Thanks for joining us on Insights! Tell us a little more about yourself and your current project.

I am thrilled to be here! I am currently a doctoral candidate in the development sociology program at Cornell University, where my research explores how the development of renewable energy and smart electricity shape experiences of urban life in Amman. As an interdisciplinary social scientist, I draw on tools and methods from geography and anthropology, and my work is rooted in postcolonial and intersectional feminist approaches. Something that I find particularly fascinating about energy infrastructure is the way that it transects multiple scales of interaction and exchange, from the intimate practices of caring for one’s home to the cultivation of regional and globe-spanning flows of data and capital. Through my research, I hope to contribute to ethnographic understanding of how the transition from hydrocarbon to renewable resources is reshaping lived spaces across these scales.

During my ACOR fellowship in Jordan, I am exploring the distribution of renewable resources across Amman, documenting how changing energy infrastructures are reshaping daily life in a cross section of different neighborhoods. I am working with local architects and community organizers to map how the transformation of the built environment both shapes and is shaped by household- and neighborhood-level energy practices. Jordan was one of the first countries in the region to turn towards an aggressive renewable energy development plan, and for over a decade now, renewable energy development has flourished at both the utility and household scales. This makes Jordan a particularly rich site from which to examine energy transition, from the gleaming, utility-scale solar farms of Ma’an to the simple, micro-scale rooftop solar water heaters (Fig. 1) that increasingly bevel the city skyline (Fig. 2).

What is one thing someone might not know about your area of research?

I am trained as a political ecologist, which means that I am always thinking about the ecological dimensions of social and political processes and the politics of ecology. Political ecologists have long worked against the artificial separation of “natural” and “social” worlds, asking critical questions about how resources come to be valued, cultivated, and exchanged in particular ways. So, when I think about renewable energy, I think about the material, geophysical qualities that make it different from hydrocarbon resources, as well as the financial, technical, and social arrangements that shape how it is developed and the kinds of possibilities it might open up. This also means that I approach environmental knowledge as rooted in place, forming in and through particular sets of social relations and historically situated systems of meaning-making. To put this in slightly more concrete terms, a solar panel is so much more than a device for capturing energy from the sun; it contains within it the history of its relations of production — the material resources it was built from, as well as the labor conditions under which it was built, and the conditions that made it possible to be shipped from its point of production to its point of use. And once installed, it creates not just the flow of energy but also financial and information flows that tie together multiple networks of people with different ways of valuing time, energy, and risk (Fig. 3).

Who is someone who has inspired or influenced you in your course of study?

After I graduated from college, I had the privilege of working at a small, grassroots environmental center in Palestine called the Environmental Education Center. The director of the center, Simon Awad, was the first person to introduce me to the incredible biodiversity of the region and its rich ecological heritage. Having grown up in Southern California, I already had a deep appreciation for the beauty and complexity of desert and chaparral ecologies, but Simon helped me begin to see the profound linkages between social and environmental systems. Spending time at the center enabled me to better understand the diverse ways that people cultivate, care for, and form attachments to the land, and through this experience I began to see how environmental protection is bound up with social and political liberation. These perspectives have indelibly shaped my approach to researching renewable energy and smart electricity infrastructure, as I center questions of access, equity, and environmental justice in thinking about energy transition.

Finally, what do you love about Amman?

I love cities, and there are so many things that I find beautiful about urban life in Amman. On any given day you can probably find me at a suq or walking the streets of the balad, listening to the thrum of sidewalk life. One of my favorite thinkers, AbdouMaliq Simone, developed this concept of people as infrastructure,^[1] which centers the provisional movements and actions of real people that make cities work. I really see that here, in the sounds and movements that animate the city center; it’s like watching an orchestra. The slow footsteps of street vendors pushing wooden carts filled with ka’ek; the radio waves broadcasting the sound of morning prayers through shop doors and windows; the cadence of vendors unloading boxes from carts and trucks, stacking goods to be sorted and organized, and, of course, the musical refrains of passing trucks selling gas canisters or watermelons. To me, this is the heartbeat of the city — the movements, the interactions, the people that suture together the spaces of life between the stone and cinderblock buildings.

^[1] Simone, A. M. (2004). “People as Infrastructure: Intersecting Fragments in Johannesburg.” Public Culture 16 (3): 407–429.

