Dancing in Damascus: Stories

Anthropologist Lindisfarne spent a total of eleven months from 1988-1990 in Damascus researching gender and marriage in upper class Damascene society. However, rather than present her fieldwork in a dry academic paper-as with her earlier research in Afghanistan, Iran, Turkey, and other Arab countries-she chose to write the nine short stories here. In her 30+ page postscript, she explains that she was motivated to do this partly in order to expose a wider audience to the reality of Arab women's lives, partly because she didn't feel she could capture the full picture of life in Damascus in a standard case study format, and partly because she felt it would be "inexcusably arrogant and patently absurd" to treat the Damascenes she met as ethnographic subjects. While the first aim is certainly valid, the latter two are somewhat questionable as, according to the bibliography in the back, these dilemmas either haven't been present or haven't stopped her before. Casual examination leads one to wonder if the only difference is that this time her research subjects are urban elites instead of tribal or lower class subjects, and if that is the case, why are urban elites "absurd" as subjects?But all that is neither here nor there to the casual reader-because for the most part the stories are quite readable and do convey something of the nature of Damascus life. Three of the stories exist to display the hard life of women. "The Tortoise" is a sly little story about an everyday lower-class women dealing with the demands of her nasty family. "Jellyfish" rather unsuccessfully takes the reader into the mind of an unmarried thirty-year-old. And "The Box (1959)" is the somewhat clichéed reminisces of an old Circassian woman recalling her few years of happiness as a newlywed in the '20s. "Fresh Apricots" is a swift and effective little study of a newly released political prisoner making his way home. "Not One of Us" displays the tension between a thoroughly Westernized woman and her sister who stayed in Damascus, exposing the insularity and small-mindedness of a certain type of upper class woman. "Lovely Tits" showcases the confusion of a Syrian man on a business trip to England interacting with a thoroughly Anglicized Syrian woman colleague. These last two stories convey what they're supposed to, but are a little forced. The other three stories ("True Love," "Hyena Piss," and "Ghalia's Wedding") are the ones most closely related to the author's research, and showcase urban elite marriage rituals, both in the matchmaking and actual planning of the ceremony. To the outsider, they will be the most unexpected and enjoyable of the lot. All in all, the stories are a valuable glimpse into modern Syria for the Western reader.