Arab Media & Society

Introduction

An often repeated truism about Arab literature holds that books are written in Cairo, published in Beirut and read in Baghdad.  This is the character of transnational cultural flows in the Arab world, where production, commodification and consumption of a single cultural form may each take place in a different metropolis.  Syria has not often formed a very significant node of modern pan-Arab cultural flows. Yet, if we were to look for the consumption and production centers of Arab television drama, we would find that series are written in Damascus, produced in Damascus, and watched throughout the Arab world, as well as numerous diasporic communities beyond.  This paper examines the rise of Syria’s television drama industry since its expansion during the 1990’s, exploring the transformations.  It argues that the ethnographic approach to Arab television must also change to accommodate the profound transformations wrought by globalization.

Ethnography and Arab Television

Over the past decade, Syria has developed a TV drama industry rivaling that of Cairo, long the center of Arab media production.  Syrian dramatic series have even begun to attract attention from the Western press: Damascus was recently dubbed “Hollywood of the Middle East”, albeit with an ironic question mark, by the Washington Post (Lancaster 1998).  Along with growing international success, local television has become the dominant cultural form in Syria. 

My own recognition of television illustrates the power of the medium. When I arrived in Damascus to begin dissertation fieldwork in late 1992, I had no intention of focusing on media.  My original project looked at the relationship between foodways and social distinction among the different groups living in Damascus.  I had planned to explore the connection between a growing sense of Damascene local identity and a resurgence of interest in “authentic” Damascene foods.  At the beginning of Ramadan, the time of year when showcase television productions are aired, I was advised by Syrians to watch a new 15 episode musalsal, or television miniseries, as it was likely to depict traditional local foodways.  So with an eye to the treatment of food, I watched the first several episodes of Ayyam Shamiyyah, (Damascene Days). 

Witnessing the controversy sparked by the series, I realized that to focus exclusively on food was to treat as tangential much of what was engaging those around me.  And Damascene Days clearly was no tangent.  Indeed, it is difficult to exaggerate the total rapture with which the series gripped Damascus dwellers that holiday season.  Damascene Days was produced by Syrian Arab Television, and aired on one of one of the only two state run channels.  It was one of only a handful of local TV productions broadcast that season.  Its rosy, sanitized, nostalgic depiction of the Old City of Damascus at the turn of the century produced devoted fans, equally fervent detractors, and a range of opinions in between. 

Damascene Days married themes of local authenticity and resistance to foreign occupation. It depicted bygone customs and traditions, and presented them as folklore, didactically.  The recent past was exoticized, truly rendered a foreign country.  The series made for multivocal ethnography, combining formal analysis of the series with reactions from audiences, critics, and cultural producers alike (Salamandra 1998, 2000, 2004).  The series provoked numerous debates, in the press, and in conversation, about Damascus, its people, and their often fraught relations with other Syrians. 

These tensions revolve around the political demise of an old Sunni Muslim urban elite, and its replacement by a peasant regime from an historically stigmatized religious sect: the ^cAlawis.  As in so many cities, an influx of migrants over the past forty years has dwarfed the population of established urbanites.  But in Damascus, those outsiders, formerly subordinate country folk, have become the ruling elite.  It is difficult and dangerous for Syrians to voice opposition to this group, whose very existence the state ideology disavows.  In theory, the Ba^cth Arab socialist project sought to obliterate divisive class, regional and religious difference. In practice, these distinctions have intensified during the forty years of Ba^cth party rule.

While there has been a modest increase in freedom of expression during the late 1990’s and early 200o’s, public, and indeed private expressions of subnational affiliations, remain sensitive.  Through the series Damascene Days, I was able to show how people use television to talk about issues that engage their everyday lives, but are also politically taboo.

The production and consumption of specific television drama series has produced some of the most innovative anthropology on the Middle East of recent years (Abu- Lughod 1993, 1995, 2005; Armbrust 1996).  Yet recent fieldwork in Syria indicates that the ethnographic study of Arab television must now expand beyond the exploration of individual works, for reasons that have to do with transformations within the industry and the wider polity, as well as expanding audience access. 

Themes explored in research of the 1980’s and 1990’s occasionally remerge in recent Syrian drama.   In Ramadan 2001, Damascene Days director Bassam al-Malla has returned to early 20^th century Old Damascus, with the series al-Khawali, (Bygone Days). This series revisited the resistance of an Old Damascene neighborhood against the dastardly Turks, but it also depicted the city’s important role as a gathering spot on the old pilgrimage route to Mecca.  Bygone Days brought back to life many of the same settings and characters that proved so popular—and so contentious—in Damascene Days, yet it did so with a higher production value, filmed not in a studio but in an actual Old Damascene quarter.  Bygone Days reflected the current state of the industry: large-scale production, sophisticated technique, on-location filming.

The Boom

Bygone Days was considered a successful series in 2001 terms. Yet it failed to grip the nation in the way Damascene Days had.  The reasons reflect the transformations wrought by the regionalization.  By 2001, the Syrian mediascape, to borrow Arjun Appadurai’s term, had completely transformed (1990).   Firstly, satellite television access has increased dramatically.  There are no accurate figures for this, for reasons which have to do with the structure of the Syrian state, in which resources are allocated by social networks, via unofficial, quasi-legal channels.  But all industry estimates hold satellite access to be very widespread. 

In addition, Arab satellite TV stations have proliferated, particularly those owned by the wealthy governments and individuals of the Gulf Cooperation Council.  Syrian producers have been at the forefront of those producing material to fill these new outlets.  A move toward economic liberalization in 1991 opened the door to private production companies.  These have proliferated, in the most Syrian of ways: the most successful tend to be owned by individuals with strong links to the regime, most notably son of the vice president.

Increased production and expanded access have obliterated the annual media sensations that once both united the national audience in the act of viewing and responding, and created space for subnational identity expression.  In place of the singular television event of the early 1990’s are an average of twenty-five Syrian musalsalat, aired on numerous terrestrial and Arab satellite stations, both private and public.  One informant recently calculated that a viewer would have to spend 10 hours a day watching TV during Ramadan to get an accurate sense of the drama series on offer. 

Drama, once the centerpiece of Arab production, no longer dominates the primetime, in Ramadan or the rest of the broadcast year.  The musalasal, perhaps the oldest local genre, and the one Syria arguably dominates, now cohabits a televisual torrent of game shows, satirical sketch programs, reality TV, and the news-as-entertainment debate shows offered by Al-Jazeera and its many competitors.  There are more televisual texts and less cultural context.  The kind of ethnography Damascene Days produced is no longer viable.   I argue that this globalization of Syrian television products necessitates a rethinking of how we look at Arab television ethnographically.

The Approach

The expansion of Syrian television presents the ethnographer with a methodological paradox.  Abundant textual material exists for content and reception analyses; but audience fragmentation renders these approaches less fruitful.  Ignoring television is an unhelpful alternative, as the social and political significance of the medium has grown along with the production boom.  To disregard television is to miss what might be gleaned from contemporary Syria’s key cultural institution.

Several factors underlie television’s increasing centrality.  Syria is in many ways a post-literate society.  There are no available readership figures; Syria is not the sort of polity that allows for the production of statistics.  But the numbers recently published for neighboring Lebanon reflect a deep crisis of intellectual life.  For a society in which the word is highly valued and the major forms of expressive culture, until recently, been literary, specifically, poetic, books sales are exceedingly low (Wilson-Goldie 2004).[1] Television has become the dominant public cultural form in the region.