ABSTRACT
Socio-economic and political changes occurring between the 1940s and 1980s transformed the life conditions of tribal/peasant communities of the Euphrates valley in the al-Raqqa region of northern Syria. A semi-sedentary mode of life was replaced by entrepreneurial capitalist agriculture and then transformed again by the Ba’th Party’s socialist agrarian policies. The village of Hawi al-Hawa is studied in order to generate and examine generalizations about socio-economic change and mobilization politics as they are articulated at the village/region level through the lives of individuals. This chapter is a reflective introduction as to how the author came to do research on the village in the late 1970s. It describes both the opportunities and the challenges of being a ‘native anthropologist’ and the various ways in which the research data were obtained. It discusses the methodological questions relating to life history reconstructions in anthropology. It navigates the reader through the structure and the main empirical and theoretical aspects of the book, which thematically is divided into three parts: the first part concerns the historical, socio-economic and political changes occurring in Syria, the second part concerns social changes through the perspectives of eight life histories and the third part is analysis and a recent village update.