Thanks, Kendra, and we look forward to learning more in the future about the results of your research!

Kendra Kintzi is a doctoral candidate in development sociology at Cornell University in New York, where her dissertation examines the material politics of renewable and smart energy development in the Middle East. Questions of resource governance, urbanization, and the political economy of infrastructure development drive her research. She draws on ethnographic, archival, and digital methods, and she centers intersectional feminist approaches by asking how urban communities in Jordan experience and shape processes of environmental and infrastructural change. Prior to joining Cornell, Kendra worked as a federal evaluator on renewable energy and smart-grid development projects across the Middle East, Africa, and Southeast Asia. Originally from California, Kendra earned dual BA degrees in development studies and comparative literature from the University of California, Berkeley, where she graduated with highest honors in the major.

The post “Ask A Scholar” with predoctoral fellow Kendra Kintzi appeared first on ACOR Jordan.

This written interview is part of a new series on Insights: “Ask A Scholar,” through which we highlight the personal experiences of fellows and other affiliated researchers. The following conversation with Nedhal Jarrar (ACOR Jordanian Graduate Student Scholarship recipient, 2020–2021) took place by email in February 2021.

Thank you for joining us on Insights! You just completed your master’s degree in architectural conservation. Can you tell our readers a bit more about your background, and what led to your interest in this field?

As a brief introduction, I’m a Jordanian architect and researcher. I received my master’s degree in architectural conservation from the German Jordanian University in 2020 after my bachelor’s in architectural engineering from the Applied Science University in Amman in 2010.

I have had professional opportunities over nine years of practical architectural experience, including design, restoration, and maintenance projects. I also taught for a brief period. Furthermore, I participated in a UNESCO program for heritage preservation in Petra. I chose to specialize in a particular branch of architecture, modern industrial heritage, concentrating on the preservation of modern industrial buildings in the Arab region, Jordan in particular. At present I am preparing a research paper on this topic.

My interest in architecture and tangible and intangible heritage began long ago. About fifteen years ago, I became passionate about documenting heritage landmarks in Jordan and the region using digital methods, especially free knowledge initiatives such as Wikipedia (and its sister projects). I started by becoming a Wikipedia editor, and later an administrator, for the Arabic side of the encyclopedia. My contributions centered on architectural, historical, and geopolitical topics related to documentation of written and visual memory in the region. Examples include articles on architecture of Palestine, tourism in Jordan, and hundreds of other articles in Arabic and in English. I have also coordinated one of the world’s largest photo contests—“Wiki Loves Monuments”—regionally for the Levant, focused primarily on global cultural heritage. Most recently, my experience in open-access knowledge has also included engagement with the Open Jordanian Heritage initiative organized jointly by ACOR, Wikimedia Levant, and the Jordan Open Source Association. I have given presentations to the initiative’s edit-a-thon participants about Jordanian heritage documentation through a number of online platforms. Many people took part, all of them heritage enthusiasts. 

My specific field of expertise, architectural conservation, includes study of renovation, preservation, adaptive reuse, rehabilitation, and reconstruction. I have always been motivated to continue my learning, expanding my personal knowledge in areas I consider important. I think heritage conservation must be placed higher on national priority lists. At the same time, “heritage” itself needs to have an appropriate definition and approaches for future generations.

Finally, my professional associations today are deeply connected with this field of study. I work in restoration materials and construction chemicals between Baghdad and Amman.

Tell us more about your thesis project!

Although industrial heritage is considered to be an important part of modern global heritage, the subject faces continued marginalization in the Arab world, including in Jordan. Resulting from a lack of clear and inclusive definitions of cultural heritage, a number of industrial heritage sites have not received protection, nor have they been addressed by scholarly research. Thus, most of these sites, built in the 20^th century, have been disappearing little by little or even been marked explicitly for demolition. 

In my thesis, I undertook a detailed study of Jordan’s modern industrial heritage, beginning with its historical emergence. The concept of modern industrial heritage is closely linked to the Arab Renaissance (the Nahda) of the late 19th and early 20th century and the period of early state-building in the region. My thesis analyzed a rare example of this kind of heritage: the Rutenberg Hydropower Plant in Baqoura, in northern Jordan. I set up a comparison between the plant and another national example of industrial heritage, the Electrical Hangar located in downtown Amman. I also looked at other similar local examples in order to more deeply demonstrate the connections between such facilities and Jordanian state-building, broadly conceived. Throughout the project, I gained a deeper understanding of Jordan’s modern industrial heritage through a variety of research methodologies, including archival research, textual analysis (especially focused on the impact of manufacturing on development projects in the region), and general field surveys for a number of sites that are arguably representative of Jordanian industrial heritage (see images in inset). I synthesized a national case study and comparative analysis.

