What can ethnography contribute to our understandings of health and disability in Jordan and elsewhere? In this roundtable event, Morgen Chalmiers (University of California San Diego), Timothy Loh (MIT), and I offered provisional responses by drawing on fieldwork in Jordan and the United States while reflecting on broader research trends in the Middle East and North Africa region. Here, I (Christine Sargent, University of Colorado Denver) write primarily in the first person to recap our event and provide additional reflections.

Frameworks and landscapes

Carole McGranahan (2018, 2) describes “an ethnographic sensibility” as:

“a culturally-grounded way of both being in and seeing the world… It is all that goes without saying in terms of what is considered normative or natural, and yet it is also the very rules and proclaimed truths — about the way things are, and the way they should be — that underlie both everyday and ritual beliefs and practices.”

Building on this generative description, I’d like to suggest that ethnography can offer three significant contributions to studies on health and disability. First and foremost, ethnographic approaches work from the ground up. This means ethnography can center the perspectives and projects of diverse communities as they attempt to survive and thrive in unequal conditions of prosperity and precarity​. Second, ethnographers understand biomedicine, global health, and rehabilitative therapies as politically and historically particular institutions rather than universal truths. An ethnographic orientation focuses on the actors, practices, and technologies that enable powerful institutions to function, revealing their tangible but often surprisingly fragile day-day-day operations. It also allows us to trace how these institutions rely on and reproduce — but are not reducible to — (post)colonial relations of value and labor. Finally, ethnography embraces the messiness and multiplicity of lived experience, attending to the macro- and microstructures of power that shape how people to make their way through the world and the world makes its way through them. While biomedicine and biomedically adjacent fields are increasingly hegemonic, they remain entangled in other frameworks for understanding and feeling fundamentally human experiences of health and illness.

From the outset of our event, the timeliness of the topic weighed heavily on speakers and audience members alike. We began by mourning and honoring longtime ACOR staff member Cesar Octavo, who had succumbed to COVID-19 just days earlier, on March 15. His passing occurred during the peak of the pandemic’s second wave in Jordan, as the country grappled with then-rising infection and mortality rates. Three months later, we continue to live through the uneven ebbs and flows of a global pandemic whose impacts underscore how biological, environmental, material, social, cultural, and political dimensions of health and illness are fundamentally interconnected. Only by thinking about these categories together and recognizing how each is deeply embedded in the others can we begin to imagine effective, ethical responses to the world being remade in the pandemic’s wake. Globally and locally, exposure and vulnerability to COVID-19 reflect pre-existing racialized and classed inequities, and these familiar patterns remind us “how certain social and cultural norms around health disparities, values about differences between certain bodies and social groups, and health and welfare structures were in existence long before COVID-19” (Sangaramoorthy 2020).

ACOR’s speaker series and fellowships offer platforms for generating collaboration and criticism — across disciplines, institutions, and continents. As enduring colonial inequities shape contemporary (research) worlds, the production of knowledge and distribution of its benefits do not occur randomly or equally. All three panelists acknowledged the institutional, financial, and geographic mobilities afforded by U.S. institutional affiliations. Additionally, our positionalities (gender, race, ethnicity, class, citizenship status, disability) shape our everyday interactions as early-career researchers conducting fieldwork in Jordan, and they locate us in broader structures of racial capitalism, underdevelopment, and “North-South” geopolitics. Attuned to these inequities, we are eager to cultivate models to build better research, where “better” means research driven by local agendas and priorities and grounded in materially transparent partnerships and exchange, rather than extraction.

Inspired by feminist scholars such as Sarah Ahmed and collectives such as the Cite Black Women movement, I began by mapping the citational landscape that has converged around questions of health in Jordan, along with more nascent research on disability. Citations, Ahmed reminds us, work as “screening techniques,” shaping the creation of knowledge that comes to build disciplinary “canons” through inclusion and exclusion. And as Seteney Shami pointed out in her recent (May 2021) ACOR presentation, the gaps between research conducted on Jordan and research conducted in Jordan remain troubling (and index deeper questions about research for whom and by whom). Indicative of Jordan’s highly developed healthcare system and geopolitical location, research outputs dealing with health are robust; those concerning disability remain emergent. While ethnography and ethnographic methods remain less commonly cited among qualitative researchers, an array of methodological companions, such as “critical phenomenology” and “interpretive phenomenology,” appear increasingly popular (Bawadi and Al-Hamdan 2017; Obeidat and Lally 2014; Nabolsi and Carson 2011; Nazzal and AL-Rawajfah 2018). Ethnography’s muted presence in an otherwise dynamic qualitative landscape invites further opportunities for discussion and collaboration. Beyond conventional academic publications, however, multimedia, open-access, and bilingual outlets including Kohl: A Journal for Gender and Body Research, Eib (part of the Sowt podcast platform), and 7iber bring ethnographic commitments and methods to their explorations of health and disability. These platforms mobilize ethnography’s most transgressive and generative qualities, centering the expertise of local knowledge makers while refusing to be limited by academic paywalls.

