The Cultural and Affective Logic of the Dabki

Abstract

The dabki is a folkloric dance enacted by Lebanese migrants in Australia. This paper examines this dance and shows that it is invested with many issues pertaining to the harsh realities of Lebanese migrants in Australia. In doing so, it criticises the reified understanding of the dabki that reduces it to a mere spectacle and a metaphor for Lebanese identity. Our analysis of the dabki shows the irreducible complexity of this cultural practice deriving from social processes that surround its production. These processes pertaining to the experience of displacement, discrimination and a change in gender and class relations result in imputing new meanings to the dabki and transforming some of its formal aspects. Overall, these changes alter the dabki and make it a site of contradictory investments: an object of intrusive gaze by the dominant culture, a strategy of building the unity of the Lebanese community, a symbolic reversal of inequality between the migrant and the host society, a site of changing class and gender relations and a strategy of re-connecting with the home of origin.