Middle East Strategy at Harvard

MESH invites selected authors to offer original first-person statements on their new books—why and how they wrote them, and what impact they hope and expect to achieve. Philip Carl Salzman is professor of anthropology at McGill University and a member of MESH. His new book is Culture and Conflict in the Middle East.

From Philip Carl Salzman

Scientifically-inspired anthropology, to which I optimistically but anachronistically adhere, aims not only to describe cultures around the world, but to explain the causes and consequences of particular cultures. It is an immodest goal, perhaps, but a worthy endeavor. Culture and Conflict in the Middle East attempts to explain why, in the Middle East, we so reliably find relentless partisanship, unending conflict, and conscienceless repression of those not holding power.

I argue that a major influence is Arab culture, grounded in Bedouin culture—understanding “culture” as cognitive frames which serve as “models of” the way the world is, and “models for” action in the future. Two major characteristics of Arab culture are particularist group loyalty, and balanced or complementary opposition. These models serve well for decentralized social control and security in segmentary tribal settings, but are uncongenial to inclusive polities and universalistic legal regimes.

This analysis is a vision seen from afar, a long way from my grounded ethnographic field research among the nomadic tribes of Iranian Baluchistan. During the 1960s and 1970s, I lived and carried out research for 26 months mainly but not exclusively among the Yarahmadzai (Shah Nawazi) tribe in the Sarhad highlands and Maskel lowlands. In fact my main research was even more particular than that, as I resided for most of the time with one herding camp of the Dadolzai lineage, although I visited many other camps and some other tribes and settlements. My full report, Black Tents of Baluchistan (Smithsonian, 2000), gives a fairly reliable picture of many aspects of tribal life in the Sarhad.

The challenge was how to draw on a detailed case study to gain a more general understanding of a broad and diverse region; that is, how to base an understanding of the Middle East, and particularly the Arab Middle East, on my study of Iranian tribes in Baluchistan. As the late Clifford Geertz said about his project in Islam Observed, “Merely to state such a program is to demonstrate a certain lack of grasp upon reality. What results can only be too abbreviated to be balanced and too speculative to be demonstrable…. [We] court superficiality and confusion at the same time.”

But I have perhaps misled you in seeming to suggest that I must jump, on my own, from the study of Baluchistan to that of the Middle East. In reality, anthropology, no less than other academic disciplines, is not a solitary, individualistic endeavor. Rather, it is a collective enterprise: we stand on the shoulders of our intellectual ancestors, hone our skills and understandings against our coevals, and draw on the accumulated knowledge of our fellows. So while I depend on my research in Baluchistan for an insight into the workings of tribes, my leap from the Iranian world to the Arab world lands me on a solid foundation of findings by Arabist anthropologists, and beyond them of findings by sociologists, political scientists, literary analysts and other experts, whom I draw upon and quote extensively and shamelessly in the book. Even so, any such synthesis is a stretch, and risky. Yet how else can we reach general understandings?

My argument, that Arab culture influences people’s outlooks and decisions, raises the question how reliably cultural principles are manifested in behavior, in action. The answer is: generally, but not always. Culture is one influence, but there are others; and any culture consists of a variety of principles, not all of which are entirely compatible with all of the others. So the results are more statistical than mechanical; that is, moral norms generate statistical norms, but the tails on the distributions are both morally and statistically abnormal.

Postcolonial theorists, inspired by Edward Said’s Orientalism, take a harder line, arguing that no generalization about the Middle East is valid, because such generalizations suppress the variety and diversity of reality, essentialize where no essence exists, and imposes disparaging interpretations in the service of imperialism and colonialism. But my judgment is that these postcolonial arguments are unsound and without foundation. First, all concepts and categories, without which thinking is impossible, are abstractions, encompassing the many variations of the unique individuals (whether trees, camels, or cultures) included. So abstraction and generalization are not only not the wrong things, they are the only things possible. Second, all peoples and societies are not the same; they are different, and differ significantly. Ignoring these indisputable differences is not good manners; it is ignorance or denial.

It is not news that just about anything significant said about the Middle East will be controversial, or, as we like to say now, contested. In writing this book, I have gone out on a long limb. Some readers will like it, while others will be reaching for their saws. For example, Marwan Kabalan argues that reference to tribalism is simply finding another way to blame Arabs for Western misdeeds. As for other readers, I hope that tough-minded assessments of the evidence will prevail over partisan fervor.

Excerpt | Publisher | Amazon