In addition, my research evaluated the study site with a brief and informal administrative plan for preservation, with the goal of paving the way for future preservation decisions for this and other industrial heritage sites in the country. This could even serve as preparation for detailed design for the site following possible renovation.

This study presents a different approach to understanding Jordan’s modern industrial heritage. Such heritage is important not just for its historical, architectural, and geopolitical value, but for its meanings in relation to preliminary periods of modern state-building projects in the Kingdom’s history. Therefore, the study calls for incorporation of these sites into the scope of “national heritage” and for putting the spotlight on modern industrial heritage as a means of motivating people’s sense of place, memory, and national identity. Links were made between theoretical frames of study and preservation, on the one hand, and experimental results, on the other. Put plainly, the study seeks to raise awareness about the meaning, essence, and value of modern industrial heritage, representing an era that was short lived in Jordan and the region. Moreover, this awareness must be developed not just among the public, generally speaking, but specifically among policymakers and institutions, public and private.

In your fellowship report, you write about “the plurality and diversity of modern industrial heritage” in Jordan. Can you summarize what you mean by this for our readers?

The buildings and sites in Jordan one might classify as “modern industrial heritage” are relatively few. However, they are nonetheless diverse and important in their historical, symbolic, structural, architectural, and sociocultural value. Jordan’s modern industrial heritage includes dams, power plants, train stations, bridges, grain silos, historic factories, water channels, and more. All of these bore witness to the founding period of the Jordanian state. Most of the sites and structures were erected in the 1960s and ’70s, which was an era of expansion and growth. They are concentrated in the northernmost parts of the kingdom.

On a personal level, do you have favorite examples of adaptive reuse of heritage structures?

Around the world, there are a great many remarkable examples of adaptive reuse of heritage sites, including industrial sites. Built during Ottoman rule, the Silahtarağa power plant in Istanbul experienced a sustained period of dereliction and decay before being converted into the SantralIstanbul, one of the city’s most important cultural centers. We could also take up European examples, such as in Denmark, Germany, and Britain, as these nations were pioneers in industrial heritage conservation, pursuing reuse, rather than demolition and dismantlement. In Copenhagen, for example, grain mills have been converted to residential apartments, and an old heavy-fuel power plant is today simultaneously a ski resort and a site of clean energy production and waste recycling.

Last but not least, there is the electrical plant of Ras al Ain in Amman and its reuse as an open cultural center. This is among the most important local examples of adaptive reuse of industrial heritage, in my opinion. Furthermore, it stands out in the region. Renovations to the site showed respect for its original building elements while distinguishing between them and recent additions. I am honored that the director of that work, Dr. Rami Daher of Turath Consultants, was my thesis adviser for my master’s degree. He is one of the biggest influences on my professional life.

In the time of COVID, most of us are getting out and about less often, although, on the flip side, we may be getting to know our own immediate neighborhoods a lot more (due to restricted travel). Do you have suggestions for how readers can continue to explore Jordan’s diverse built heritage during the time of COVID? 

Unfortunately, the current pandemic and its associated lockdowns have greatly restricted the ability of people to visit archaeological and touristic sites in Jordan and the rest of the world. This has motivated us as architects, archaeologists, and heritage and tourism professionals to think outside the box in order to find practical solutions for restoring connections between vast swaths of tourists and enthusiasts and various touristic and architectural attractions. One such solution is virtual reality, technology that a number of regional institutions have already begun to work with. The Jordan Tourism Board, for example, began disseminating VR experiences to promote virtual tourism to a number of the kingdom’s heritage sites as a way to make up for the distinct lack of visitors.

From another angle, I work currently on a project to link archaeological sites in an effective manner with their representation on Wikipedia. Smart devices can empower visitors to access detailed information in a simple yet interactive way.

We, as members of the local society, including formal institutions and organizations, are called upon to come together for sake of preserving our cultural inheritance. We must work together to promote visitation to archaeological and heritage sites by reconsidering traditional methods of addressing them. 

