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Paper short abstract

Heritage development in Jordan casts hospitality as consumable heritage, yet efforts to commodify practices like offering Arabic coffee meet resistance. This paper shows how refusals to consume hospitality expose the alienation heritage-making produces and its limits as political control.

Paper long abstract

“Hospitality in Jordan is in the stones”; “hospitality is engrained in Jordanian culture”; Jordanians are by nature very hospitable people”; sentences like these line the brochures promoting the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan as a touristic destination. They are echoed in the signage guiding visitors around heritage sites in the country. The importance of hospitality in Jordanian culture is put forward as an undeniable fact and serves as a cornerstone in the development of the tourism and heritage industry in the country. But the way development projects have tried to develop hospitality practices as heritage has been resisted by many Jordanians. This is exemplified in the struggle of past USAID projects to integrate coffee rituals in tourism packages as heritage experiences. Arabic coffee, my interlocutors stressed to me, is sacred, it is not for sale; just as their hospitality is not.

Building on Andrew Shryock’s analysis of how “authentic” (asli) hospitality is displaced into the past to shield it from tourism (2004, 2012), this paper asks what the resistance against the integration of hospitality into heritage can tell us about the role of heritage as a political tool. Through ethnographic attention to the material consumption of culture as heritage (coffee, construction of spaces of hospitality, and curated encounters), I explore how claims of control (saytara) over hospitality generate experiences of alienation. I argue that hospitality’s refusal to be “digested” as heritage exposes the limits of heritage-making as a technique of political control.