These nine short stories explore love and loss in contemporary Damascus, as well as the possibilities of writing ethnography as fiction.
Growing out of the author's anthropological fieldwork in Syria, these nine short stories explore love and loss in contemporary Damascus. Available here together for the first time in English, they confound popular stereotypes of Arab women and men as fundamentalists, terrorists, and victims of the Gulf War. In a postscript, "The Pirates' Socks," Lindisfarne discusses why she chose to write about her fieldwork through the medium of fiction, and how writing these stories allowed her to tell truths an academic monograph could not contain. An Arabic edition of Dancing in Damascus was published in Syria in 1997, to considerable acclaim throughout the Arab world.
"In this book we have a new experience: an approach to creative writing that is different, that starts with research and social investigation but transforms the results into a literary text. Although the author is a foreigner--perhaps indeed because she is a foreigner--her observations of social life in Damascus are valuable, especially because she does not engage in touristic or orientalist comment. [She is able] to penetrate to the depths of Syrian life, in the same way as would the best of our local women writers." -- Mamdouh Adwan, poet and playwright, in praise of the Arabic edition
"This book shows women as active agents, not as passive receptors of male actions. In addition, it provides another view of Middle Eastern women in a literature that has been largely focused on Iraq, Egypt, or Morocco." -- Claire R. Farrer, University of California-Chico
Nancy Lindisfarne is Senior Lecturer in the Anthropology of the Arab World at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London. She has done ethnographic fieldwork in Iran, Afghanistan, Turkey, and Syria; has published numerous articles on gender, marriage, and Islam in the Middle East; and has coedited two volumes, Dislocating Masculinity and Languages of Dress in the Middle East. As Nancy Tapper, she is the author of Bartered Brides: Politics, Gender, and Marriage in an Afghan Tribal Society.
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