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

Nedhal Jarrar is an architect who specializes in industrial heritage in Jordan and the Arab region. He is a member of the International Committee for the Conservation of the Industrial Heritage (TICCIH) and International Council on Monuments and Sites (ICOMOS) Jordan. He received a master’s degree in architectural conservation from the German Jordanian University; his thesis was titled “Reconceptualizing Jordan’s Industrial and Architectural Heritage of Modernity: Rutenberg Power Plant in Baqoura.” His professional experience in architecture includes design, renovation, and maintenance projects as well as participation in a UNESCO heritage project in Petra. He also taught for a brief period. He has received a number of scholarships throughout his career, including the Jordanian Graduate Student Scholarship from ACOR for the 2019–2020 academic year. He also received an academic research grant from the German Jordanian University to test concrete samples from the reclaimed study site of Baqoura in northern Jordan. He is among the founders of Wikimedia Levant, a non-profit organization active in Jordan, Lebanon, Palestine and Syria that aspires to promote free knowledge through Wikipedia and other Wikiprojects, in which his interests concentrate on documentation of cultural heritage in the region and support for Arabic-language and online content on this subject. He is a reviewer, administrator, and editor on Wikipedia and has made thousands of contributions and edits on the open encyclopedia.

Suggested further reading:

“Jordanian and Syrian youth get serious about cultural heritage preservation.” UNESCO. July 31, 2019.

Jarrar, Nedhal. “Jordan – A Struggle Against Privatization and Neoliberalism.” International Committee for the Conservation of the Industrial Heritage Bulletin 91, 2021.

Jarrar’s thesis, “Reconceptualizing Jordan’s Industrial and Architectural Heritage of Modernity: Rutenberg Power Plant in Baqoura,” is available for public reading at the ACOR Library.

The post Ask a Scholar: Nedhal Jarrar 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.

We were pleased to welcome at the gala representatives of the Jordanian government and royal family, as well as international diplomats from the United States, South Africa, Greece, and beyond. Rick Spees, Executive Director of CAORC, and ASOR President Susan Ackerman were also in attendance. The diverse range of those who came to celebrate this occasion with us, from Wadi Musa to Washington, D.C., is a testament to the legacy ACOR has built as an international center for research in Jordan. To all those in attendance, as well as those unable to join us for the evening, we extend our utmost gratitude for your support, and we look forward to continuing the many fruitful relationships we have fostered until now.

The evening also served as an opportunity to honor our longest-serving staff member, Mohammad Adawi, also known as Abu Ahmed, who formed an integral part of the ACOR family as our chef for the entirety of our first 50 years in Amman. In 2016, Abu Ahmed was awarded the ASOR Albright Service Award in recognition of his long and outstanding service to ACOR. On the night of the gala, Abu Ahmed marked his retirement from ACOR by cutting our 50^th anniversary cake, capping off an evening of conversation, presentations, and celebration.

On this occasion, we also premiered a short film (featured at the top of this post) showcasing some of ACOR’s many projects, including the Petra Church and the Temple of Winged Lions. Produced especially for ACOR’s 50^th year, this video provides great insight into what ACOR does and how we have evolved over time. We are excited to be able to share the final product with you today, and we extend our thanks to filmmakers Ghassan Salti and Mohammud Ali and former ACOR Development Officer Miriam Saleh for all their hard work producing it. A video clip on USAID SCHEP, implemented by ACOR, was also created for the event by the SCHEP team.

Truly, the past 50 years have been an incredible journey, and one that we look forward to continuing with your support.

By Starling Carter, ACOR Development Assistant

The post ACOR Celebrates its 50th Anniversary in Amman appeared first on ACOR Jordan.

About the Lecture
This talk demonstrates how bringing a cultural anthropology lens to contemporary visual art illuminates the relationship between large-scale regional conflict, economic globalization, urban change, and gender roles.  Recent changes in Amman’s cultural scene, such as the proliferating cafes and galleries in Jabal al-Weibdeh, are best understood in relation to the violent conflict and refugee flows in the whole Middle East region, along with the implementation of neoliberal development policies.  At the same time, a striking feature of the boom in Amman’s arts and culture is that most projects involve women at their center, who thus are influencing transformations in the city’s landscape and culture in unprecedented ways.  This lecture draws on various strands of anthropology, especially urban anthropology and the anthropology of art, to examine the convergence of these processes—war, economics, urban development, and gender roles—in the rapidly expanding art scene in Amman.

