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Sensing the State: Baking Political Authority in Contemporary Jordan
Abstract
Drawing on oral histories and archival work, this paper explores how the Hashemite Kingdom’s bread subsidy reconfigured the habits and practices through which the citizenry fed themselves and their families. It asks and seeks to explore how this welfare program altered social relations while implementing an entirely different aesthetic regime of ordering. The set of transformations described not only modified gastronomic routines and patterns of subsistence; they also introduced new modes of sensorial engagement with conduits of state power. Like roads and electricity, bakeries took root in the corporeal immediacies of individuals and neighborhoods, while also linking them to a broader public, what Jacques Rancière terms a “community of sense.” Bakeries quickly became crucial nodes in Jordan’s welfare infrastructure, fashioning attachments through which a heterogeneous public was fostered. Building upon 20 months of ethnographic work, the paper then turns to a consideration of the ways the bakery molds a set of embodied attributes crucial to Jordanian political subjectivity. By carving out space and time and fusing daily routines under a particular rubric of intelligibility, the bakery and the bread subsidy induce particular modes of experience, ‘felt’ individually but produced socially, in what I will term stately sensations. The result is a citizenry not interpellated by nationalism or monarchical ideology but conjoined by quite tangible patterns of consumption and commensality. The bakery does more than ensure subsistence. It works to naturalize the state by making it seem part and parcel of everyday life, cultivating stately sensations, and through rather delectable means.
Discipline
Anthropology
Geographic Area
Jordan
Sub Area
Ethnography