Among the
Jasmine Trees: Music and Modernity in
Contemporary Syria
by Jonathan
Shannon
Wesleyan University Press, Middletown,
CT, 2006
292 pp. illus. 24 b/w. Trade, $40
ISBN: 0-8195-6798-1.
Reviewed by Jonathan
Zilberg
Jakarta Institute of the Arts
Among the Jasmine Trees is a hauntingly
beautiful example of all that is best
in contemporary anthropology and ethnomusicology
and their mutual nexus with performance
studies and ideas of embodied knowledge.
It is also an important book for those
interested in ethnographic studies of
the contemporary Arab world and of how
cultural heritage is being used to express
alternative forms of modernity that draw
on sentiment and emotion.
Chapter One introduces the reader to Aleppo,
where the study was conducted. It relates
why Aleppo is a critical site for studying
tarab music in that it has long
been seen as the cradle of traditional
Arab music and tarab music itself
is seen as a quintessentially Arabic tradition
connecting contemporary Syriac music back
to the Golden age of Levantine culture.
Chapter Two introduces the key concept
to which the author will elaborate upon
in each chapter authenticity. Holt
Shannon relates how while in the past,
authenticity signified "genuineness",
"rootedeness, fixedness, permanence,
and lineage" today its meaning has
shifted such that modernity has become
the essence of authenticity. The shock
of modernity has led to a revival in which
alternative modernities are emerging through
the creative use of their cultural heritage
that involves the construction, performance,
and contestation of musical authenticity.
Accordingly, Chapters Three, Five and
Six focus on different aspects of authenticity
in tarab music. While Chapter Three
focuses on the role of history, cultural
memory and the emotions in the construction
of authenticity, Chapter Five focuses
on what constitutes an authentic performance
and how authenticity is performed and
Chapter Six focuses on the relationship
between sentiment and authenticity in
tarab music. The intervening chapter,
Chapter Four, examines the all important
Dhikr ceremony which is a ritual
invocation and remembrance of God and
which is especially important for understanding
the historical roots of "authentic"
Arab music as well as for engaging the
notion of body memory which is of central
importance to this study and the music
itself. All in all then, this is very
much a study of authenticity and is, I
believe, currently the most detailed case
study of authenticity to be found in the
ethnographic literature.
In doing so, the study succeeds admirably
in showing how musical authenticity is
imagined, constructed, performed, embodied,
and contested. It closely examines the
genealogy of the key terms authenticity,
heritage, and modernity in the Arab world
and provides a nuanced study of the different
uses of origins in constructing alternative
narratives of authenticity. It also provides
a convincing account of how Syrian musicians
are engaged in a project of performing
and imagining an alternative modernity
that emphasizes emotion over rationality.
In all this, there are two ethnographic
incidents that are extremely compelling
examples of the difficulties and pleasures
involved in conducting anthropological
fieldwork.
The first incident relates his search
for dhikr, his difficulties in
getting invited to such a performance,
and the virtually mystical way in which
he eventually experienced it. In this
it is a classic example of the strength
of humanistic anthropology to leave the
reader with the experience of having been
there and having come to understand something
of the dare I say "authentic"
Other. The second incident involves his
personal experience of embodied knowledge
in which through the inexplicable failure
of his recording equipment, he came to
have a deep emotional experience of just
how important embodied knowledge is, of
how it is "written on the back of
the heart". For all this,
and more, this study certainly deserved
the Kerr Award, but there is a major problem
at hand as regards the anthropology of
authenticity.
Holt Shannon reveals how contemporary
Syrian artists consider authenticity as
a negative aesthetic and how it is a fundamentally
important determinant of their musical
experience in which the authentic is always
opposed to the inauthentic. In this, at
the behest of his informants advice,
Holt Shannon deftly returns us to Adorno
but at a price for the absence
of engagement with the anthropological
research on authenticity is stunning.
It will be fascinating to see how anthropologists
invested in authenticity in such different
ways to Sholt Hannon will respond to this
work.
It is above all fascinating to see how
Shannon is so deeply committed to Sapirs
and Adornos ideas that have been
so thoroughly rejected in post- modernist
anthropology and cultural studies. One
possible reason for this is that the study
ultimately relies on an essentialist conception
of authenticity as a negative aesthetic.
In this, Holt Shannons intellectual
inheritance lies within the classical
tradition of Theodore Adornos The
Jargon of Authenticity (1973), Edward
Sapirs Adorno-esque notion of the
"genuine" versus the "spurious",
Lionel Trillings important work
Sincerity and Authenticity (1972)
and Suzanne Langers all important
study Feeling and Form (1953).
Drawing on subsequent ethnomusicological
studies which engage the topic of authenticity,
the axioms on authenticity developed in
anthropology are nevertheless all sensitively
evoked. These include the constructivist
and emergent nature of reality, the importance
of discourse, the nature of culture as
fractured and contested, the invention
of tradition, and the importance of ambiguity,
contradiction and paradox in which all
that was considered as formerly solid
has melted into air.
Despite this fundamental contradiction,
this study, perhaps, deserves to become
a classic of early 21st century
ethnography. Herein, we see how intellectuals
and musicians reflect upon and theorize
the imagined tension between the present
and the past and the ways in which different
subject positions deploy and experience
the notion of the authentic versus the
inauthentic. Though it will be interesting
to see how anthropologists working on
authenticity react to it having been so
utterly left out of the equation, it will
be more interesting still to see how Arab
intellectuals respond to this work and
how Muslim tarab audiences in Africa
and Asia respond to it in terms of its
silence on how Syrian women and the rest
of the Islamic world experience tarab.