This panel brings together scholars using varied historical and ethnographic approaches to argue that Jordan is a generative site for knowledge production, given its position at the intersection of broader political, economic, and social formations. What is today known as the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan has historically been conceptualized in relation to other territories in the region. As Lebanese historian Kamal Salibi (1993) writes, a combination of geographic features made Jordan a “natural point of connection,” such that travelers alternately called the area “the approaches of Syria” or “the approaches of the Hijaz,” depending on the direction toward which they headed. Diverse groups—displaced peoples, Bedouin and fellahi communities, Western technocrats, migrant workers—have converged in Jordan from the turn of the 20th century to the present, resulting in uneven interactions and unexpected entanglements. This history has resulted in a popular discourse about the country—and its capital Amman in particular—as lacking an identity (Shami 2007), as being a mere transit point or a veritable “non-place” (Augé 1992) without a rooted history. The contributions to this panel not only interrogate this discourse, illuminating the complex forms of political mobilization, cultural production, and world-building taking place in Jordan; they also argue that the ways that broader political, social, and economic processes intersect and materialize in the country make it a crucial site of inquiry for grappling with regional and global phenomena, such as revolutionary movements, smuggling, contested histories, technological production, and artistic expression. How do labor conditions and local histories of Arabic shape the linguistic data produced in Jordan? What can we learn about the lasting impacts of the Palestinian Revolution through attention to its place in Jordanian history? What does the aesthetic and social formation of sound spaces in Amman suggest about complex relations to place? How do historical smuggling routes and kinship connections across the Jordan River inform the conception and policing of border transgressions in the present? Addressing such questions, the panelists build on recent scholarship that has theorized transnational formations from and through Jordan, including humanitarianism (Feldman 2018), women’s activism (Pratt 2020), the politics of aid (Toukan 2021), and the affective production of the state (Martínez and Sirri 2020), among others. In line with this scholarship, the contributions to this panel ask how we might attune ourselves to the ways that mobilities, discourses, and movements take root at the crossroads, shaping the practices and interactions of everyday life in Jordan.
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Mr. Tariq Adely
In May 2023, Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI, spoke at the Xpand Technology Conference in Amman, Jordan about data, artificial intelligence (AI), and ChatGPT. In his opening remarks, tech mogul and moderator Fouad Jeryes emphasized the significance of the event taking place in Jordan: “We remain a powerhouse here in Jordan for tech…we are the creators of the overwhelming majority of [Arabic] content on the Internet.”
Discourses about Jordan’s inordinate production of digital content have circulated in news media and policy reports for at least a decade. However, such claims have accumulated greater significance with the entrance of chatbots, large language models, and other AI-enabled technologies—built on massive linguistic datasets—into public consciousness. Today, workers in Amman’s tech sector, a space in which English has historically been privileged, are not only accumulating socio-economic capital through their Arabic competencies; through their everyday labor, they are grappling with the politics and ethics of producing Arabic-language data and digital technologies.
This paper draws on over a year of ethnographic fieldwork in Amman’s tech sector, including participant observation with two tech startups and semi-structured interviews, to ask: (1) What kinds of labor and decision-making are involved in transforming Arabic content into data for technological production? (2) How do varied linguistic histories, political commitments, and conceptions of value shape the experiences of those working at the intersection of language and technology? These questions aim to illuminate the political and ethical stakes of tasks like digitizing, collecting, annotating, and categorizing linguistic data, in addition to the ways that data-driven technologies and AI are differentially experienced across linguistic landscapes and political economies. Building on Jordan as a case study, this paper argues that making language into data is not a simple conversion but rather a process thoroughly shaped by the language ideologies, social relations, and political milieus in which it is embedded. Moreover, it advances recent anthropological scholarship on AI and algorithmic systems—which has largely focused on the US and Western Europe—by asking how concepts like data and machine learning are being differently conceptualized in the Arabic-speaking world. Lastly, this paper builds on scholars in science and technology studies and critical data studies who are centering tech workers in the Global South as political subjects—rather than just victims of economic exploitation—who actively shape the languages and digital technologies with which they labor.
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Eliza Marks
“Amman deserves to exist in its own right… for us to have inclusion, for the government to be responsive, for there to be alternative arts and culture scenes without having to be shoved into a room where no one can see or hear us…” Challenging the often-stated claim that Amman is a “transit city,” Jude insisted that such statements don’t conceptually fit with the ongoing attempts to build projects that make Amman “more livable.”
Echoing Jude’s intervention, this paper focuses on the ways that Exile* – an “experimental” sound venue and initiative in Amman – curates its space and aesthetic in relation to experiences of Amman’s fractured political-economic and social contexts; online and offline platforms; and local, regional, and international creative networks. Through the organizers’ persistence and vision – and despite governmental and societal pressures that pushed it to relocate to different sites across the municipality, and reinforced the necessity for its seeming hiddenness – Exile found a stable home in an abandoned car park in the center of Amman. Reshaped with DIY walls and industrial pillars that segment it, and treatments and lighting systems that accentuate its pulsing rhythms, this space aims to cultivate an openness that affords like-minded DJs a place to “play free,” and its regulars a place to imagine Amman’s potential.
