Among the Jasmine Trees: Music and Modernity in Contemporary Syria (review)

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: 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 Syrian music back to the golden age of Levantine culture. Chapter Two intro-intoduces a key concept that the author elaborates upon in each chapter: authenticity. Holt Shannon relates how while in the past, authenticity signified "genuineness," "rootedness, 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 cultural heritage, which 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. 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 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.

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, two ethnographic incidents are extremely compelling examples of the difficulties and pleasures involved in conducting anthropological fieldwork.

The first incident relates the author's 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 Holt Shannon's 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 informant, Holt Shannon deftly returns us to Adorno—but at a price, for the absence of engagement with the...