“We come here and cry!” Emotion, trade and urban identity in pre-conflict Aleppo

Cambridge (to the Heritage Research Group, Department of Archaeology, 24 November) last week.

This paper discusses the importance that Aleppine merchants and shopkeepers in pre-conflict Syria (2009) attached to emotional sensitivity, both as a way of demonstrating moral sincerity and as a way of cultivating relationships capable of enduring across time and space. “Emotionality” was a valued form of male personhood and central to local conceptions of identity ranging from the urban to the national and pan-national. I will explore the way that performances and narrations of emotional authenticity interacted with other symbols of cultural authenticity, to enable Aleppine merchants to make claims about urban identity at a time of weakening Baathist nationalism.

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One evening in Aleppo in 2009, I attended a small gathering at one of the houses – something of a bachelor pad – of a Hamdi Sujail, a wealthy manufacturer and exporter of mattresses and stuffed blankets. I had gone there with Abu Zaki, an occasional importer of industrial spare parts, imitation jewellery from China and luxury goods such as massage chairs. Abu Zaki also worked as a broker for large textile deals, and regularly cultivated the company of wealthy industrialists like Hamdi. He referred to this as making relations (sawi ‘alaqat), and told me he was “always working”. In the mornings and afternoons, he would drive around Aleppo visiting factories and shops, renewing acquaintances, dropping in for a chat, a joke, and an anecdote or two. Many evenings he spent with friends and business acquaintances in arenas of leisure such as restaurants, hotel lobbies, cafes in upmarket shopping malls, and private homes. The “evening gathering”, al-sahra in Arabic, was central to his practice of cultivating and sustaining of networks of trust and mutual obligation. He credited it with the development of his career as a freelance accountant, another of his professions. He said “staying up” (sahranin) with business friends and acquaintances was how he “went from working with one company to working with seven”.

Abu Zaki was also a poet and was able to recite from memory both his own work and several lengthy passages from a shared cultural repertoire of classical Arabic verse...

By team member 
Dr Paul Anderson, Cambridge University