The former capital of the ancient Nabataean Empire, the city of Petra serves today as the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan’s most popular tourist destination. Tourism constitutes the lifeblood of three tribal communities that live in and around Petra Archaeological Park: the Bidul of Umm Sayhoun, the Layathna of Wadi Musa, and the Ammarin of Bayda. Most members of these communities rely on tourism-sector revenues to make a living (Reeves 2023). Spanning formal and informal economies, local involvement in Petra’s tourism industry includes selling souvenirs and rides on horses, donkeys, and camels to visitors, owning and staffing hotels and restaurants in Wadi Musa, and working for the Petra Development and Tourism Region Authority (PDTRA), which governs the archaeological park and its surrounding communities.

The powerful revenue-generating opportunities associated with visitor flows to Petra have unleashed considerable competition among local groups seeking to secure greater access to the city’s tourism economy. This competition manifests, for example, in conflicting narratives propagated by local tribespeople who seek to legitimize their own participation in the tourism sector while calling into question the work of rival tribes. Both the Bidul and the Layathna leverage their history in the Petra region for this purpose. The Bidul, for example, rely on oral histories that convey the tribe’s physical connection to the city as former inhabitants of its caves (Reeves 2020). On the other hand, the Layathna point to their role in helping to drive Ottoman forces out of the Petra region during the 1916–1918 Great Arab Revolt as evidence of their importance as the city’s protectors (Reeves 2022). These narratives demonstrate the importance of the past as a legitimizing force undergirding present-day claims to Petra’s tourism revenues.

In this essay, I demonstrate that the relationship between the past and present is bidirectional.^[1] Factors related to tribal geographies in Petra today impact stories about the Bidul’s and Layathna’s past to the same extent that the oral histories of the two groups exercise a (de)legitimating effect on their present-day tourism-related work. I reveal the effect present realities exercise on the past through examining the efforts of Bidul and Layathna tribespeople to cast doubt on each other’s historical connection to the region by propagating narratives about contemporary places in Petra. These narratives reveal that Bidul and Layathna efforts to prove that they are indigenous to the Petra region involve not only historical arguments but also claims based on the two tribes’ current positions in the city’s political economy.

Places and the Past

Places, connected by nature to present-day realities on the ground, become instruments in local stories that serve to connect some of the region’s current residents to Petra’s past while erasing others from it. The Layathna propagate this dynamic by leveraging the intertribal distribution of territory in Petra today to legitimize their presence in the region while delegitimizing that of the Bidul. The following narrative articulated by Abu Saif al-Nasrat^[2] accomplishes this dual purpose:

“After 1900, some individuals from the Bidul came and settled in the caves. They deny this reality through different claims, such as that they have origins [here]. They do this in order to give some type of legitimacy to their presence. Their presence is very recent. It does not exceed 120 years. To the contrary, the Layathna were mentioned in the year 1300. There are historical sources, not just talk…. The Bidul say that they belong to the Howeitat [a large tribe in southern Jordan], but the Howeitat refuse them completely. The Bidul are different from them. Every once in a while, they spread a new narrative. However, you have to look at it logically. In any place, if you have lived there for a long time — in the tribal system, this is reflected in the tribe’s power and property. You see? Your strength as a tribe is measured in power and property. Where is your land? They have none. The land that they reside on now, the village that they have settled in — all of that land belongs originally to the Layathna.”

Abu Saif’s rhetorical inquiry into the location of the Bidul’s territory today succinctly casts doubt on the tribe’s historical presence in Petra. At first glance, this line of argumentation is convincing. After all, the Bidul do not own territory within Petra today. The areas the tribe claims as its historical domain are located within the state-owned confines of Petra Archaeological Park (Reeves 2023). Furthermore, Umm Sayhoun — the village adjacent to Petra that the government built for the Bidul after removing the group from the ancient city’s caves in the 1980s — sits on land taken from the Layathna via eminent domain (Reeves 2022).