Focusing on Exile as a case study, this paper draws on in-person and digital ethnographic methods and semi-structured interviews to consider the ways that diverse elements – sonic, visual, structural, social, behavioral – cohere to produce a sense of space, “vibe” (Garcia 2020), or “atmosphere” (Riedel 2019). In conversation with recent works on alternative music genres and spaces in Egypt and the Levant (Sprengel 2020, El Zein 2020, Withers 2021), it asks: What kinds of practices and labor contribute to the production of such spaces in Amman? How do online remediations of events (Strassler 2020), the differential mobility of participants, and feelings of (non)belonging impact the perceived significance of these spaces? What “visions” and commitments are advanced and contested, here, and what does this suggest about participants’ relationship to the city? It argues that, in order to understand such spaces and initiatives, one must look not only at the aesthetic-social assemblages contained within their structures, but also their position “in between”: between online and offline; zones of the city; geographically-dispersed creative and social networks; and political-economic and social opportunities and constraints.
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Samar Saeed
In the 1960s, Jordan became a central base of operations for the Palestinian revolutionaries, known as the fidayeen. Particularly in the wake of the 1967 military defeat, and people’s disillusionment with Nasserism and Arab Nationalism, the fidayeen became the new force seen as capable of liberating Palestine. Declaring armed struggle as the path for liberation and conducting operations inside occupied historic Palestine, the fidayeen sparked hope and vigor among the masses. No longer victims nor powerless, the fidayeen imbued a sense of power, dignity, and pride many were desperate for. As such, thousands of people, from Jordan and the region, joined the ranks of various Palestinian factions. The Palestinian Revolution was also felt beyond the Arab world. Filmmakers from France, Italy, and Japan arrived to document the fidayeen’s struggle, journalist-intellectuals came to capture the revolutionary bases, training camps, and schools, all the while doctors from Egypt and Cuba came to provide them vital medical training and support. In such context, Jordan did not only serve as an important military-base for the fidayeen but the Palestinian Revolution had a direct impact on its social, cultural, and gender relations, where a renewed political consciousness resembling that of the 1950 emerged. Despite the significance of the Revolution’s presence in Jordan, this historical era is often reduced to a set of clashes between the armed Palestinian factions and the Jordanian military in 1970—the year the fidayeen were expelled from the country—glossed as “Black September” or crudely categorized as a “civil war” in Jordan. Utilizing oral histories, memoirs, newspapers, photographs, this paper argues that historical attention to the revolutionary actions and network-building taking place in Jordan in the 1960s not only addresses a gap in the historical narrative of the Palestinian revolution; it also allows us to better see the ways that the Palestinian Revolution impacted Jordanian society, the transnational character of the Palestinian struggle, and the silences in our historical narratives.
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Mr. Alex Jreisat
On the 17th of May 2023, Israeli authorities thwarted Jordanian parliamentarian Imad al-Adwan’s attempt to smuggle gold and over two hundred guns across the Allenby Bridge into Palestine. Israel returned Imad al-Adwan to Jordan, at which point he was stripped of his diplomatic immunity after being dismissed from parliament—where he also served on the Palestine Committee. He faces fifteen years imprisonment for his actions. That Imad al-Adwan was punished for smuggling is of particular interest, considering that the Adwan family is a Balqa tribe whose sphere of protection historically straddled both sides of the Jordan River Valley (al-Ghawr). Before and during the British Mandate era, commodities and people would move from the city of es-Salt and its agricultural satellite villages to the markets of Jerusalem under the protection of the Adwan.
This paper draws on archival, oral history, and ethnographic fieldwork, including participant observation and collaborative map-making with local communities, to scrutinize historical perceptions of the Jordan River Valley by its residents. It also analyzes the persistence of these perceptions despite the established of the border along the Jordan River to reconstruct the interconnected socio-economic landscape between Jordan and Palestine. It does so by asking: How was the region across the Jordan River conceptualized by its inhabitants before Transjordan's partition from Palestine? When and how do these affective geographies surface after periods of hiatus? In asking these questions and examining the case of Jordanian parliamentarian Imad al-Adwan's smuggling attempt, this research centers the Balqa region’s amputated linkages from its traditional Palestinian centers to challenge the conventional national historiography of the region, which considers the Balqa within the spatial boundaries of Jordan despite the enduring ties and practices that straddle both sides of the Jordan River. It aims to redefine the historical fragmentation between Jordan and Palestine by spotlighting the region's intrinsic role in shaping cross-border relations and regional dynamics across the Jordan River, advocating for a relational, community-focused geographical understanding of the region.
