Acting historians: Historicism, memory, and performance among Lebanese former detainees from Syria

Abstract

ABSTRACTThe nascent subfield of the anthropology of history criticizes the historicist bent of Western historiography and calls for attention to alternative historicizing practices, especially non-Western ones. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in Beirut, I argue that former Lebanese and Palestinian detainees held in Syria have developed a range of such practices in order to have their testimonies about their detention taken seriously in Lebanon. Against a background of institutionalized amnesia and deep political and sectarian divisions, the state refuses to treat them as political detainees. Other publics are more sympathetic, but the ability of ex-detainees to persuade them is limited by these audiences’ historicist presuppositions, particularly their expectations that detainees’ accounts rely on a linear chronology with a clear progression from past to present and that detention narratives provide evidence that can be critically compared and corroborated. In this regard they also implicitly reject the model, bequeathed by the Holocaust, of the inarticulate victim as guarantor of a testimony’s authenticity. Consequently, the anthropology of history should resist the temptation to map historicist and non-historicist forms of history onto a West/non-West split.