Making Do in Damascus: Navigating a Generation of Change in Family and Work

8. Crafting Lives

282 8 Crafting Lives Agency and Resources under Bashar al-Asad We are smelling the food but are still not at the table. —folk saying One of enduring questions in sociology has been how to conceptualize adequately the relationship between social structure and personal agency. Debates in gender studies about structure and agency have evidenced a paradigmatic shift away from social structural explanations of gender difference toward the negotiated and ongoing process of gender construction in the context of interpersonal interaction. This book has sought to bring these two approaches together to demonstrate through the experiences of families in Damascus how the negotiation of gender within and among sets of kin is shaped by state policy and family resources and enacted within a narrative of deeply held moral and religious values around what it means to be a responsible mother, sister, brother, or father and citizen of the state. Emerging out of a long history of colonization and incorporation into ancient and modern empires, Syria established itself in the later part of the twentieth century as a regional power with a strong sense of pan-Arab national identity and Ba‘thist values centering on social equality and security . State support for education and investment in industrial and agricultural production contributed to expanded literacy and job security across a broad range of economic sectors. At the same time, ongoing regional conflict with Israel and US intervention in the region have energized concerns around national security and dampened Syria’s ability to compete Crafting Lives | 283 in a global economy. Recurring electricity shortages, problems with transportation , the rising cost of housing and water, population growth, and rural–urban migration—all exaggerated by the influx of refugees from Iraq—have strained the state’s resources. The security of the regime itself, dominated by ‘Alawites from outside of Damascus, has hung on the ability of Hafiz al-Asad’s younger son to manage tensions between the military, the ‘Alawite leadership established by his father, conservative Islamist groups, and the urban, largely Sunni business elites. For two generations, the resentment of the Sunni majority was held in check by periodic efforts to open the economy, greater latitude for public expressions of popular Islam, and cultivation of a sense of embattlement against the economic, political, and military hegemony of the West and its regional allies. The image of a strong leader and a culture of state paternalism and fear generated by real and rumored imprisonment, disappearance, and disenfranchisement powerfully shape the collective conscience. Managing Resources and Relationships The breakdown of that hegemony in 2011–12 reflected the inevitable failure of a corrupt and paternalistic state to manage and control access to information. What the narratives of families in Damascus reveal is the process of navigating that rapidly changing field with the changing resources at their command. Across two decades of social change, we see women drawing on religious and cultural normative schema of gender dependency to manage resources and relationships in an effort to make space for their lives. The state clearly did much to open access to education , particularly for women in rural areas and for working-class and middle -income urban women whose families would have otherwise limited their spending on education to older sons. Nevertheless, the centrality of security dampened educational reform, and the system has languished from an outdated curriculum, rote learning, and uneven access to information technologies. Within poorer households, children’s ability to finish high school and move on to university studies has been regularly undercut by families’ need for their labor at home. In this paradigm, older girls stay home in order to help mothers with siblings, do piecework, and wait for marriage, 284 | Making Do in Damascus and older boys are likely to drop out in order to take jobs within one of the trades. Within middle-income households, parents continue to be deeply concerned that outdated texts and overcrowded classrooms are poor preparation for an increasingly competitive job market, particularly for sons who will shoulder primary responsibility for families of their own. Sons are encouraged to make as much use of Syria’s educational system that their grades and their family’s wasta and financial resources allow, including enrolling in extra training in computer technology or foreign language. Girls in middle-income households also make investments in education, seeing it as a way to add to the experience and maturity they bring to marriage—at...