Collections électroniques de l’Ifpo http://ifpo.revues.org Les publications de l’Ifpo assurent la diffusion et la valorisation des recherches menées au sein des territoires scientifiques investis par l’Institut dans les société du Proche-Orient (la Syrie, le Liban, la Jordanie, les territoires palestiniens, l’Iraq) dans l'ensemble des disciplines des sciences humaines et sociales depuis l'antiquité jusqu'à nos jours. Le site des collections électroniques de l'Institut français du Proche-Orient offre une sélection d'ouvrages scientifiques accessibles en ligne en texte intégral, en libre accès. Lodel 0.8 Changing Perceptions of Marriage in Contemporary Beirut http://ifpo.revues.org/index458.html Demographers have drawn our attention to the increase of celibacy, the reduction of the age difference between the partners and the fluctuations in divorce rates in the contemporary Middle East. Nevertheless, few anthropologists have focused on these changes and on the implications of these changes on social relationships and on marriage in particular. The study of kinship and marriage is a very old subject in anthropology. New approaches have developed away from genealogies and the study of kinship terms and a whole new approach has emerged under the influence of questions raised by new phenomena such as gay marriage, one parent families etc. mainly focusing on the US and Europe.In studies focusing on the Middle East there is still a strong tendency to approach the subject from the perspective of gender relations and patriarchy, often shaped and redefined under the influence of feminist perspectives and women studies. The main focus, however, remains on power relations, on social hierarchy and ranking, on reproduction of gender roles and gender ideology. For Lebanon, interest in these subjects has come mainly from sociologists who adopted the feminist perspective. Azza Baydoun focused on the changing perceptions of femininity and masculinity, Marie-Thérèse Khair Badawi on the sexuality of educated Maronite women and Nadia Samaha and Irène Lorfing on the increasing presence of women on the labour market. Nevertheless, Omar points out that “while the patterns and (...)jc.peyssard@ifporient.org (Barbara Drieskens) Fri, 25 Sep 2009 00:00:00 +0200 http://ifpo.revues.org/index458.html Mariage tardif et célibat au Moyen-Orient : quels enjeux ? http://ifpo.revues.org/index459.html Les comportements de nuptialité ont connu des changements importants dans les pays du monde arabe et du Moyen-Orient : depuis la fin des années 1970, on y observe un net déclin de l’âge moyen au premier mariage, puis l’émergence d’un niveau significatif de célibat probablement définitif, en particulier chez les femmes. Ce phénomène apparaît aux yeux de certains analystes comme un simple fait, une question à traiter par les décideurs politiques : selon Rashad et Osman par exemple, « ces changements [dans les paramètres de la nuptialité] induisent de nombreux effets, suscitant notamment la formation de groupes sociaux aux besoins spécifiques et aux nouvelles préoccupations. » Néanmoins, au cours des années 1990, les premières révélations de l’émergence de ces phénomènes dans plusieurs pays de la région ont déclenché un brûlant débat populaire. En ce tournant du siècle, le célibat est devenu l’une des principales cibles tant de l’action que de l’opinion publique, le phénomène apparaissant comme une source majeure de dysfonctionnement social. De nombreux organismes publics et privés œuvrent même aujourd’hui à concevoir et à mettre en œuvre des mesures destinées à promouvoir le mariage, notamment des ONG gérées par des mouvements islamistes.Ce chapitre propose des éléments d’explication à l’émoi populaire et politique suscité par ce retard des mariages et par l’émergence du célibat au Moyen-Orient. Dans (...)jc.peyssard@ifporient.org (Françoise De Bel-Air) Fri, 25 Sep 2009 00:00:00 +0200 http://ifpo.revues.org/index459.html La corniche des célibataires http://ifpo.revues.org/index450.html Juillet 2007. Je rencontre Smaïn, vingt ans, sur la corniche nord de Tyr, bourdonnante d’activité en ce début de soirée d’été. On discute un peu. Il me raconte que sa sœur Taghrid, partie vivre en Allemagne il a y quelques années après son mariage avec ibn khâlita (son cousin parallèle matrilatéral), est en vacances ici. Bonne nouvelle, lui dis-je : j’avais fait une interview avec sa mère Fatmé il y a plus d’un an, et elle m’avait expliqué que les ponts étaient coupés entre elle et sa fille suite à une brouille compliquée dans la génération des aînés concernant l’usage d’un abri à Jal al-Baher, le groupement palestinien bédouin où Fatmé vit à la périphérie nord de Tyr. Pas seulement entre elle et sa fille, d’ailleurs, mais aussi entre elle et son fils Hassan, qui vit de même en Allemagne : Taghrid et Hassan sont respectivement mariés avec le fils et la fille de la sœur de Fatmé – sur le papier, un cas de badal, ou mariage par échange, quoique le terme ait pratiquement disparu du langage quotidien – et la brouille des aînés s’était propagée à distance dans la famille. Bonne nouvelle, donc, dis-je à Smaïn, parce que la douleur de sa mère était palpable pendant notre entretien sur le sujet. Il me remercie, dit qu’il va transmettre mes salutations, et que je devrais passer à la maison dans tous les cas, pour voir un peu l’ordinateur portable qu’il vient de s’acheter et qu’il essaie de connecter au (...)jc.peyssard@ifporient.org (Sylvain Perdigon) Fri, 25 Sep 2009 00:00:00 +0200 http://ifpo.revues.org/index450.html Introduction : sur le mariage http://ifpo.revues.org/index444.html Élément constitutif des sociétés humaines, le mariage en est aussi l’une des plus vieilles institutions. Se transformant sans cesse au cours du temps, évoluant au gré des époques et des contextes, sa définition est suffisamment large pour s’accommoder d’une myriade de variantes individuelles et de significations, exprimant de manière différenciée les multiples façons qu’ont les individus de se retrouver autour d’un même projet : fonder une famille.Les changements rapides qu’ont connus les sociétés du Moyen-Orient, aussi bien sur le plan socio-économique que du point de vue des idées, des conceptions du monde et des idéaux – rattachés à ce contexte fluctuant et largement influencés par un contact prolongé avec les conceptions d’autres sociétés –, ont profondément modifié la manière dont le mariage était représenté, perçu et pratiqué. À tel point que de plus en plus de jeunes gens s’interrogent sur la pertinence du mariage, se demandant s’il ne devrait pas y avoir différentes manières pour un homme et une femme, mais aussi – des voix s’élèvent, bien que plus timides – pour deux hommes ou deux femmes, de vivre ensemble.Le mariage reste pourtant la norme dominante dans les sociétés moyen-orientales étudiées dans le présent ouvrage. Il existe toutefois un phénomène crucial, dont l’importance croissante n’a cessé d’attirer l’attention des chercheurs aussi bien que des décideurs politiques : la (...)jc.peyssard@ifporient.org (Barbara Drieskens) Fri, 25 Sep 2009 00:00:00 +0200 http://ifpo.revues.org/index444.html Chapter 3: Why status matters: Contractual settlements and propertyrights in light of their transaction costs http://ifpo.revues.org/index574.html “The old should be left to its perennial character [al-qadīm yutrak ‘ala qidameh]” (Majalla, article 6)“The essence of speech is in its literal meaning [al-aṣl fi-l-kalām al-ḥaqīqa]” (Majalla, article 12)In any society relationships of different types could be conceptualized as contractual. Only few, however, might have the legal “equivalent” of a contract, meaning that in cases of conflict or litigation, an action could be brought to the corresponding legal authorities. But many contractual relationships, however, do not have an “equivalent” of a legal recognition either, in the form of a statute, code, or a similar codified material. There are several reasons why such a discrepancy might arise, but probably the most common has to do with the fact that legal formulas have to be “invented” first—invention ought to be taken very strongly, as an act of radical imagination, one that involves all the creative forces of the imaginary. In effect, the invention of a formula—or a “type-contract”—that fits within a particular legal order is no easy matter, especially in that it takes several generations of testing and experimentation before a formula or code “fits” well within the system and meets the needs of society. It was, indeed, for this very reason, that