Paper short abstract:

I consider the everyday politics and discursive resources of the rural the Hirak protests in Central Jordan, suggesting the ways they are conflated into general and regionalised discourses of protest are often misleading, and might better be approached through an examination of moral economy.

Paper long abstract:

This paper considers the discursive recourses and conditions of possibility for the Dhiban Hirak in the Madaba region of Jordan, where I conducted my doctoral fieldwork. This largely rural and East-Banker dominated movement of loosely-connected labour unions and activists surprised many academic and policy commentators by emerging from the supposedly 'tribal' and loyalist regime heartland in 2011, challenging but self-consciously partaking in generalised narratives of an 'Arab Spring'. Since then, the Dhiban Hirak, largely made up of young unemployed Bani Hamida Bedouin, has been at the forefront of land disputes and unrest. I trace the intersection of Hirak with broader opposition politics, examining the use of repurposed and reimagined notions of a tribal Bedouin past, particularly through talk of broken social contracts (especially concerning land), corruption and the nature of traditional shaykhly authority, patronage, and hierarchy that I term representational sovereignty. I suggest that the heuristic concept of moral economy has value here, connecting experiential accounts of protest, often analysed in the anthological literature through affective concepts of waithood and stuckedness, with wider scales of analyses focused on political economy and 'the global'. By focusing ethnographically on the language of consumption (interlocutors described at times the state as 'eating' and 'bleeding' its subjects, analytical focus can be gained on the way norms and values of hierarchy, patronage and shared reputation are reproduced and contested in the everyday politics of protestors. This can serve as a corrective to much recent anthropology of protest, in and beyond the region.