This panel seeks to bring together scholars who think about the relationship between social movements, houses, and the built environment. Housing is widely considered to be a human necessity—if not a human right. Yet in the context of ethnic conflict, imperial wars of aggression and the resulting influxes of refugees, many across the region struggle to find housing and (if successful) they struggle to have their claims acknowledged and respected. Even where people have succeeded in asserting claims to housing, they often find it difficult to expand their dwellings as their families grow. Thus housing, with its tendency to take up space, expand and impinge, often becomes a site of contestation in both urban and rural contexts as different groups vie for control of space. Such conflict may arise along ethnic or sectarian lines or it may array the state and its planners against certain categories of citizens or non-citizens. This conflict often comes to shape not just the house but also the street and the larger built environment as an arena of contestation, exclusion and even violence.
Yet people do not merely encounter these spaces pragmatically. They are also ideologically and morally charged. This panel will look at houses and the larger built environment as both material and conceptual domains, as places that make citizenship claims and also mobilize resources across transnational networks. Panelists suggest that claims made by political activists calling for greater political transparency or the rights to labor and livelihood seek reforms that do not destroy, but undergird this ethos of the house. By analyzing social movements in relationship to homes, we ask: what are the politics of housing? What role does the house play in anchoring discourses of rights that are articulated in the idiom of kinship? How does the built environment interface with arguments over the legitimacy of the state? How do different social actors (planners, squatters, activists, the law-abiding middle class) approach the ethics of housing? What is the larger significance of discourses around informality, ‘randomness’ and cleanliness in the Arab city? In so doing, we aim to redress early work in anthropology, such as Bourdieu's Kabyle house, that focuses on reading social behaviors off arrangements of intimate forms of dwelling by arguing instead that the space of the home articulates forms of political and social action that reach well beyond its threshold.
In the past hundred years, rural Jordan has seen tremendous changes in the nature of its primary modes of dwelling. The past is commonly associated with the goat hair tent, a form of women’s wealth and a token of nomadic, Bedouin identity and a certain kind of masculinity: the kind of man whose home has no door. In contrast to this heritage—alternately viewed as romantic or backwards—the present and future seemingly belong to the concrete house, built with migrant labor, industrial commodities and, in many cases, bank loans. In place of a simple gendered bifurcation of the tent into masculine and feminine aspects, such homes seemingly provide a separate time and place for everything.
Yet I argue that these ostensible changes to the material infrastructure of Jordanian modes of dwelling are mitigated by the fixity of the ‘spoken home,’ which continues to reproduce the household (and by extension the family it contains) as a corporate body. It supports a resilient mode of ‘house politics,’ which has survived this transition intact, constituting and legitimating particular modes of publicity and domesticity. Ironically, the house-as-body constitutes such a powerful chronotopic frame that many Jordanians see continuity where none exists, back-projecting certain rigid notions of gender onto a more diverse and variegated past. This raises the question: how much more transformation of the local political economy would be required to upset this discursive framing of the home and the regime of gender relations it entails?
This paper analyzes the restoration of Jordan’s UN Dana Biosphere Reserve cottages for eco-tourism and home-building in neighboring village Qadisiyah as competing land projects. Whereas a multi-million dollar U.S. Aid endowment restores Dana’s houses as a “heritage” village for a tourist economy, families in Qadisiyah build houses slowly with income from provisional labor to shore up a familial future. Each aesthetic act manifests economic and political networks in tension. The paper makes the case for provincializing environmentalism, for thinking about global ecology movements in relation to other unauthorized, transnational economies that do work with land.
Throughout 2011 and 2012, Jordan witnessed an unprecedented number of demonstrations and other forms of popular protests as part of the so-called Arab Spring. Apart from those that sought concrete demands—such as salary raises, subsidies, and benefits—most protests were against fasād (corruption), a phenomenon widely considered pervasive in Jordan. Indeed, for most Jordanians, fasād is the symptom and the name of all the ills of society and state. More specifically, fasād is the reason why public debt has risen from $8 billion to $23 billion (72% of GDP) within 10 years, without any palpable improvement in the quality of life. It is the reason the promise of development never materialized; the reason the usual means of social mobility such as education and commerce no longer achieve that end; the reason some people are able to accrue wealth and political power while others suffer. Here, al-fāsidīn (the corrupt) are responsible for average Jordanians’ individual and collective misery. In a sense, it was their otherwise inexplicable fortunes that explained ordinary Jordanians’ otherwise inexplicable misfortunes.
This presentation will discuss the politics and ethics of public accusations of fasād directed at state officials and the King as manifested in the chants and slogans of the residents of Ḥay al-Ṭafāyleh. This tribal neighborhood of 30K, located in central Amman, across the valley from the Royal Court was home to a vibrant popular movement (Ḥirāk) that led other movements in chanting transgressive slogans against the King. The presentation will map the movement’s politics of speech onto the spatial trajectories of its protests to outline logic of “homeness” that undergirded its performance. I argue that the protestors considered the neighborhood their home in relation to which the Royal Court stood as the King’s home. Chanting daring slogans against the King outside his “home” indexed “fearlessness” as the key virtue of their masculinity.
In this paper, I examine relatively new spaces or uses of space in Jordan and their gendered implications. Drawing on two ethnographic cases, I trace spatial reconfigurations enabled by gendered transformations that have been precipitated by increased education, migration and attendant socio-economic transformations. In the first case, I examine the work trajectories of young women who migrate to Amman for employment. Most of these young women live in female dormitories for several years and in some cases for as much as a decade. I consider the implications of dormitory as home, as well as the re-configuration of links to home communities over time. Secondly, I will analyze the ways in which relatively new spaces of consumption in Amman, namely cafes, restaurants and malls, create a space for single young men and women to meet and court each other in the age of a marriage crisis. These spaces of courtship at times bypass or delay the making of marriages by families in the space of the home. Ultimately, I seek to bring these cases into conversation with the scholarship on houses and housing in Jordan, and particularly the notion of bayt (house) as signifier of kin relations and hierarchies in the household both literal and figurative.
