FIELD SONGS

Duration: November 2021 - January 2023

Funding Scheme: AHRC Follow-on fund: creative economy for sustainable development

Principal Investigator: Prof Lisa Boden

The Challenge

Conflict not only displaces people and destroys material heritage sites; it also disrupts unwritten cultural practices and oral, community-based intergenerational knowledge transmission. Pre-war Syria, once the “bread basket” of the Middle East, had a rich and diverse cultural heritage around agricultural production. However, rural areas have been heavily affected by displacement, with many former farmers seeking refuge in neighbouring Middle Eastern countries. Existing research points to the fragmentation of Syrian community networks in sites of refuge because of displacement and economic pressures. There is a real risk that expert knowledge held by agricultural communities will be lost. However, researchers have to broaden their understanding of what this knowledge might look like: displaced communities’ musical practices, especially traditional harvesting songs, should be considered intangible cultural heritage (ICH), and an important vector of embodied, communal, and practical knowledge about agriculture. This project explores the following question:

How can the intangible cultural heritage of displaced Syrian agricultural communities, notably traditional harvesting songs, become the basis of collective actions for an innovative approach to sustainable development in Middle Eastern host countries and Syria?

WITH THE SICKLE AND SONGS - Documentary

Drawing on fieldwork and workshops with Syrian farmers in Turkey and northern Syria in 2022, this documentary portrays the ongoing relevance of (agri)cultural heritage for Syrian refugees in Turkey, and for the future of sustainable agriculture in the Middle East.

Research Aims

The FIELD SONGS project is a multidisciplinary collaboration between veterinary public health/One Health specialists and anthropologists from the University of Edinburgh, and Syrian-led organisations with expertise in agricultural science and the arts and humanities: Syrian Academic Expertise and Douzan Art & Culture, both located in Gaziantep, southern Turkey. The project is funded by an AHRC Follow-on fund to maximize the impact of the creative economy on sustainable development, coming from the UKRI Arts and Humanities Research Council in the United Kingdom.

The FIELD SONGS project will document a specific form of Syrian refugee expertise - the intangible cultural heritage (ICH) of Syrians from agricultural backgrounds - and explore how refugee ICH can inform development policies in Middle Eastern host countries and in Syria. The project’s premise is that recording refugees’ traditional harvesting songs can be a way of tapping into embodied, communal, “unwritten” agricultural knowledge that is currently absent from policymakers’ and humanitarians’ intervention plans. Building on our partnerships with Syrian academics, practitioners, and agricultural communities in the Middle East, as well as on ethnographic insights from our previous projects, this research revolves around two in-person ICH workshops with Syrian farmworkers and Syrian musicians in Gaziantep, Turkey. The goal of these workshops is for participants to perform and record harvesting songs together, and document traditional forms of food production, manufacturing, and consumption. The recordings will be shared through a digital archive, to be hosted on Douzan’s Notah website. The digital archive will be central to safeguarding refugee ICH and making it available to displaced Syrian communities worldwide. Workshop recordings, together with ethnographic data from short-term fieldwork at refugees’ agricultural worksites in Turkey, will also inform a short ethnographic documentary, to be hosted on our team’s One Health FIELD Network’s and SAE’s websites. The documentary will be an important outreach tool targeted at decision-makers and humanitarian actors in Turkey and internationally. We will use our findings to advocate that mainstreaming Syrian agricultural expertise and ICH can improve refugee labour market integration in Middle Eastern host countries now, and will prove vital to sustainable and locally-informed post-conflict reconstruction efforts of Syrian agriculture in the future.

Anticipated Outcomes and Impact

Unlocking the potential of refugees’ intangible cultural heritage for sustainable development in the Middle East

As our SyrianFoodFutures, From The FIELD, and Refugee Labour under Lockdown projects have documented, many Syrian refugees end up as day labourers in volatile agricultural labour markets, and NGO-led vocational trainings seldom lead to jobs because of the mismatch between training contents and refugees’ actual levels of expertise. At the same time, ongoing conflict and displacement impede the reconstruction of agriculture in Syria itself. The FIELD SONGS project will reformulate the question: instead of treating Syrian refugees as “aid beneficiaries” and people in need of further upskilling, how could development action mainstream their agricultural expertise and ICH into policy-making? This project will contribute to the 2021 UN International Year of Creative Economy for Sustainable Development through unlocking the potential of refugee ICH for improving refugees’ labour market integration in Turkey, and for sustainable and community-led post-conflict reconstruction of Syrian agriculture: documenting refugee ICH can help recover locally appropriate ways of food production, manufacturing, and consumption, for development policy. The project actualises the UN’s “leave no-one behind” agenda by focusing on communities who are triply marginalised: as refugees in Middle Eastern host countries which do not grant them full refugee protection; as workers in the informal agricultural sector; and as objects of public and humanitarian discourse which frames them as a liability, not as an asset, for development. Through the ICH workshops, we will document the cultural and regional diversity of agricultural traditions, and the role of women and elders as knowledge bearers. The ultimate impacts of the project will be:

• FIRST, for displaced Syrian farmworkers in Turkey, the ICH workshops will extend cultural heritage participation to a marginalised group. The workshops and the digital archive will preserve their ICH, facilitate inter-generational knowledge exchange, and strengthen social cohesion among displaced Syrian communities.

• SECOND, displaced Syrian academics and practitioners in Turkey will benefit from the research through developing new formats of community engagement, building expertise in documenting, archiving, and sharing Syrian ICH, and acquiring new advocacy tools (archive, documentary).

• THIRD, our findings will provide evidence to human rights organisations, policymakers and donors in Turkey and internationally about how to factor refugee ICH into short- and more long-term development programming. Decision-makers will gain access to a previously untapped network of diverse Syrian technical and cultural expertise from a specific refugee demographic: Syrian agricultural workers. This should improve opportunities for co-construction of locally-compatible interventions and diminish risks of long-term unintended consequences on agriculture. In the short-term, we will use our findings to advocate with policymakers in the Middle East for the acknowledgement of Syrians’ contribution to host countries’ economies, and for extending their protection as refugees and as agricultural workers. Research findings can help address the problem of exploitative refugee labour in agriculture, e.g. through more targeted vocational trainings for Syrian refugees, and through documenting agricultural traditions that could form the basis of successful entrepreneurship in host countries. In the longer term, mapping out refugee ICH will prove central to revitalising agricultural production in post-conflict Syria. Our partner SAE already runs small-scale community-led agricultural projects with internally displaced Syrians in northern Syria, and findings will directly inform its future trainings.

Principal and Co Investigators

Partners

The Team