Yet, these details constitute precisely the nuances that place-based argumentation covers up. Abu Saif’s narration projects the present into the past without alteration, painting a static picture of Petra’s tribal history in the process. For this reason, there is no space in Abu Saif’s narrative for the tremendous changes the region witnessed with respect to the intertribal balance of power over the past 150 years alone. For instance, the Bidul’s deletion from Petra’s history by virtue of their lack of territory today neglects the tribe’s tremendous power in the 19th century, when Sheikh Imgaibel Abu Zaitoun al-Bidul’s dominance over the Petra region was entrenched to the degree that he imposed a tax on travelers wishing to enter the rose-red city (Reeves 2021). Moreover, the projection of the present into the past presents a misleading image of the historical role of land in southern Jordan. To the degree that fixed, territory-based identities existed before the extension of state sovereignty to the area in the final decades of Ottoman rule, they were associated predominantly with small farming villages — such as Wadi Musa — that dotted the ranges of large nomadic and semi-nomadic tribes, such as the Howeitat.

Considering the Bidul’s own status as a formerly semi-nomadic tribe, the salience of place-based claims in their own legitimacy-contesting narratives is anachronistic as well. Abu Muhammad al-Bidul articulated one such argument:

“If you go to our graves in Petra, inside Petra, beyond the Snake Monument, there is nobody from Wadi Musa buried there. What does that demonstrate? That demonstrates that not one of them was an inhabitant of that area. That’s the biggest piece of evidence. If you asked someone [from Wadi Musa], ‘your grandfather, where is he buried in Petra?’ He’ll go like this: [shrugs]. Because he was not buried in Petra!”

Beyond the graves of their ancestors, other place-based arguments that Bidul tribespeople employ involve their intimate knowledge of Petra’s geography and the presence of human remains in some of the city’s caves — bones that the Bidul allege belong to tribal ancestors who died in a 19th-century cholera epidemic. As was the case with Abu Saif’s observations about Bidul land ownership, Abu Muhammad’s point concerning the lack of Layathna remains within Petra Archaeological Park once again instrumentalizes present realities to cast doubt upon another tribe’s history in the ancient city.

Conclusion

Outside the immediate context of competition over tourism revenues in Petra, Bidul and Layathna narratives that place the present in the past indicate that history itself changes as the circumstances in which stories about the past are narrated evolve. Elsewhere in Jordan, anthropologist Andrew Shryock (1997) observed a related transformation in the Balga region, where educated Abbadi tribesmen had begun using the written word as a means to “formalize” contentious, theretofore orally transmitted aspects of their ancestors’ fraught relationship with the powerful Adwan tribe. While the often harmful employment of placed-based narratives is a contemporary cause for concern in Petra, their use also points to a possible step to address the destructive effects of intertribal competition in the city’s tourism economy. Given the importance of the past to Petra’s contemporary political-economic landscape, providing a venue — such as a museum dedicated to oral history — for the region’s tribes to propagate stories about their forefathers in a non-contentious manner would enhance the legitimacy of all of the local communities that call Petra home today.

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References

Reeves, N. 2020. “Shaykhs and Tribal Entrepreneurs: Tribal Hierarchies, Government Development Policies, and the Struggle over Representation in Petra’s Tourism Economy.” Oxford Middle East Review 4.1: https://omerjournal.com/2020/07/03/shaykhs-and-tribal-entrepreneurs-tribal-hierarchies-governmental-development-policies-and-the-struggle-over-representation-in-petras-tourism-economy/.

Reeves, N. 2021. “Erasing History: Rival Tribal Narratives, Official Regime Discourse, and the Exclusionary Debate over Indigeneity in Petra, Jordan.” ESIA Dean’s Scholars Journal, 28 September 2021. https://blogs.gwu.edu/esiadeansscholarsjournal/2022/08/01/erasing-history-rival-tribal-narratives-official-regime-discourse-and-the-exclusionary-debate-over-indigeneity-in-petra-jordan/.