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About the Lecturer
Dr. Aseel Sawalha is a professor of anthropology at Fordham University in New York City and ACOR’s 2016-2017 NEH Fellow, supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH). Her research project is titled “Amman’s Art Scene and the Changing Urban Landscape” and explores several dimensions of Amman’s developing and vibrant art and culture sector as well as the social and economic impact of art culture on the surrounding communities. Dr. Sawalha’s research intersects urban anthropology, Middle East studies, and gender studies.

Aseel Sawalha earned a B.A. in English Literature (1987) and an M.A. in Anthropology (1991) from Yarmouk University in Irbid, Jordan.  She earned a Ph.D. in Cultural Anthropology from the City University of New York (2002).  Please visit her Fordham faculty page or visit her ACOR scholar page to learn more.

The post An Anthropological Gaze at Art – An ACOR Video Lecture by Dr. Aseel Sawalha appeared first on ACOR Jordan.

It was nearly a week after the end of the 13th International Conference on the History and Archaeology of Jordan (ICHAJ), and the students who attended were still buzzing. Four Jordanian university students, selected to attend the conference through the USAID Sustainable Cultural Heritage Through Engagement of Local Communities Project (SCHEP), gathered at ACOR to discuss what they had learned and how they could carry their experiences forward.

“I mean, it was just so cool! We used to read [Megan Perry’s articles] all the time in class and then there she was right in front of us!” gushed Aveen Qatameen, a master’s student of physical anthropology at the University of Jordan. Aveen is one of 15 SCHEP Scholars, high achieving students from across Jordan who received scholarships to attend ICHAJ.

Another SCHEP Scholar, Thaer Shawabkeh of Hashemite University, was similarly enthusiastic. “USAID SCHEP gave me the opportunity of a lifetime to attend the conference. I saw the work that was being done at the archaeological sites in Madaba [where I’m from], where I did not know people were still active,” said Thaer. “Being engaged this way with the scientific community gave me the strength and support to continue my course of study without paying attention to the constraints of society.”

The discussion continued along this vein, as the students eagerly chatted about their plans for staying involved in the field. Their ideas varied from pursuing advanced degrees to organizing trash pick-ups at the sites or teaching their friends and families about Jordan’s history. They were excited to showcase their country’s heritage and wanted to make sure their whole communities were involved in this effort.

For USAID SCHEP, conversations like this are exactly what we’re trying to do. USAID SCHEP aims to preserve, manage, and promote cultural heritage resources in Jordan using a unique community-first approach. Part of this mission includes making archaeology and heritage more accessible, to bring those outside the traditional academic circles into the conversation. By engaging the next generation of heritage professionals and advocates, we hope to empower them to be guardians of Jordan’s trove of cultural heritage resources.

In service of this goal, USAID SCHEP also worked to ensure that the site stewards from USAID SCHEP’s five project sites were able to attend the conference as well. Site stewards are another unique aspect of the USAID SCHEP approach. Part local site manager and part community liaison, site stewards are members of the host communities who act as a vital link between USAID SCHEP, the project directors, and the larger host communities. Their presence ensures that the host communities remain the ultimate beneficiaries of USAID SCHEP activities.

Site stewards, along with dozens of other trainees at USAID SCHEP project sites, learn best practices in conservation and cultural resources management (CRM). After training in masonry, surveying, documentation, and other CRM-related vocational skills, they are qualified to work in projects beyond their own site, thereby providing them with a broader range of economic opportunities.

Attending ICHAJ gave the site stewards the opportunity to augment those skills by learning from leading CRM experts. Eman Abdesalaam, site steward for the Temple of the Winged Lions in Petra who also serves as the project’s documentation specialist, was particularly excited to attend a workshop on documentation. “It’s so important for my work for me to attend,” said Eman. “I need to see how everyone does this work, not just the people working on our project.” Eman is a perfect example of what USAID SCHEP seeks to achieve in host communities—a sense of ownership over cultural heritage and a passion for conserving sites and sharing their stories with the world.

