Ambiguities of Domination: Politics, Rhetoric and Symbols in Contemporary Syria

Ambiguities of Domination: Politics, Rhetoric, and Symbols in Contemporary Syria. By Lisa Wedeen. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999. 230p. $48.00.

Fred H. Lawson, Mills College

First-time visitors to Damascus invariably notice two things: the groups of armed men clustered at key points throughout the city and the massive portraits of President Hafiz al-Asad that loom over them. Scholarship on the politics of contemporary Syria focuses almost exclusively on the former. Lisa Wedeen urges that greater attention be paid to the latter, not because clusters of armed men are politically inconsequential, but because explanations for Syrians' obedience to the present authorities that are couched in terms of outright coercion "remain incomplete. They fail to account for the ways in which language and symbols mediate, structure, define, and continually reassert political power and obedience" (p. 156).

Among the various symbols that have served to buttress the predominance of the military wing of the Bath Party over the last three decades, none has proven more potent and durable than the depiction of President al-Asad "as omnipresent and omniscient" (p. 1). This image stifles dissent in at least two ways. By "cluttering public space," it makes it impossible for "alternative symbols, discussions, and language" to be articulated (pp....