Reeves, N. 2022. “Bayn al-Māḍī wa-l-Ḥāḍir: Hikāyāt Abnāʾ Qabīlatay al-Bidūl wa-l-Layāthna al-Tārīkhiyya wa-Ahmiyatuhā al-Mustamira fī-l-ʿAṣr al-Rāhin” [“Between Past and Present: The Oral Histories of the Bidul and Layathna Tribes and Their Ongoing Importance in the Present Day”]. Abhath Al-Yarmouk: Humanities and Social Sciences Series 31.1: 1–23. https://journals.yu.edu.jo/ayhss/Issues/Vol31No12022.pdf.

Reeves, N. 2023. “Bringing Order to Petra’s Tourism Economy.” Tourism Cases. https://doi.org/10.1079/tourism.2023.0010.

Shyrock, A. 1997. Nationalism and the Genealogical Imagination: Oral History and Textual Authority in Tribal Jordan. Berkeley: University of California Press.

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Notes

^[1] My research in Petra was generously funded through an ACOR-CAORC Predoctoral Fellowship.

^[2] Abu Saif al-Nasrat is a pseudonym, as are all of the names of people quoted in this article.

Nicolas Seth Reeves is pursuing a dual master’s degree in international development and political science from Sciences Po Paris and Freie Universität Berlin. His bachelor’s thesis (George Washington University) on the impact of state-led tourism development on tribal communities in Petra resulted in publications in the Oxford Middle East Review (2020), Columbia Journal of Politics and Society (2020), and Abhath al-Yarmouk: Humanities and Social Sciences (Arabic, 2022). Reeves spent a year in Egypt as a 2019–2020 Center for Arabic Study Abroad (CASA) Fellow at the American University in Cairo, where he completed native-level language courses in Modern Standard Arabic, Arabic literature, and Egyptian dialect. With the generous support of an ACOR-CAORC Fellowship, his research examines how pandemic-induced decreases in international visitors to Jordan impacted tourism-reliant communities living in the vicinity of Petra, Wadi Rum, and Umm Qais and how local, national, and international stakeholders influence strategies as these communities pursue and defend their political and economic interests.

The post Places and the Past: The Bidul, the Layathna, and Narratives about Indigeneity in Petra appeared first on ACOR Jordan.

Romani people in Jordan, by some estimates, are as numerous as 70,000. Present in the Arab region in some capacity since the 8th century, Romani characters appear recurrently in literary works by luminous authors from the early centuries of Islam and into the medieval period, including al-Jahiz, al-Harriri, Ibn al-Muqaffa’, and Ibn Daniyal. Romanies appear prominently in Orientalist travelogues in the early part of the 20^th century, as well as in works by Arab authors. For Mahmoud Darwish, often considered to be the greatest modern Arab poet, the figure of the landless, wandering Romani became a metaphor by which to romanticize the Palestinian refugee crisis. He wrote in a famous poem, “Violins weep with Romanies going to Andalusia / Violins weep for Arabs leaving Andalusia.”

In Jordan, Romanies were a favorite theme of Mustafa Wahbi Al-Tal (also known by his pen name, “Arar”), the early 20^th-century poet and one of the architects of Jordanian identity. Prone to raucous depictions of revelry evoking the medieval Sufi poets (but without their spiritual double entendres), Arar would often write of his benders in Romani tent encampments around his home city of Irbid which was then a small town. Like his Andalusian contemporary Federico García Lorca, Arar found in Romani people a romanticized purity: a discursive site from which to critique modernity and what he thought to be its hypocrisies. Arar’s son, Wasfi Al-Tal, who became a prominent Jordanian political figure, was also an early patron of Abdo Musa, a Romani rabab master and singer who was arguably the first authentically Jordanian musical voice. In the 1980s, the Romani bouzouk player Jamil Al-Aas, along with his wife, Salwa Haddad, popularized what is today one of the most widely loved folk songs in Arabic: “Wen a’ Ramallah.” The song is Palestinian and its performers Palestinian/Jordanian, but what is not popularly known is that it is most likely of Romani origins, as Romanies themselves attest; it is an invocation of a bygone era of Romani wandering through Palestine and the Levantine region. 

