Please find the complete conference program here.
Immediately following the take-over of Beirut’s central district and elite shopping area by Lebanese opposition groups, a text message circulated among local cellular phones: “A miracle happened yesterday – the statue of Sheikh Riyad al-Solh… raised his hand over his face in disgust, covering his mouth and closing his nose!” Among supporters of the government, a main way to discredit the political demands of the opposition was to emphasize its distastefulness, its lack of aesthetic and civilizational merit. Photographs in pro-government newspapers focused on the eating, leisure, and behavioral habits of the new inhabitants of downtown, presenting non-shoppers and “uncivilized.”
Significantly, such invocations of tastefulness and civilization have not been confined to parties at one end of the political spectrum. In contemporary Arab societies, discourses of taste are a powerful force in everyday interactions, political projects, and social transformations. Because taste seems to be both trivial and natural, as something that is self-evident and therefore irrefutable, it plays a central role in naturalizing and justifying social categories and hierarchies, particularly when wedded to notions of national or high culture or to ideologies of civilizational difference or advancement. The centrality of taste suggests the benefits of using an altogether ignored lens on Arab society: aesthetics.
This workshop aimed to bring together scholars who are increasingly paying attention to how people use discourses of aesthetics to constitute their social positions vis-à-vis other groups, to advance political and economic agendas, and to stake claims on culturally valued resources. We read together foundational anthropological, sociological, art, and philosophical texts and discussed aesthetics as sensual perception or the production of virtuous selves and brought that literature into conversation with studies of the modern Arab world by giving ground to some participants to present current research. The goal was dual: to advance understanding of contemporary Arab societies, and to push the boundaries of current theorizing of aesthetics in political and cultural studies.
While aesthetics tends to be functionalized as an epiphenomenal means by which culturalpolitical structures are reproduced, the contested, heterogeneous, cosmopolitan post-colonial societies of the Arab world today provide a rich arena for exploring aesthetics in action, as social agents in the emergence of new cultural forms. Recent work on aesthetics in media studies has begun to demonstrate the advantage of aesthetics as an analytic that can capture at once ideological and (willfully) unarticulated levels of sociality. This attention to aesthetics brings the materiality of social interactions to the fore, as the very technology that abducts social beings. In particular, the relationship between Arab societies as the peripheries of their metropolitan colonizers (in terms of politics and consumption systems), and Arab societies as key arenas in the global struggle for wealth and dominance should allow a consideration of the importance of aesthetics in situations where belonging and hegemony are unstable yet vital.
Questions to be asked included: what are the different notions of “taste” (dhawq) in Arab societies, and how are they constituted and inculcated in various institutions, from the family to the school to the mosque and church? How do certain discourses of bodily knowing emerge in relationship to particular socio-cultural contexts, such as economic restructuring, struggles for political control, and the rise of public piety? How do embodied notions of aesthetics shape social and political subjectivities in relationship to local and regional struggles and transformations? How might notions of aesthetically justified communities, rather than affirm social hierarchies or align with dominant political projects, be used to disrupt them? These are key questions whose answers will provide an entirely new angle on politics in the Middle East.
In studying cultural categories, Mary Douglas noted that the violation of conceptual boundaries often produces the experience of distaste, sensual repulsion, which in turn produces resistance to the violation of boundaries. For Bourdieu (1984), taste is a culturally and bodily inscribed phenomenon that is key to the reproduction of social hierarchies as connected to politics and economics. These insights suggest that unstable social settings where values and virtues are contested would benefit from analysis of the role of discourses of aesthetics, and their relation to notions of culture and civilization. However, both the scholarship on political-economic tensions and that on the appeal of specific ideologies in politicized struggles have largely ignored the important point that battles are often played out through the idiom of aesthetics and that people are often compelled by concepts of naturalized, bodily values. Research into the emergence of ideas about aesthetics and their instantiation in contemporary social practices is crucial for our understanding of how different groups become attracted to the various political, economic, and social projects that vie for dominance in the Arab world.
This workshop aimed to understand the work that the concept of aesthetics has been made to do in different contexts and to see how this concept has fundamentally shaped contemporary ideologies, subjectivities, and models for social action in contemporary Arab societies. We focused our discussion of aesthetics in three dimensions: institutional projects; consumption practices; and bodily ritual. We have selected these three areas because they are connected to the larger literature on aesthetics in other parts of the world and because these are the areas of vibrant research in the Middle East that would most benefit from a consideration of the important role of aesthetics. We hopeed to bring scholars working in these three areas together to consider the ways in which their research interests overlap, and to bring different theoretical approaches into conversation with one another.
Schedule:
Wednesday, July 14
Consumption Practices
10 am — 10.30 am
Introduction: Kirsten Scheid and Jessica Winegar
10.30 am — 12.00
Reading Session 1 led by Samuli Schielke
Texts: Veblen, Bourdieu, Meneley, and Steiner (De Koning optional)
1.30 pm — 3 pm
Research Presentation by Mona Harb (& Lara Deeb), "Taste and Aesthetics in/of the Pious Leisure Industry in Beirut"
3.30 pm — 5 pm
Research Presentation by Katrin Bromber, "'Hyperreality' as conceptual gateway to understand iconographic trends in the Gulf Region"
Thursday, July 15
Institutional Projects
10 am — 11.30 am
Reading Session 2 led by Jessica Winegar
Texts: Foucault, Rancière, and Abu-Lughod
11.45 am — 1.15 pm
Research Presentation by Sonali Pahwa, "Theatres of Citizenship: Performance and Identity in Globalized Egypt”
2.45 pm — 4.15 pm
Research Presentation by Chiara De Cesari, "Cultural Governmentality Through Heritage: The Palestinian Biennale and Defiant Arts of Government"
Friday, July 16
Bodily Ritual
10 am — 11.30 am
Reading Session 3 led by Kirsten Scheid
Texts: Csordas, Howes and Classen, Porcello et al, Allen and Hamdy (Peterson optional)
11.30 am — 1 pm
Research Presentation by Jonathan Shannon, "Slow Turning, Fast Music: Consuming Syrian Sufi Music"
2 pm — 3.30 pm
Research Presentation by Deborah Kapchan, "At-tariqa as-sufiyya, attariqa al-jamaliyya, Sufi Order/Order(s) of Beauty: Re-Orienting the Body through Song and Sense"
4 pm
Concluding remarks by Ghassan Hage