Dodge - Bourdieu goes to Baghdad

Tags: papers

• Argues against the primordialist and ethnosymbolic theories, alongside the analysis of artificial state theories of iraq
• Poposes forward 4 identities that are rooted in history and not just the past 15 years:
  • Kurdish identity
  • Shia
    • Subsequent Sunni
  • Iraqi
  • Pan Arab

Bourdieu Influences

• Uses the key analytical concepts of ‘field’ and ‘capital’
  • Field is what comprises society, society is made up of various autonomous social microcosms
    • Political field -> is this dominated by secular nationalism or islam umma?
    • Bureaucratic/administrative field -> politicans play here
  • Capital is what people can deploy to contest a field
    • Economic capital
    • Social capital -> extent of one’s network
    • Cultural capital -> Culture’s stratifying power in society
    • Symbolic capital -> “It is the struggle for symbolic power within Iraq’s political field that has the main explanatory focus”
      • Symbolic power legitimize power relations -> writers, teachers, journalists weild symbolic capital

Arab Nationalism

• Post mandate
• Largely formed to drive the british out
• British actually re-invaded after 1941 and stamped this out
• Social capital was fracatured between senior military and Baath party post 1958 coup
  • abdul karim qasim
  • Baath

Iraqi Identity

• Emphasized by the ahali (the People) group after 1931, mostly Leftism, Liberal Democracy, and Iraqi nationalism
• Also promoted by the iraqi communist party
• abdul karim qasim helped solidify the Iraqist place within the political field
• Baath’s seizure of power in 1968 shut out the communists, and reinterpreted iraqists for itself
  • “Mesopotamianism”
  • Incorporated parts of the Kurdish identity post 1975 Algiers Agreement
  • Incorporated parts of the shia identity post 1977 mass protests of the Marad al-Ras

Shia identity

• abdul karim qasim’s rule started the formation of the Dawa
• Muhammad Baqir as-Sadr deployed both relgious and social capital
• Baathist attempts at dominating the field actually cohered Shia identity
• Armed uprisings against the Shias following the invasion of Kuwait, especially with Ayatollah al-Khoei
• Final change occured under Muhammad Sadiq al-Sadr

Kurdish nationalism

• First occured under the formation of the kurdistan democratic party and the groups around mulla mustafa barzani
• modernists nationalists split from the KDP to form patriotic union of kurdistan (PUK)
• anfal campaign solidifed the kurdish identity