Eman also served as an ambassador of the USAID SCHEP model to the rest of the conference. She gave a presentation on her work with USAID SCHEP and Sela, the local non-profit company that she and fellow site steward Ahmad Mowasa founded in July 2015 along with other members of the Temple of the Winged Lions team. Sela for Vocational Training and Protection of Cultural Heritage specializes in administering and managing cultural heritage preservation training programs, as well as providing professional development opportunities in site conservation, restoration, and maintenance. Eman shared the stage at ICHAJ with some of the leading voices in archaeology, including the project directors of all five USAID SCHEP sites, who presented on their work integrating community engagement with academic research.

To ensure that all attendees could understand and appreciate the values of these lectures, USAID SCHEP sponsored simultaneous translation services in both English and Arabic. Breaking down language barriers is a vital step to maximizing accessibility and ensuring that all those interested can appreciate and grasp the latest methods in archaeology and cultural resources management.

ICHAJ happens every three years, bringing together academics who have been working on archaeological sites in Jordan for most of their careers. This year, USAID SCHEP was proud to introduce some new faces. Too often archaeology is relegated to classrooms or seasonal digs, rather than an ongoing and inclusive conversation. By bringing in more members of the host communities, USAID SCHEP is helping to ensure that the conservation of these sites is sustainable and ongoing, and not dependent on academic schedules or grant funding. Furthermore, USAID SCHEP is allowing more people to enjoy the truly incredible stories of the people and places that surround Jordan’s past.

SCHEP Scholar Muthana Abu Diab summed it up best. “USAID SCHEP is our umbrella, underneath it we are linked: students, residents, and specialists … It motivated me to know more about the archaeological treasures that we have, and all those waiting to be discovered. Cultural heritage gives me an added self-respect when I see all that I have inherited.”

Written by Sofia Smith, USAID SCHEP Communications Officer

This blog article is not official U.S. Government information and does not necessarily represent the views or positions of the U.S. Agency for International Development or the U.S. Government.

The post USAID SCHEP Brings New Voices to Jordan’s ICHAJ appeared first on ACOR Jordan.

Bakeries lie at the center of communal life in Jordan’s cities and towns. They mark daily rhythms and movements in countless neighborhoods. The subsidized bread they dispense is crucial to the subsistence of many of the country’s inhabitants. Yet bread’s importance is not only a product of its strictly nutritional properties. It is valued not only as a source of calories or a strategic foodstuff linked to daily consumption but as a cultural and political symbol. Loaves are frequently waved at Friday protests. Empty bags are placed next to, rather than inside, garbage containers. When a piece of bread hits the ground it is picked up, pressed to the forehead and kissed. In brief, khubz ‘arabī (Arabic—or pita—bread) holds a symbolic value that is not easily quantified. It is frequently associated with dignity, survival and sustenance. During the most recent food policy debate (2013–2015), one prominent Jordanian journalist referred to the bread subsidy that ensures the foodstuff’s availability as “the last red line” in the social pact between the government and the citizenry.

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Today, Jordan is one of the largest per capita spenders on food subsidies in the world. The vast majority of this sum is expended on khubz ‘arabī. Residents of the country are estimated to consume nearly ten million loaves a day, averaging around 90 kilograms of bread per person annually. The subsidy has been a mainstay of the Hashemite regime’s welfare provisions since the early 1970s. Although the Jordanian government has at various points subsidized a host of basic foodstuffs (frozen poultry, rice, cooking oil) and other household items (tea, coffee, cigarettes, heating oil, water), the vast majority of these undertakings have been scaled back, if not completely eliminated. Despite cutbacks to these and other social expenditures during the last 25 years, the bread subsidy has not been changed. In 2014, the government spent approximately 265 million dinars ($374.25 million) to maintain the price of 16 qirsh ($0.23) per kilogram. Why has this policy survived more than two decades of austerity and free market reform? How do the meanings with which this foodstuff has been imbued contribute to this outcome? What is subsidized bread’s “place” in the country’s social contract?

Over the last six months, I was fortunate enough to receive an ACOR-CAORC pre-doctoral fellowship to continue addressing these questions. Crucially, time as a fellow allowed me to build upon research I first began during a Fulbright grant in 2013–2014. I spent much of my time in the country observing and working in three different bakeries. These bakeries were in very different socio-economic milieus, and the time spent baking, conversing, and witnessing their role in the urban fabric was intensely fulfilling. Although untraditional in my field (comparative politics), I believe this ethnographic approach to the study of bread helped me better apprehend the foodstuff’s importance: how its availability has become closely linked to a perceived right to subsistence, why its provision is frequently described as a sacrosanct responsibility of the government.

