Paper short abstract:

In this paper I trace how relationships to land have been formed, reformed and reimagined in the Madaba region of Jordan in the face of Bedouin settlement and social change. I historicise contemporary land regimes, contestations and protests through ethnographic life-histories and archival research.

Paper long abstract:

In Jordan as elsewhere, attempts to reform the nation-state also seek to reform land. In this paper I consider the role of land settlement in Jordan in efforts to build, reform and contest the nature of the nation-state, particular in relation to its putatively tribal or Bedouin subjects. I draw upon my doctoral fieldwork in the Madaba region, interweaving ethnographic material and oral life histories recorded in the villages of the Bani Sakhr and Bani Hamida Bedouin with archival material and secondary historical sources. I do so to historicise contemporary land conflicts and protests, tracing the emergence of ideas around land ownership historically. I consider the ways overlapping and often competing claims, usage rights and responsibilities to land have been the target of various developmental initiatives seeking (with only partial success) to create a legible system of absolute, individual and alienated ownership, expunging or de-legitimising other conceptions of land. The discourse of Jordan's relative stability is often explicitly linked to land as part of a wider moral economy tying together the country's Hashemite monarchy and the supposedly tribal East-Bank Jordanians, at once sustaining the symbolic significance of Bedouin/tribal heritage, while also pacifying and entangling them within the framework of the Nation-State - a moral economy increasingly seen as fraying in the face neo-liberal economic reforms. I critically examine this picture through a fine-grained analysis of political economy and social change in the area east and south of Madaba, including in light of recent protest movements.