once the Fertile Crescent and the rest of the Ottoman Empire had been associated to a quasi-mercantile economy whose requirements were monetary transactions and contractual (...)jc.peyssard@ifporient.org Mon, 22 Jun 2009 00:00:00 +0200 http://ifpo.revues.org/index574.html Chapter 10: Hanafi practice and sultanic ordinances: Which normative rules did finally prevail? http://ifpo.revues.org/index587.html In all the adjudicative practices encountered thus far, whether in the form of individual chapters, sections, or epistles in the fiqh manuals, or fatwās, or the adjudication of the sharī‘a courts, a process had begun to unravel. Opinions were always selected from a handful of authoritative sources from the madhhab, based upon their need for a specific purpose. Those opinions were typically decontextualized from their original sources, as there was no effort deployed to understand an opinion in the context of its text of origin. What in fact provided meaning to a set of opinions was, on the one hand, their relations to one another, and the assessment that they are able to provide on the specific matter they were chosen for, on the other. In other words, the aim was not to understand an author, his œuvre, or even a specific text of his, as much as to use one or more of his opinions in conjunction with other “similar” opinions—all with the sole purpose for adjudicating on a contemporary issue. Opinions thus behaved like codes that scholars simply “found” suitable for a particular matter at hand; and besides their immediate usefulness, it was their association with totemic figures of the past that ensured their respectability. What really mattered then was less the body of textual evidence itself, and more how those texts were grouped together and interpreted, and how their meaning, through analogical reasoning, was associated with the case in question (or a (...)jc.peyssard@ifporient.org Mon, 22 Jun 2009 00:00:00 +0200 http://ifpo.revues.org/index587.html Chapter 11: The phantom of the victimand the triangle of debt http://ifpo.revues.org/index588.html They looked. Murderer’s ground. It passed darkly. Shuttered, tenantless, unweeded garden. Whole place gone to hell. Wrongfully condemned. Murder. The murderer’s image in the eyes of the murdered. They love reading about it. Man’s head found in a garden. Her clothing consisted of. How she met her death. Recent outrage. The weapon used. Murderer still at large. Clues. A shoelace. The body to be exhumed. Murder will out. (James Joyce, Ulysses, p.102 of the 1971 Penguin edition.)Fiction is the perfect crimeA man rushes out from a house with a knife in his hand, he is covered with blood, moving swiftly, and signs of fear are visible [ẓāhir] [on his face.] People then entered the house immediately at that time, and found a slaughtered human being at the same time [bi-dhalika al-ḥīn] who was stained with his own blood. And there was no one in the house except that person who was [leaving and] caught in that situation: he becomes a suspect [yu’khadh bi-hi] since there are visible indications [huwa ẓāhir] [of his culpability.] No one would dare [lā yajtarī aḥad] claiming that he did not kill [the man in the house], and assume that the dead person slaughtered himself, or some other man [other than the suspected one] killed him, then climbed the wall, and ran away. That is a remote possibility which is not acceptablebecause it was not created by some evidence [dalīl] such as the possibility that the witnesses might have lied.This passage, by a leading Egyptian (...)jc.peyssard@ifporient.org Mon, 22 Jun 2009 00:00:00 +0200 http://ifpo.revues.org/index588.html Epilogue: Society as text: the infernal cycle of credit and debt http://ifpo.revues.org/index589.html Our approach has opted for a micro-analysis of texts. By giving priority to text as such—any text for that matter, no matter what its institutional origins might have been—a descriptive analysis of social relations is achieved through the notion of society-as-text. Such a cinematographic and psychoanalytic approach deliberately selects from the massive amount of available texts the ones that will receive that privileged close scrutiny. A process of juxtaposition, montage, and collage of texts therefore follows, one