Building from fieldwork

We began our individual presentations with doctoral candidate Morgen Chalmiers, a feminist ethnographer and physician in training who has been conducting multi-sited fieldwork on Syrian refugee women’s reproductive experiences in San Diego and Amman. In her work, Chalmiers brings together the paradigms of reproductive justice and critical refugee studies. As articulated by the SisterSong Women of Color Reproductive Justice Collective, reproductive justice centers the “human right to maintain personal bodily autonomy, have children, not have children, and parent the children we have in safe and sustainable communities.” Key for Chalmiers’s work is putting this framework in conversation with the interdisciplinary field of critical refugee studies. The Critical Refugee Studies Collective defines the latter as “a humane and ethical site of inquiry that re-conceptualizes refugee lifeworlds not as a problem to be solved by global elites but as a site of social, political and historical critiques that, when carefully traced, make transparent processes of colonization, war, and displacement.” Accompanying Syrian refugees seeking reproductive healthcare, Chalmiers is studying clinical interactions — in the U.S. and Jordan — “as sites where macrosocial structures of power, privilege, and inequity are manifest, challenged, and negotiated through everyday interactions.”

Next, I offered an overview of my research on the experiences of mothers raising children with Down syndrome in greater Amman. Anthropology recognizes disability as a form of human diversity present across time and space. Ethnographic methods allow us to explore how people make sense of normative and non-normative bodyminds (Price 2015, Schalk 2018) while attending to the historical and material conditions that inform these processes. Jordan is home to dynamic and engaged disability activist and ally communities. It also boasts some of the most progressive laws in the region and was one of the first signatories to the United Nations Convention of the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (UNCRPD). Materializing the cultural, political, economic, and infrastructural transformations required to build an accessible and inclusive Jordan, however, remain an ongoing struggle. My fieldwork took place during a period of significant legislative development (2013–2015), but many families struggled with the gaps between progressive policy and practical implementation. I spoke with activists, advocates, educators, therapists, kin, and neighbors about the complexities of disability stigma, which continues to shape the lives of individuals with Down syndrome and their families. At the same time, I documented diverse strategies that family- and community-based organizations have developed to challenge stereotypes and assumptions about what Down syndrome is and what living with Down syndrome entails. These strategies weave together different resources, including transnational Down syndrome advocacy networks, human- and disability-rights vocabularies, Islamic and Christian visions of humanity, and biomedical or biogenetic models of heredity. Ultimately, I argue that centering disability as an analytic and dimension of lived experience can illuminate broader dynamics of change and struggle in Jordan today.

Finally, doctoral candidate Timothy Loh connected theoretical frameworks on language in medicine and disability to his dissertation research examining deaf Jordanians’ engagements with new assistive technologies that have recently emerged in the country, including the cochlear implant, a surgically implanted device that provides its users with some electronic access to sound. Taking an anthropological approach to language, which emphasizes the multifunctionality of language rather than merely its capacity to describe things in the world, Loh’s research builds on recent conversations between medical and linguistic anthropologists about how language is constituted in medicine and vice versa. Loh asks how language ideologies influence the ways that medical professionals provide biomedical interventions for deaf children and how deaf people and their families engage with these technologies. The question of which technologies deaf people should use is bound up in the question of which language and languages they should learn (Friedner and Kusters 2020). In fact, Loh argued that this question takes on salience in the Middle East, a site of intense language ideologies where both scholars and the public actively debate the relationships between modern standard Arabic and colloquial dialects, indigenous languages such as Tamazight, colonial languages including French and Spanish, and English as a global language. The fact that Arabic is the both the language of the Quran as well as of the nation-state in Jordan, Loh pointed out, has implications for what languages deaf Jordanians are expected to know and to learn. 

Collectively, our research and data (re)emphasize the centrality of caregiving and care-seeking practices to projects of health and wellbeing in Jordan. We have lived through different stages of the pandemic across our different countries of residence, research, and the places we call home, raising new questions about anthropology, fieldwork, and what ethnography has to offer. We hope that our panel (and this summary) invite further discussion and new relationships that further ethnographic approaches to health and disability in Jordan and beyond.

Citations and Resources

Bawadi, H.A., and Z. Al-Hamdan. 2017. “The Cultural Beliefs of Jordanian Women during Childbearing: Implications for Nursing Care.” International Nursing Review 64 (2): 187–194.

