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By Lisa Wedeen
In Syria, a dead ringer for President Hafiz al-Asad is all over the place. In newspapers, on tv, and through orchestrated spectacles Asad is praised because the "father," the "gallant knight," even the country's "premier pharmacist." but such a lot Syrians, together with those that create the legit rhetoric, don't think its claims. Why may a regime spend scarce assets on a cult whose content material is patently spurious?
Wedeen concludes that Asad's cult acts as a disciplinary equipment, producing a politics of public dissimulation during which electorate act as if they respected their chief. by way of inundating everyday life with drained symbolism, the regime workouts a sophisticated, but powerful type of strength. The cult works to implement obedience, set off complicity, isolate Syrians from each other, and set instructions for public speech and behaviour. Wedeen's ethnographic learn demonstrates how Syrians realize the disciplinary elements of the cult and search to undermine them. Provocative and unique, Ambiguities of Domination is an important contribution to comparative politics, political conception, and cultural studies.
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Extra info for Ambiguities of Domination: Politics, Rhetoric, and Symbols in Contemporary Syria
Example text
Obviously, Syrian ideologues are not alone in likening political relations to familial ones. Political theorists and ideologues in various historical epochs and places have invoked metaphors of the family to define the terms of political membership. Political narratives often displace the emotionally charged, immediately meaningful relationship of family life onto the more impersonal, remote, and abstract relations between rulers and ruled or among citizens. Or conversely, theorists may make the abstract meaningful by analogizing it to people's concrete, lived experiences.
No one is deceived by the charade, but everyone-even M -is forced to participate in it. " And "real obedience" relies on not believing. The soldiers' participation, however, entails more than an outward manifestation of obedience. As each soldier tries to outdo his predecessor with increasingly exaggerated dreams lauding the leader's supernatural feats, he registers not only his obedience, but also his complicity in perpetuating the cult. To be complicit is to allow oneself to be made an accomplice, to become bound up in the actions and practices the regime promotes.
Insofar as Asad personifies state institutions designed to provide goods and services in return for obedience and allegiance, the metaphor of the father operates to underscore that Asad is like the family patriarch: similar to but bigger, better, and more powerful than one's own father. 48 Implicit in the metaphor of the father is also love and connection between ruler and ruled. Under Asad, it is not uncommon to see slogans, bumper stickers, and spectacles invoking "love" or signifying it with a heart to represent public devotion.