Yet, in spite of this continuity of an over a millennia-long presence and cultural contributions, Romanies remain strangers to mainstream Jordanian consciousness. I have made theoretical arguments elsewhere on possible reasons for such an omission, so I will not repeat these arguments here. Rather, for the remainder of this essay, I will offer a basic ethnological sketch of the various Romani groups in Jordan.

For a start, the ethnonym “Romani” is a polite umbrella term for referring to an array of groups that are related by language, history, or sometimes mere affinity (more on this shortly). In English, the better-known term is “Gypsy;” but that is an uncomfortable lexical choice that carries with it centuries of racism and abuse. In Arabic, the literary term is al-ghajar, but the more colloquial ethnonym in the Levantine region is al-nawar; a situation that corresponds to the Romani/Gypsy divide in English. Because of how and what demographic data are collected in Jordan, it is impossible to have a detailed quantitative discussion of Romani life in the country. The population estimate of 70,000 cited earlier was reported to me by one Fateh Abdo Musa, a Romani politician (and son of musician Abdo Musa) who has for many years attempted to form a unified Romani political bloc and who has run unsuccessfully for a seat in the Jordanian parliament several times. In reality, the total number of Romanies in Jordan is unknown; it could be possibly lower, or quite plausibly much higher.

Even less known are the population dynamics of Romani sub-groups, clans, and tribes. This is, again, mostly because of the reluctance of the Jordanian government to collect ethnicized data. But there is another problem here. Romanies in Jordan are indicative of a much wider tendency in Arab/Islamic society that historically feigned ambiguity in various areas of life that later underwent examinations of scientific exactitude in the 20^th century. Some such areas, argues the Arabist Thomas Bauer, included sexuality, Qur’anic interpretation, linguistics, religious skepticism, and more. The move away from ambiguity and toward standardized categories (and consequent intolerances), argues the Bauer, has largely been a result of the interventions of European powers that were for centuries engulfed by the Catholic dogma of un roi, une loi, une foi. I argue in my upcoming book on Romani kinship in Palestine that ethnic groups and boundaries were also historically ambiguous in the region and that presently ambiguous Romani formations are a relic of this premodern past. This being said, the two main Romani groups in Jordan are Doms and Turkmen, although each one is then subdivided into various groups, some of which often overlap with non-Romani lineages.

Doms are the largest Romani group in the Middle East (Fig. 1). Dom is a cognate term with rom; both terms for “man” in Domari and Romani languages, respectively—the former being the language of Doms, and the latter the language family of European Roma. Thus, there is a clear linguistic connection between Doms and Romani peoples of Europe. Domari is largely no longer spoken in Jordan, with the exception of the Daqdaqa tribe of Doms (Fig. 2). The name of this Dom tribe most likely refers to the Arabic daq “tattoo,” a prominent feature in the culture of this group. Most Doms in Jordan are refugees from Palestine, although very few use such language themselves to describe their fortunes. Having arrived in the thousands with the Palestinian exoduses of 1948 and 1967, Doms, in this sense, constitute an integral part of the Palestinian story in Jordan.

A second Romani group that is prominent in Jordan is the Turkmen, a Turkish-speaking group with likely neither linguistic nor ethnic ties to other Romani peoples (Fig. 3). However, the consensus in the scholarly field of Romani studies is that Romani identity is bound not only by shared ethnicity but also by affinity, and the situation in Jordan shows that Turkmen and Daqdaqa Doms settle in the same neighborhoods whenever possible. Although sometimes professing their distinction from one another, the two also cooperate on practical matters: conflict resolution, wedding celebrations, and political life. That is to say, Doms are always invited to Turkmen weddings and vice versa, members of one group will turn to the other group’s sheikhs when there is a conflict in the community, and both are represented in Jordanian politics by Fateh Abdo Musa.Most importantly, perhaps, both Doms and Turkmen (with the exception of Doms from Gaza) are Jordanian citizens, meaning that these populous communities with a historic continuity in the region constitute part of the Jordanian political body and are also part and parcel of the human index of what we call varyingly and at various strata as the bilad al-sham or the Levant, the Arab world, and the Middle East.