Cite Black Women Collective.

Critical Refugee Studies Collective.

Eib. Sowt Podcasts.

Friedner, Michele and Anneliese Kusters. 2020. “Deaf Anthropology.” Annual Review of Anthropology 49:31–46.

Kohl: A Journal for Gender and Body Research.

McGranahan, Carole. 2018. “Ethnography Beyond Method: The Importance of an Ethnographic Sensibility.” Sites: A Journal of Social Anthropology and Cultural Studies 15 (1): 1–10.

Moghnieh, Lamia, Mustafa Abdalla, Suhad Daher-Nashaf, Abdelhadi Elhalhouli. 2021.
 العيش والموت في زمن الكورونا: مقاربات من الأنثروبولوجيا الطبيّة في مجتمعات المنطقة العربيّة. Arab Council for Social Sciences.

Nabolsi, Manar M., and Alexander M. Carson. 2011. “Spirituality, Illness and Personal Responsibility: The Experience of Jordanian Muslim Men with Coronary Artery Disease.” Scandinavian Journal of Caring Sciences 25 (4): 716–724.

Nazzal, Mohammad S., and Omar M. AL-Rawajfah. 2018. “Lived Experiences of Jordanian Mothers Caring for a Child with Disability.” Disability and Rehabilitation 40 (23): 2723–2733.

Obeidat, Rana F., and Robin M. Lally. 2014. “Health-Related Information Exchange Experiences of Jordanian Women at Breast Cancer Diagnosis.” Journal of Cancer Education 29 (3): 548–554.

Price, Margaret. 2015. ” The Bodymind Problem and the Possibilities of Pain.” Hypatia 30 (1): 268-284.

Sangaramoorthy, Thurka. 2020. “From HIV to COVID19: Anthropology, Urgency, and the Politics of Engagement.” Somatosphere, 1 May 2020.

Schalk, Sami. 2018. Bodyminds Reimagined: (Dis)ability, Race, and Gender in Black Women’s Speculative Fiction. Durham: Duke University Press.

SisterSong Women of Color Reproductive Justice Network. “What is Reproductive Justice?”

United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs. “Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (CRPD).”

The post Wellbeing and Living Well: Ethnographic Approaches to Health and Disability appeared first on ACOR Jordan.

ACOR Proudly Presents:
“The Making of Amman: Stories, Tours, and Traffic Jams”
An Online Lecture by Prof. Betty Anderson on August 26, 2020

About the Lecture:

Dr. Betty Anderson will present the research that she, Dr. Fida Adely, and several local researchers have been conducting in Amman over the last few years. Their research seeks to collect stories from Amman’s young residents about how they experience a city that is rapidly changing. Their stories map a city that is geographically and socio-economically fragmented, with increasing frustrations about the possibilities of physical and economic mobility. It is also a city where new and old neighborhoods generate a strong sense of belonging. In the talk, Dr. Anderson will be recounting these stories and analyzing the different methodologies the research team has employed to uncover them, including conducting one-on-one interviews, focus group sessions, and interviews-on-the-street; undertaking walking tours of neighborhoods all over the city; and producing photographic essays and interactive maps.

About the Lecturer:

Betty Anderson is a Professor of Middle East History at Boston University and the author of Nationalist Voices in Jordan: The Street and the State (University of Texas Press, 2005), The American University of Beirut: Arab Nationalism and Liberal Education (University of Texas Press, 2011), and A History of the Modern Middle East (Stanford University Press, 2016). For this project on Amman, she has been working in collaboration with Fida Adely, Associate Professor at the Center for Contemporary Arab Studies in the School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University, and the author of Gendered Paradoxes: Educating Jordanian Women in Nation, Faith and Progress (University of Chicago Press, 2012).

A recent ACOR lecture given in Arabic may be found here. 

For more content such as this, please subscribe to Insights and ACOR’s YouTube channel.

The post The Making of Amman: Stories, Tours, and Traffic Jams appeared first on ACOR Jordan.

Following a 10-month Fulbright Fellowship in Amman, I spent two months in residence at ACOR in summer 2019, where I began a Council of American Overseas Research Centers (CAORC) Fellowship. For much of the year leading up to my arrival at ACOR, I scoured the libraries and archives around Amman gathering documentary sources to complement archival records I had located documenting legal matters in the post-1948 period. The CAORC Fellowship allowed me to settle into ACOR’s library for a period of pause and reflection on the volume of materials I had collected. I worked simultaneously on two distinct goals: one, to write a paper for the August 2019 Nordic Middle East Studies conference in Helsinki, with its thematic focus on “Borders and Borderlands,” and, two, to prepare a more in-depth presentation for an ACOR audience prior to returning to teaching at Towson University at the end of the summer. A period of concentrated writing time in ACOR Library allowed for the completion of both. Not only does ACOR Library serve modernists well, due to its excellent collection on modern Jordan and Palestine, but the collegiality from fellows and visitors to the library furthered introspection and analysis of my work.