Undoubtedly, the bread subsidy is and will remain subject to fluctuations in the global wheat market and sensitive fiscal considerations. But to analyze food policy solely through recourse to these easily quantifiable factors misses a key part of the story. Consistency in prices, the psychological comfort of feeding one’s family, escaping the specter of starvation—their import is inaccessible without access to meanings that only human actors can provide. Where international financial institutions and neoliberal technocrats see an inefficient universal subsidy distorting natural market signals, Jordanian citizens see a welfare program linked to social values and hard-earned rights, one crucial to their daily subsistence. Systems of social provision are always embedded in cultural and political contexts that shape their development. They are not easily studied by way of a dataset or from the comfort of an armchair.

Written by José Ciro Martínez, ACOR-CAORC Pre-Doctoral Fellow for 2015–2016 and Ph.D. Candidate in Politics and International Studies at the University of Cambridge. All photographs in this article were provided by and are the copyright of the author.

The post When Bread Is More than Just Bread appeared first on ACOR Jordan.

The Roman temple on the Citadel (Jabal al-Qal’a) in Amman is popularly known as the Temple of Hercules. There is no conclusive evidence that it was dedicated to Hercules, but it is securely dated by its dedicatory inscription to the term of the Roman governor Geminius Marcianus (A.D. 161–166). The temple is on the middle terrace of the Citadel within a colonnaded temenos or courtyard. It was oriented along an east-west axis with its facade to the east. The temenos was once connected to the Roman city below by a monumental staircase. The temple had a hexastyle (six columned) facade on a podium measuring 43 x 27 m. The height of the columns, including the bases, is 13.5 m. Each column consists of five or six drums, each weighing up to 11 tons. Detailed analysis of the material remains indicates that while the temple may original have been planned to have columns all around, it was probably not actually built that way.

The ACOR-directed restoration of the temple began in 1992 under the supervision of Chrysanthos Kannelopoulos and engineer Mohammed Tayyem, with funds from the United States Agency for International Development (USAID).

The temple on Jabal al-Qal’a is the most poorly preserved Roman temple in the area. Most of the material of the temple was already robbed out before the earthquake of A.D. 746/47, when the remnants of the structure, including the four remaining columns at the front, collapsed. Over the next nine centuries, the building of fortifications on the Citadel resulted in the reuse of more of its material. It would therefore be impossible to restore the whole monument.

Restoration work focused on the only three areas which were restorable: the portico of the temple, the northwest corner of the platform or podium on which the temple rested, and part of the west temenos colonnade. Fortunately, the temple had a numbering system carved on the drums of the colonnade by the ancient builders; this made it possible to understand the original placement of the drums. Three columns of the temple were found to be preserved and these were restored. One section of the inscribed architrave was restored in its original place as determined from the sequence of the inscription.

The fourth shaft from the south, shaft K, was erected in is original position. Its bottom drum, although preserved, was replaced by a replica. The ancient drum has large cracks, severely flaked edges, and cavities—all caused by the excessive stress during the tilting and oscillation of the shaft in the earthquake. A rough cylinder with eight bosses or knobs, to ease lifting, was shaped out of a block measuring 1.7 x 1.7 x 3.2 m and weighing 27 tons.

The manufacture of the four new drums and their final carving in place is considered one of the major achievements of ACOR’s restoration project. Most of the material was carved with modern equipment, but one drum was shaped from the rectangular block mainly with chisels and hammers. The drum, with a diameter of 1.6 m and a height of 2.1 m, was roughly shaped from a rectangular block by six stone cutters in 40 days.

The restored columns of the Great Temple of Jabal al-Qal’a, together with the sections of the inscribed architrave, now create a focal point for the skyline of Amman. Thanks to ACOR, the capital of Jordan, deprived of the plethora of columns that one can see at other sites such as Jerash, has a reminder of her ancient glory.

ACOR’s Amman temple restoration project was published in C. Kanellopoulos, The Great Temple of Amman I: The Architecture (1994) and in Anthi Koutsoukou, Kenneth W. Russell, Mohammed Najjar, and Ahmed Momani, The Great Temple of Amman II: The Excavations (1997).

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