FIELD SONGS - How can Syrian refugees' intangible cultural heritage inform innovative approaches to sustainable development in the Middle East?

冲突不仅使人们流离失所，破坏物质遗产；它还破坏了不成文的文化习俗和以社区为基础的口头代际知识传播。战前的叙利亚，曾经是中东的“粮仓”，在农业生产方面有着丰富多样的文化遗产。然而，农村地区受到流离失所的严重影响，许多以前的农民在邻近的中东国家寻求庇护。现有的研究指出，由于流离失所和经济压力，叙利亚难民的社区网络支离破碎。农业社区拥有的专业知识可能会流失，这是一个切实存在的风险。然而，研究人员必须拓宽他们对这种知识的理解：流离失所社区的音乐实践，特别是传统的收获歌曲，应该被视为非物质文化遗产，是体现、社区和实用农业知识的重要载体。FIELD SONGS项目将记录一种特殊形式的叙利亚难民专业知识——来自农业背景的叙利亚人的非物质文化遗产，并探索难民的非物质文化遗产如何为中东东道国和叙利亚的发展政策提供信息。该项目探讨了以下问题：流离失所的叙利亚农业社区的非物质文化遗产，特别是传统的收获歌曲，如何成为中东东道国和叙利亚可持续发展创新方法的集体行动基础？该项目的前提是，记录难民的传统收获歌曲可以成为一种利用具体的、公共的、“不成文的”农业知识的方式，而这些知识目前在决策者和人道主义者的干预计划中是缺席的。拟议的项目是爱丁堡大学兽医公共卫生/One health专家和人类学家之间的多学科合作，以及叙利亚领导的具有农业科学和艺术与人文专业知识的组织：叙利亚学术专家（SAE）和Douzan艺术与文化。基于我们与叙利亚学者、从业者和中东农业社区的合作伙伴关系，以及ahrc资助的叙利亚食品期货项目（2019-21）的民族志见解，拟议的研究围绕着与叙利亚农场工人和叙利亚音乐家在土耳其加济安泰普举行的两次面对面的非物质文化遗产研讨会展开。这些工作坊的目标是让参与者一起表演和录制收获歌曲，并记录食物生产、制造和消费的传统形式。这些录音将通过一个数字档案共享，并托管在豆赞的Notah网站上。数字档案将是保护难民非物质文化遗产的核心，并将其提供给世界各地流离失所的叙利亚社区。工作坊的录音，以及在土耳其难民农业工地短期实地工作的人种学数据，也将为一个简短的人种学纪录片提供信息，该纪录片将在我们团队的一个健康领域网络和SAE的网站上播出。该纪录片将成为针对土耳其和国际上的决策者和人道主义行动者的重要外联工具。我们将利用我们的研究结果，倡导将叙利亚农业专业知识和非物质文化遗产纳入主流，可以改善目前中东收容国难民劳动力市场的融合，并将对未来叙利亚农业可持续和当地知情的冲突后重建工作至关重要。

Conflict not only displaces people and destroys material heritage sites; it also disrupts unwritten cultural practices and oral, community-based intergenerational knowledge transmission. Pre-war Syria, once the "bread basket" of the Middle East, had a rich and diverse cultural heritage around agricultural production. However, rural areas have been heavily affected by displacement, with many former farmers seeking refuge in neighbouring Middle Eastern countries. Existing research points to the fragmentation of Syrian community networks in sites of refuge because of displacement and economic pressures. There is a real risk that expert knowledge held by agricultural communities will be lost. However, researchers have to broaden their understanding of what this knowledge might look like: displaced communities' musical practices, especially traditional harvesting songs, should be considered intangible cultural heritage, and an important vector of embodied, communal, and practical knowledge about agriculture. The FIELD SONGS project will document a specific form of Syrian refugee expertise - the intangible cultural heritage of Syrians from agricultural backgrounds - and explore how refugees' intangible cultural heritage can inform development policies in Middle Eastern host countries and in Syria. The project explores the following question: How can the intangible cultural heritage of displaced Syrian agricultural communities, notably traditional harvesting songs, become the basis of collective actions for an innovative approach to sustainable development in Middle Eastern host countries and Syria?The project's premise is that recording refugees' traditional harvesting songs can be a way of tapping into embodied, communal, "unwritten" agricultural knowledge that is currently absent from policymakers' and humanitarians' intervention plans. The proposed project is a multidisciplinary collaboration between veterinary public health/One Health specialists and anthropologists at the University of Edinburgh, and Syrian-led organisations with expertise in agricultural science and the arts and humanities: Syrian Academic Expertise (SAE), and Douzan Art & Culture. Building on our partnerships with Syrian academics, practitioners, and agricultural communities in the Middle East, as well as on ethnographic insights from the AHRC-funded SyrianFoodFutures project (2019-21), the proposed research revolves around two in-person intangible cultural heritage workshops with Syrian farmworkers and Syrian musicians in Gaziantep, Turkey. The goal of these workshops is for participants to perform and record harvesting songs together, and document traditional forms of food production, manufacturing, and consumption. The recordings will be shared through a digital archive, to be hosted on Douzan's Notah website. The digital archive will be central to safeguarding refugees' intangible cultural heritage, and making it available to displaced Syrian communities worldwide. Workshop recordings, together with ethnographic data from short-term fieldwork at refugees' agricultural worksites in Turkey, will also inform a short ethnographic documentary, to be hosted on our team's One Health FIELD Network's and SAE's websites. The documentary will be an important outreach tool targeted at decision-makers and humanitarian actors in Turkey and internationally. We will use our findings to advocate that mainstreaming Syrian agricultural expertise and intangible cultural heritage can improve refugee labour market integration in Middle Eastern host countries now, and will prove vital to sustainable and locally-informed post-conflict reconstruction efforts of Syrian agriculture in the future.