Arpan Roy was the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) fellow at the American Center of Research for 2022–2023. He is an incoming Marie Skłodowska-Curie Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Humanities at the Universitat Pompeu Fabra in Barcelona, Spain. He earned his PhD in anthropology from Johns Hopkins University in 2021. His book manuscript, tentatively titled Relative Strangers: Romani Kinship and Palestinian Difference, is currently under review with the University of Toronto Press. He is also co-editing the first book project of Insaniyyat, the society of Palestinian anthropologists. He has published articles in Anthropological Theory, CITY, Social Anthropology, and Jerusalem Quarterly. 

The post Toward a Romani Ethnology of Jordan appeared first on ACOR Jordan.

“Heritage is Jordan’s oil.” This statement, which I heard from heritage experts, development workers, and Jordanian government officials, has come to be the most captivating way for me to summarize my PhD project. With the support of a Harrell Family Fellowship granted by the American Center of Research, I conducted field research in the early summer of 2021 to further investigate what it means when the past becomes a central resource for building futures.

Heritage has indeed opened up markets in Jordan, and the many wonderful sites scattered over the country continue to mesmerize tourists from all over the world. As a political scientist and historian, I explore the political economy of heritage in Jordan, specifically by looking at its links with development projects. The core idea underlying most contemporary heritage development projects is that when heritage sites provide income revenue to the people living near the sites, these people will value the site more and work to protect and preserve it. This, in turn, assures the sustainability of these “resources from the past” for future generations. The American Center’s USAID-funded Sustainable Cultural Heritage Through Engagement of Local Communities Project (SCHEP) has been at the forefront of this type of development initiative in Jordan, building on a legacy of community archaeology projects such as the Madaba Plains Project and Umm El-Jimal.

This idea of value creation and preservation is very interesting, but heritage scholars have been reluctant to highlight the economic value of heritage in their research. Many scholars worry that the commodification of heritage, and its increased use in the tourism market, will be harmful to the cultural value in the long run. Researchers such as Paul Burtenshaw have argued that this reluctance has led to a dearth in heritage scholarship. Regardless of personal opinions on this matter, the economic importance of heritage is clearly growing and thus calls for further research.

In my research I employ ethnographic methods, in combination with historical research, to look closely at this economic-value creation. My research has led me to visit heritage sites big and small in Jordan, and I conducted over ten months of ethnographic research in Madaba, looking at the impact heritage development has had in the city (Fig. 1).

Contrary to many heritage scholars, I think it is problematic to think of heritage as a timeless aspect of human’s engagement with the past. Since “heritage” as a term is relatively young—it only started to be used to refer to culturally significant remnants of the past in the 20th century—it is important to look at the conditions of possibility for the concept to play such an important role in contemporary society. Heritage is now used to build economic and political futures in Jordan, but these practices are shaped by the histories of archaeologists working in the region, of development projects intervening in places, and of colonial understandings of civilization and history.

One aspect that struck me in many of the heritage development projects, is the recurring complaint that Jordanians do not care enough for their heritage. This lament was uttered by Jordanians and foreigners alike in my conversations with them, and it points at the problematic definition of the concept of heritage. While it might be true that some archaeological sites have been beleaguered by vandalism or a lack of investments, it is equally true that most Jordanians have demonstrated a wonderful sense of care and pride in their traditions and histories. There is no denying the importance of tradition in the consumption of coffee, the hosting of guests, the richness of the language, and the abundant diversity of religious practices that suffuse daily life in Jordan (Fig. 2).

The complaint that there is not sufficient care for heritage points to a contestation surrounding the definition of heritage and the ownership of traditions and histories. Expert knowledge tends to alienate people from places suffused with histories, as Allison Mickel (2021) has shown in her salient study of labor practices in archaeology. Sites in Madaba that used to be part of everyday lives, intertwined in relations between past and present, lost their connection to the inhabitants when they were gated off. Sites were then described only in relation to “big events” in a shared history understood by tourists, but their relations to local histories often never made it to the signage (Fig. 3).

