Although racialization has been theorized as an embodied, experiential, and everyday phenomenon (Fanon 2008; Fassin 2011), there is a tendency to locate racial ideologies in texts and images without attention to their specific sites of articulation. Yet if we wish to understand how concepts travel and adapt to new environments amid historical change, we should investigate how ideological notions are (re)produced as public signs in situated interaction (Volosinov, 1973). This presentation draws on participant-observation fieldwork with Iraqi Christian refugees working in a basement kitchen of a small restaurant in Amman, Jordan to illustrate the conditions under which the laboring body becomes an index of racialized difference. In Iraq, there is a longstanding association between Christians and work in the service industry, which reflects a history of internal rural-to-urban migration along with Ba’athist state propaganda that highlighted the loyalty of Christian national subjects. Meanwhile, in Jordan, economic relations are structured through interactional routines that read bodily signs of difference as indexes of ethno-nationally bounded characteristics and capabilities. And in being displaced from Iraq to Jordan, ideological signs of compliance and loyalty long associated with Christians as national subjects are increasingly concatenated with bodily signs of demanding and polluting physical labor. This emerging stress on the raced body as an index of character and capabilities reprises the historical origin of race as a heuristic device for sorting out workers in the underdeveloped peripheries of the capitalist world system (Trouillot, 2005). And this parallel to the past could suggest why already-existing sectarian distinctions are taking on an increasingly racialized character in a region that has been violently incorporated into the periphery of contemporary U.S. empire. References: Fanon, Franz (2008). Black Skin, White Masks. New York: Grove Press. Fassin, Didier (2011). “Racialization: How to do race with bodies.” In A Companion to the Anthropology of the Body and Embodiment. Edited by Frances E. Mascia-Lee. Pp. 419-434. Hoboken: Blackwell Publishing Trouillot, Michel-Rolph (2005). “The North Atlantic Universals.” In The Modern World-System in the Longue Duree. Edited by Immanuel Wallerstein. Pp. 105-108. New York: Routledge. Voloshinov, V.N. (1973). Marxism and the Philosophy of Language. New York: Seminar Press.