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

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.