The lament that Jordanians do not care about their heritage also has a worrying colonial ring to it. During the destructive times of colonial conquest, Europeans often denoted their colonial subjects as living without a sense of history. During the British occupation of Egypt, Balfour defended the occupation by claiming that it was the English who knew the history of past civilizations in Egypt the best. Their superior knowledge of pharaonic times legitimized, according to Balfour, the presence of English troops on Egyptian soil (Said 1978). Similar arguments were used by France and Belgium to haul important artifacts to imperial museums. Precisely what is considered valuable and to whom clearly has far-reaching effects.

When heritage becomes the resource powering futures, it is crucial to look closely at what aspects of heritage are emancipatory and what aspects alienating. Many archaeologists have been actively rethinking their projects to address these alienating discourses, and heritage development workers have followed suit. A critical study of heritage, and its use in political economy, is a possible way out of lingering colonial ways of thinking. Together with the important work of Abu-Khafajah and Miqdadi (2019) as well as Meskell and Luke (2021), my research places Jordan firmly at the forefront of the growing research on heritage development. It is my hope that my research will contribute to the compassionate work of archaeologists and stress the emancipatory role history can play for the future. 

References

Abu-Khafajah, S., and R. Miqdadi. 2019. “Prejudice, Military Intelligence, and Neoliberalism: Examining the Local within Archaeology and Heritage Oractices in Jordan.” Contemporary Levant 4 (2): 92–106.

Burtenshaw, P. 2014. “Mind the Gap: Cultural and Economic Values in Archaeology.” Public Archaeology 13 (1–3): 48–58.

Jarrar, N. 2021. “A Struggle against Privatization and Neoliberalism.” The International Committee for the Conservation of the Industrial Heritage Bulletin 91: 12–13.

Meskell, L., and C. Luke. 2021. “Developing Petra: UNESCO, the World Bank, and America in the Desert.” Contemporary Levant 6 (2): 126–140.

Mickel, A. 2021. Why Those Who Shovel Are Silent: A History of Local Archaeological Knowledge and Labor. Louisville, CO: University Press of Colorado.

Said, E. W. 1978. Orientalism. New York: Pantheon Books. 

Charlotte Vekemans obtained her BA and MA in history at KU Leuven and her MS in conflict and development studies at Ghent University, Belgium. She published several articles on Belgian colonial rural policy while working at the History Department of KU Leuven and then moved on to earn a PhD in political science, specializing in heritage development, at Ghent University. Her research interests lie in heritage studies, politics of history, development politics, governmentality and new materialism, focusing on the integration of heritage in development projects in the Middle East, specifically in Jordan. She is also active as a teaching assistant for the joint BA in social sciences at Vrije Universiteit Brussel and Ghent University.

The post Exploring the Political Economy of Cultural Heritage appeared first on ACOR Jordan.

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.

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 Landscape of Research in Jordan and in the Arab Region: Challenges, Transformations, Prospects

An ACOR online lecture by
Dr. Seteney Shami (Arab Council for the Social Sciences)
Delivered via Zoom on May 17, 2021

Simultaneous translation into Arabic was provided by Ala Abusharif/Pegasus Events and Conference Preparation.

About the Lecture:

What are the patterns and trends, constraints and potentials in current research contexts and practices in Jordan and across the Arab region? This presentation will address these questions from three angles:

• The changing themes and priorities in research in Jordan and on Jordan;
• The present and future of research in the region in the light of unfolding crises;
• The response by research communities and institutions to the heightened demands for new knowledge for new audiences.

Overall, the landscape of research across the region appears bleak, with deteriorating infrastructures, decreasing resources, shrinking public spheres and restricted mobility. Despite all of this, research continues to take place, and there are lively online discussions and burgeoning portals for the production and dissemination of analysis and commentary on the politics, economics, and social transformations of the region. This outflow does not simply represent a technological leap or a quantitative increase. It also presents a challenge to longstanding academic institutions and practices and blurs the boundaries between academia and media, between academia and activism, and between the institutional and the interstitial.