that would give us a descriptive analysis of the social through its own languages and grammars. The notion of society-as-text therefore pushes us towards representations of the social through different angles, analytical tools, prisms, temporalities and styles, and lights and shadows.The scope of this study has been to rethink social and economic relations within a textual anthropology, prior to rooting the socio-economic into a legal nexus of relations involving contractual settlements, property rights, and the transaction costs allocated to bargain for, negotiate, and secure (mostly status) contracts. Anthropology proves crucial in describing pre-modern systems in terms of its kin groups, formal and informal networks of violence and vengeance, and the institutions that monopolize violence and act in lieu of a weakly implemented state power. The socio-economic history of the Ottoman Empire mostly assumes the existence of commodities in terms of their cost of (...)jc.peyssard@ifporient.org Mon, 22 Jun 2009 00:00:00 +0200 http://ifpo.revues.org/index589.html Chapter 8: The language of judges and the performance of speech acts http://ifpo.revues.org/index584.html Thus far, our main assumption has been that court records, despite all difficulties and problems, are worthy of examination on their own, that is, as totalities endowed with their own intrinsic meaning. On the one hand, court documents could not be approached without the prior assumption that their drafting, at least in the eyes of the qāḍīs and scribes who did the work of putting together the different pieces of the puzzle, has an internal logic of its own. This logic is purely “textual” in the sense that it is the document-as-text that holds the arguments together. In other words, the persons who drafted these documents did so on the basis that they made sense to them: they knew what they were doing, and it is this “knowledge” of drafting documents that “we,” as modern observers, would like to capture. But, on the other hand, despite the fact that court documents are totalities in themselves, their “meaning” is not to be found in the text itself but is always “outside” the space of the document—in relation to other discursive formations. Such an approach thus claims, first, that it is not enough to pull out at random “facts” and “data” from court documents (an approach common to social historians and which could be described as “positivist”); second, that to consider a document-as-text and to study the meaning of its key words and sentences and the way “it all fits together” as a discursive/textual construction is only a first step (...)jc.peyssard@ifporient.org Fri, 19 Jun 2009 00:00:00 +0200 http://ifpo.revues.org/index584.html Glossary http://ifpo.revues.org/index585.html ‘āda, habitālat al-qatl, tool-of-killingālat ḥādda, sharply edged tool, considered enough for Ḥanafīs to determine intentional killing‘āqila, “professional milieu” of a culprit charged of homicide, and which might be requested by court action for a partial or total payment of the blood moneya‘yān, s. ‘ayn, notables (in pl.), also tangible objects (s. or pl.)abūkāt, from the French avocat, lawyer; introduced by the second half of the nineteenth century due to the nonexistence of professional lawyers prior to that periodadab al-qāḍī, the rules of judicial decision making‘adam, the nonexistence of a thingaḥyā, to cultivate a land that was left over as mawātahālī, ahl, people of a localityajnabī, foreign, someone outside the agnatic group per seajzā’, bodily parts, or more generally, fragmentsal-milla al-rāfiḍa, “the confession of refusal,” meaning the Shī‘īs‘amār, buildings, built area either in the city or countryside‘amd, intentional killingamr, orderamwāl al-aytām, funds of orphansamwāl amīriyya, taxes and surtaxes due to the stateankara, to denyarḍ, landarḍ-u al-kharāj, land subject to the kharāj (q.v.) taxarshad, the most “mature” among all beneficiaries‘aṣaba, kin, agnation, consanguinity, blood relationship‘aṣabiyya, group feelingaṣl, essence‘ashīra, clanawāmir sulṭāniyya, sultanic orders, ordinances‘ayn, pl. a‘yān, tangible object, and in its plural form the notables of a (...)jc.peyssard@ifporient.org Fri, 19 Jun 2009 00:00:00 +0200 http://ifpo.revues.org/index585.html