قولبة «السوري» في لبنان، والقولبة العربية

“Stereotyping the ‘Syrian’ in Lebanon”, Arab Stereotyping

LAU, Beirut November 6-9 2001.

Intro: prejudice, stereotyping, racism and violence

– about the survey

– in its simplest definitions, stereotyping is casting in an unvarying form or pattern individuals or groups this casting becomes a fixed notion of a person and group held by a number of people allowing no individuality or critical judgement. stereotyping = an obstacle to real knowledge, replaces it by self-satisfaction by the stereotyping community and a sense of superiority.

– In our case, to stereotype means, first of all, to fix the group/community as an individual, al-suri, implies the reduction of 18 million people to an individual. Now the group can be cast as one individual.

– This tradition of individuation goes back to the war period. In fact, it was the phalangist leader Bashir Jumayyel who first named the collective by the individual term: the falastini, the suri. Later, the whole political class carried after him: the suri did this; the suri did that; what does the suri want; I tell you the suri is behind it, who else? etc.

– Meaning of this reduction: the characteristics of the one applicable to all; and conversely those of all to the one.

1.

– nationalism as a form of differentiation and hierarchization

– political (relations of power), cultural, class

– variations of stereotyping of the syrian

1. i) the worker
2. ii) the security service man

iii) the street vendor, more particularly, the kaa’k vendor

the amalgam between security service men mukhabaraat and kaak vendors is exemplified in many an anecdote: i) the cartoon diffused on the internet showing a kaak vending cart which reveals its inside made up of an intricate network of listening divices; ii) the joke about the military parade in Damascus the unit representing the Syrian troops in Lebanon shouting “Kaak, Kaak!” iii) the representation of the Syrian as a caak vendor becomes a codeword for Syrian as in this cartoon of the famous cartoonist of an-Nahar, Pierre Sadeq, who, to impress upon us that the whole Lebanese Parliament is under Syrian control, draws the House of Representatives emiting caak-shaped bulls with a legend saying “kaak, kaak, kaak”.

1. iv) the homsi: the debrouillard, sophisticated (“shater”) Lebanese vis-à-vis the awkward, naïve Syrian.
2. Functions of comparisons between stereotyping and stereotyped:

not only socially, but also culturally, inferior

less debrouillard than the Lebanese

less sophisticated