My research examines the broad topic of law in the Jordanian West Bank. I have been exploring the ways that the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan’s legal system developed in a precarious historical moment. The post-1948 war period brought central Palestine under Jordanian rule. For the Palestinians, who had not realized an independent state of their own and been displaced from their homes, United Nations General Assembly Resolution 194 (III), adopted in December 1948, seemed to come to their aid with its calls for the return of Palestinians to their home. Jordan’s leaders worked on the politics of the post-war situation and reached an armistice agreement in 1949 with the new state of Israel, established on the land Palestinians had fled or from which they were exiled. Israel defied Resolution 194 blocking Palestinians’ right and desire to return to their homes. The armistice line, offering little precision for human settlement and agricultural stability for people’s lives, defined a new border previously unknown in the history of the region and marked an obstacle to life returning to normal for Palestinians. Yet, many still set out for their homes and lands, effectively transgressing the new and very long border.

The Jordanian government and monarchy experienced a period of turmoil, both politically and legislatively, in the years following the geographical expansion of the country. The “Unification of the Two Banks,” namely the East Bank and the West Bank, followed elections in 1950. The government then launched a Judicial Committee to draft laws for the whole of Jordan. Following heated deliberations, Jordan’s parliament enacted a new Penal Code to be implemented in August 1951. The assassination of King Abdullah in July 1951 briefly halted the implementation of the new law. In September 1951, following a tense few weeks regarding the succession process, King Abdullah’s eldest son, Talal, succeeded his father to the throne. His younger son, Nayyif, acting as Regent in Talal’s absence, had signed the law postponing the implementation of the new criminal code, which took effect in October 1951, amidst additional legislative and constitutional change. On 1 January 1952, King Talal signed the new constitution.

Required to police the new and expansive border after the signing of the Armistice Agreement, the Jordanian Arab Legion became stretched beyond capacity despite efforts to adapt. The enlarged kingdom faced the limitations of its existing legal system, as Transjordan had relied on Ottoman law for its Penal Code. A different Penal code had prevailed over the newly added territory, as the British Mandate Government in Palestine had legislated to meet colonial goals. Jordan maintained a dual system in its application of Penal law for more than two years after the signing of the armistice agreement: Ottoman law persisted in the East Bank while British Mandate law persisted in the West Bank. The latter had no statute for border crossings, yet that seemed to be the most frequently violation, particularly for the Hebron District whose villages lost substantial agricultural lands along with prospects for trading along the Palestinian coast now part of Israel.

The Jordan-Israel Mixed Armistice Commission, an organization of United Nations Observers, could not adequately attend to the many cases of border crossings that occurred in the early 1950s. With two Jordanian members, two Israeli members, and one foreign member, who usually served as the deciding vote on the committee, the Commission failed by not gaining trust from either side. The Jordanian newspapers from the period, particularly the ones that had roots in pre-Mandate and Mandate Palestine, published frequently on the Commission, both reportage and opinion pieces. Continued research will delve into the Commission’s role and its perception by Jordanians on both banks of the country.

Contextualized by these post-war changes, my research traced the legal and legislative developments particularly for the period of the early 1950s in the Hebron District. I will return to ACOR in summer 2020 to continue research and writing, examining a range of topics within the context of the law. New legislation affected the “crime of border crossings,” undertaken in particular by Palestinian men and younger boys according to the historical records. This topic must engage with the growing literature on borders, and from a legal perspective must consider the types of people, including juveniles who crossed, along with the punishments meted out to transgressors. Juveniles’ punishments differed significantly from their elders, as did the punishment for women though records do not indicate that they frequently crossed the border. Analyzing the punishments for various crimes must consider the socio-economic context for Palestinians, as many struggled to restore their livelihoods in light of the scarcity of work and available agricultural land after the war. During this time, Jordan’s legislative body continued to produce new laws to adapt the legal system to the new historical reality. While this research addresses a concise historical time period, it will illuminate our understanding of the legal challenges that both the kingdom and its new citizens faced in the post-war period.

I gratefully acknowledge my ACOR-MESA Travel Award, which will support my travel to New Orleans for the annual 2019 Middle East Studies Association conference. I am particularly looking forward to receiving feedback from colleagues in the field at this early state of my project, as it will go a long way to enhancing analysis of the legal system, border issues, and other criminal contexts.

The post History of Legal Challenges in Jordan in the 1950s appeared first on ACOR Jordan.