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Situating Tribes in History: Lessons from the Archives and the Social Sciences

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  15 September 2021

Nadav Samin
Nadav Samin*
Affiliation:
Department of History, Catholic University of America, Washington, DCUSA
*
*Corresponding author. E-mail: [email protected]
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Extract

The tribe presents a problem for the historian of the modern Middle East, particularly one interested in personalities, subtleties of culture and society, and other such “useless” things. By and large, tribes did not leave their own written records. The tribal author is a phenomenon of the present or the recent past. There are few twentieth century tribal figures comparable to the urban personalities to whose writings and influence we owe our understanding of the social, intellectual, and political history of the modern Middle East. There is next a larger problem of record keeping to contend with: the almost complete inaccessibility of official records on the postcolonial Middle East. It is no wonder that political scientists and anthropologists are among the best regarded custodians of the region's twentieth century history; they know how to make creative and often eloquent use of drastically limited tools. For many decades, suspicious governments have inhibited historians from carrying out the duties of their vocation. This is one reason why the many rich and original new monographs on Saddam Hussein's Iraq are so important. If tribes are on the margins of the records, and the records themselves are off limits, then one might imagine why modern Middle Eastern tribes are so poorly conceived in the scholarly imagination.

Type
Roundtable
Information
International Journal of Middle East Studies , Volume 53 , Issue 3 , August 2021 , pp. 473 - 476
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Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s), 2021. Published by Cambridge University Press

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References

1 Some examples are Sassoon, Joseph, Saddam Hussein's Baʿth Party: Inside an Authoritarian Regime (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2011)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Khoury, Dina Rizk, Iraq in Wartime: Soldiering, Martyrdom, and Remembrance (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2013)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; original studies by Aaron Faust, Samuel Helfont, and Lisa Blaydes; and, a number of doctoral dissertations in the pipelines.

2 Watha'iq min al-Ghat, ed. Faʾiz b. Musa al-Harbi (Riyadh: Muʾassasat ʿAbd al-Rahman al-Sudayri al-Khayriyya, 2010).

3 E.g., ʿAbd Allah b. ʿAbd al-Rahman al-Bassam, ʿUlamaʾ Najd Khilal Thamaniyat Qurun (Riyadh: Dar al-ʿAsima li-l-Nashr wa-l-Tawziʿ, 1998).

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8 Samin, Nadav, “Daʿwa, Dynasty, and Destiny in the Arab Gulf,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 58, no. 4 (2016): 935–54CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Samin, Nadav, Of Sand or Soil: Genealogy and Tribal Belonging in Saudi Arabia (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2015)Google Scholar.

9 Anderson, Benedict, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 1983)Google Scholar; Evans-Pritchard, E. E., The Nuer: A Description of the Modes of Livelihood and Political Institutions of a Nilotic People (Oxford, UK: Clarendon Press, 1940)Google Scholar.

10 I thank Peter Wien for his clarifying comments here.