Customer Reviews

Syrian Episodes: Sons, Fathers, and an Anthropologist in Aleppo

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This is truly a superb book. A must for all those interested in Syria, the Middle East, Islam, and the encounter with other. John Borneman is a keen observer and an original reader of his surrounding. The book consists of a series of encounters that take place during his stay in Aleppo, one of the most ancient and sophisticated city in the Arab world (Syria). Borneman analyzes social interactions, focusing on the relation between politics, economics, family relations, and sexual desire. All come together in this beautifully written book that transports us to a different world while enabling us to see and understand it. This work is for those who are willing to accompany the anthropologist on his quest for meaning as he meanders through cultural difference and the various subtleties that provide a place and a people with their identity. The book is thoroughly self-reflexive, constantly interrogating the limits of knowledge while keenly reproducing fascinating encounters that place us at the center of the experience.

An anthropological study of Aleppo is such a novelty that I could not wait to get my hands on the book.
The preface is a quick introduction to the modern Syrian political and cultural scene with a couple of useful analytical insights on how an anthropologist/ethnographer approaches his subjects : "...how in our encounters, do expectations and counterexpectations shape the questions we ask each other and the dynamics of our interaction?"
This and similar methodological and analytical questions should be kept in mind as one starts reading the Episodes themselves....otherwise, one runs the risk of being caught in a series of interactions which though entertaining at times, they become at some point superficial and pointless unless tightly framed within the research project of the author.
The coda is excellent in pulling together the material anew, giving sense and extracting meaning from the scattered episodes.
The author repeatedly stresses the necessity for the anthropologist to maintain ambiguity in the interpersonal encounter to allow for the unfolding of an unscripted interaction and he does practice that ambiguity. On another level, one is never completely in control of the elements one is projecting in the encounter, the author's polymorphous gender orientation may very well have been projected outside his own volition and must have in fact affected the way his interactions proceeded.
Although hinted at here and there, I missed a deeper analysis of the meaning of the author's foreigness/otherness in those encounters. Placed as the Episodes are against the backdrop of the American war in Iraq, the author favored the analysis of the meaning of his Americannness, as an assertive dominant otherness, in the encounters, over the meaning of his Otherness/Foreigness on every level- from physical to intellectual and religious- which in my assesment, affects the encounter with men and women from the Muslim culture- be they practicing Muslims or non-Muslims-very deeply and is revealed only to the experienced eye.
In all, well worth-reading.

It appears that many people, espcially those in the academic world thought highly of this book, however I didn't like Borneman's approach to his study. He was too biased by his homosexuality to objectively evaluate his research. Many of his encounters had inferences of sexuality. His conclusions about a son's reliance on his father were very thought-provoking both in terms of individual relationships and the relationship of Syrians to their leader Assad, but he put too much about himself and his feelings in the book. The book would have been much better if he had kept his personal sexual life out of it.