In this way, current challenges to the social sciences and humanities, and to knowledge production in general, are not only practical or logistical but also epistemological and methodological. The presentation will discuss the implications for: higher education and research institutions; the possibilities emerging from new actors, interstitial collectivities, and thought communities; the emergence of new audiences for new types of knowledge; and the changing connections between academia, activism and policy. The groundwork for the needed shifts has already been laid through critical, feminist, and decolonial approaches in the social sciences and humanities. I argue that academia needs to take up the challenge of the times—build on solid foundations of the past but look toward a future which will necessarily present a reconfigured institutional landscape of knowledge production.

We hope to see you again soon for future ACOR lectures!

Related Links:

The Arab Council for the Social Sciences Website

2021–2022 ACOR Fellowship Awardees

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المركز الأمريكي للأبحاث يقدم وبكل فخر

:مشهد البحث في الأردن والمنطقة العربية”
 “التحديات، والتحوّلات، والآفاق

محاضرة عامة 
تلقيها الدكتورة ستناي شامي (المجلس العربي للعلوم الاجتماعية)
يوم الإثنين الموافق 17 أيار/مايو

:عن المحاضرة 

نأمل ان نراكم قريباً ومحاضرة جديدة مع أكور

Related Links:

The Arab Council for the Social Sciences Website

2021–2022 ACOR Fellowship and Scholarship Awardees

The post مشهد البحث في الأردن والمنطقة العربية: التحديات، والتحوّلات، والآفاق appeared first on ACOR Jordan.

Morgen, can you tell us a little more about yourself and what brings you to Jordan?

I’m a student in the joint MD/PhD program at the University of California, San Diego, specializing in medical anthropology. My larger dissertation project examines systems of reproductive healthcare provision for displaced populations and considers how experiences of forced migration influence reproductive subjectivity and decision-making. My research in Jordan builds upon prior work with the Syrian refugee community in San Diego while also focusing on communicative processes and interactions facilitated by and within the humanitarian healthcare sector.

More generally, my ethnographic fieldwork and clinical practice are informed by the paradigm of reproductive justice and a commitment to addressing health disparities through an intersectional feminist framework. I’m especially passionate about integrating anthropological insights into clinical practice and health policy through interdisciplinary collaboration. After completing my PhD and MD, I plan to pursue a residency in obstetrics and gynecology and seek a joint appointment at a research university as a practicing physician and professor in the social sciences.

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

The birth of anthropology as a discipline was deeply linked to Euro-American colonialism and imperial rule, a history that has shaped both our methodological approaches and some of the most foundational assumptions of our scholarship—even basic questions like who or what is appropriate for an anthropologist to study. Over the last several decades, feminist ethnographers have sought to radically transform and decolonize anthropology by integrating insights and methods developed by critical theorists in their study of race, gender, and social structures. It’s a very exciting time to be a student and witness these innovative efforts to reinvent the discipline.

Do you have a favorite cultural place in Jordan? If so, what is special about it?

When traveling, there’s a tendency to seek out “authentic” cultural experiences, whether this means consuming “exotic” foods or watching a “traditional” dance performance. However, my graduate work in anthropology and critical gender studies has emphasized that “culture” encompasses much more than symbols, practices, and performances—it’s equally present (and reproduced) within everyday interactions. So I think my favorite cultural activity would be chatting and sharing a meal with friends at one of our favorite restaurants (Khal is always a popular choice).

Morgen A. Chalmiers is a Ph.D. candidate in psychological and medical anthropology at the University of California, San Diego and an M.D. student in the Medical Scientist Training Program at UC San Diego School of Medicine. She is the recipient of an ACOR-CAORC Pre-Doctoral Fellowship 2020–2021. Her anthropological research broadly examines women’s experiences of reproductive healthcare using the tools and theoretical lens of psychological anthropology. She works with a collaborative team across the UC campuses to conduct community-engaged, multi-sited research on resettled refugee women’s access to reproductive healthcare. She is passionate about integrating anthropological insights into clinical practice and health policy through interdisciplinary collaboration. To read more about her work and publications, visit morgenchalmiers.com.

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