the various implications of tribal self-identification for social and political development in MENA. For many, a homogenized tribalism signifies "primitive" levels of development that are inimical to state formation. Tribal identification is considered divisive, reactionary and irrational, its existence antithetical to Weberian concepts of statehood. Local urban elites also tend to exoticize tribes in their regions. Yet some level of tribal self-identification and organization remain germane to a large number of contexts in MENA, even as the significance of tribalism, as locally defined, fluctuates with socio-economic and political change. Historically, tribal populations were rural. Their relations with urban states were characterized by political and economic interdependence as well as by conflict. There has always been considerable variation among MENA's tribes, notably in degrees of hierarchy vs. egalitarianism within tribes and sub-tribes and the relative status of women. Today, tribal terminology may refer to forms of social organization (which differ by location, ecology, economy and political environments), alternative legal systems, and/or ways of channeling memory and framing heritage.
The presenters in this panel are anthropologists, with a political scientist as discussant. All participants have conducted field research and published on issues related to tribalism in MENA. One paper will examine tribal discourse as political imaginary in Afghanistan and ask why and how it remains significant. Three papers will discuss tribalism in relation to the Arab Spring: the first examines changing perceptions of tribal institutions in Syria from late Ottoman times until today. The second explores the apparent resurgence of tribal mobilization in Tunisia in response to Mohamed Bouazizi's immolation. The third paper will discuss the implications of tribal self-identification to national development in Yemen. By counteracting assumptions that tribes in the region are independent actors or independently political spoilers, papers in this panel question current paradigms in anthropology and political science. In their discussions of tribal ideology, tribe-state relations, economic and social contexts, and the various ways in which tribal identification is expressed, these papers touch on all aspects of this conference's theme: "Belief, Ideology, Social Action and Cultural Expression."
Tribes and tribalism enjoy an enigmatic presence in the Middle East. Consigned by the state and religion to their prehistories and, on their own, either failures as organisations or at best frames of contention, imageries of tribe and tribalism persist. Not just as nostalgia or anachronism, tribal identities and tribalism as culture are resurrected in such apodictic modern activities as the cultural heritage business of tourism, mostly in royal states, at election time in others, even for weekend outings; yet this availability doesn’t seem to organize anything concrete or that can’t be explained more concretely from pastoralists’ trucking their sheep to political entrepreneurs ginning up constituencies. Even if tribalism is a bust in the short term, absorbed into other strategies, and even then if more strategies of identity than of mobilization, its longer term forms and formulas show remarkable persistence and stability. Anthropology that since Barth and Bourdieu has shied away from such abstractions in favor of more concrete referents and objective conditions would authorize attention to tribalism less as representation than as discursive practice, which may be seen objectively to stratify from lower-level abstractions deployed strategically to higher-level abstractions deployed… how? Even if just talk, what is the talk about? Are its strategies really ‘no more’ than those at lower levels – i.e., claims on resources – or little more than entertainment? To open some additional middle ground of social action and cultural expression, I examine chains of evidence from foundation stories through tales of heroic deeds, often involving women and a frequently missing third term, religion, for discursive practices that deploy more metaphysical strategies, whose very point is removal from representation and engaging not harmonies but contradictions that they cast as intractable. Is that enough to sustain their persistence, and at more concrete levels where they compete with others? And where, besides as power plays – the ‘game’ in both Barth’s and Bourdieu’s terms – does it identify tractabilities?
The understandings of tribes and tribalism in the contemporary Middle East has undergone significant changes over the past century; at times the tribes have been rendered invisible and at other times important partners in local governance. This paper sets out to examine these political changes; to identify the fluidity of local, national and international attitudes and practices towards tribes, particularly the Bedouin tribes of the northern Arabian Badia. And although Bedouin tribes have largely disappeared from contemporary discourses, this paper provides convincing evidence that , in fact, the Bedouin tribes, never disappeared; they simply were not officially acknowledged. Based on interviews with tribal leaders and participant observation in Syria over three decades the paper sets out the historical transformations and changes in attitudes and practices with have been the hallmark of ‘bedouin tribal studies’ from the end of the Ottoman Era to the final years of the Asad regime.
The closing decades of the Ottoman Empire were marked by government efforts to co-opt tribal leaders and their offspring into Ottoman militarism. The French and British mandatory authorities, however, regarded the tribes and associated tribalism as both ‘backward’ entities and at the same time romanticised and orientalised forms of association that could be used to achieved their League of Nations Mandate aims. Thus both pacification and semi-autonomous state-like administrations were allowed to exist side by side. The early years of independence as well as those of Baathi rule resulted in the de-legislation of tribes and efforts to break the tribal associations commonly acknowledged with regard to transnational territorial holdings and natural resources. In recent years , however, tribal self identification in Syria has grown noticeably. After decades of suppression and legal nullification of status ( 1958) the source of this transformation is examined in terms of contemporary local, regional and national understandings of tribe, tribalism and transnationalism. The role of the tribes in the current uprising is also explored.
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In 1953 French ethnographer Jacques Berque wrote a famous article criticizing the vagueness with which the world “tribe” was used in discussing North Africa—-a criticism still true today to a great extent. Tunisia’s first president Habib Bourguiba viewed tribalism as a cause of underdevelopment and took explicit measures to eradicate it. In the late 1960s, Tunisian nationalist Laroussi Methoui suggested that Tunisia had once been “many tribes” but had become “a single tribe” at independence. By the 1980s (and even more by the early 2000s) Tunisia had become predominantly urban and many thought that tribalism had disappeared or been reduced to a rural remnant. Then came the Tunisian Revolution of 2010-2011. It began in the Interior, where tribal sentiments have been historically strong. There had been protests in other areas of the country before the unfortunate Mohamed Bouazizi burned himself to death in Sidi Bouzid, but they had lacked the Interior’s effective network of tribal ties to facilitate the spread of a protest movement. Further South, where the uprising spread next, tribal sentiments were the main factor in a long-simmering labor dispute in the mines of the Gafsa region which contributed strongly to the uprising. Some suggest that tribalism in Tunisia never went away but was simply latent and has now re-emerged—-not only in the Interior, South and Northwest, but also among the tribal diaspora in Tunis and other large cities. During the early days of the 2010-2011 Revolution, when the national forces of order disappeared from the scene and Tunisia fell temporarily into chaos, tribal ties became important for grassroots social organization to maintain security. During and since the election of October 2011 Tunisian President Moncef Marzouki has offered a good example of how to use tribalism to mobilize support. Marzouki emphasizes his Mrazig tribal origins in the Pre-Saharan area around Douz—-even though he was born in the Cap Bon and has lived almost all his life in Sousse, Tunis and abroad, not in the South. This paper analyzes the meanings of tribe and tribalism in contemporary Tunisia, addressing especially the relationship between tribalism and regionalism and the extent to which tribal ties have come to play a role in political and social mobilization.
Lacking an industrial base or the water resources to develop urban industries, Yemen remains largely rural, and the vast majority of its rural population self-identifies as tribal. Yemeni tribes are territorial units, best defined as indigenous civil society organizations (CSO) made up of smaller subunits, each with its own elected leaders who mediate internal disputes and represent the community in its dealings with the outside world. Tribal organization enables groups of varying sizes to mobilize quickly and effectively in times of need. Members of the tribal population, like others in Yemen, participate actively in government as politicians, soldiers, and employees. They vote in national elections and give allegiance to the Yemeni state. Economically, individual tribesmen and women are entrepreneurial and readily absorb new opportunities and consumer goods. Tribal women have historically enjoyed mobility, voice, and full economic participation in the rural economy. Nevertheless, media and the discourse of international development stigmatize tribalism in Yemen as violent, primitive and irrational, , at the very least, inimical to nation-building. While there are historical reasons for hostility to tribes among urban and southern Yemenis, I suggest that a hegemonic understanding of modernity underlies European and American aversions to tribalism. Proponents of conservative, politicized interpretations of Islam, who adhere to alternative models of modernity also oppose tribalism. Through discussion of tribal institutions and their adaptability to contemporary global conditions, this paper explores tribalism’s confrontation with alternative visions of modernity.
