Kinship, Islam, and the Politics of Marriage in Jordan

Affection and Mercy

Geoffrey F. Hughes

• Publisher: Indiana University Press
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9780253056467
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Cultural & Social Anthropology
• Index: Social Sciences

In Kinship, Islam, and the Politics of Marriage in Jordan, Geoffrey Hughes sets out to trace the "marriage crisis" in Jordan and the Middle East. Rapid institutional, technological, and intellectual shifts in Jordan have challenged the traditional notions of marriage and the role of powerful patrilineal kin groups in society by promoting an alternative ideal of romantic love between husband and wife.

Drawing on many years of fieldwork in rural Jordan, Kinship, Islam, and the Politics of Marriage in Jordan provides a firsthand look at how expectations around marriage are changing for young people in the Middle East even as they are still expected to raise money for housing, bridewealth, and a wedding.

Kinship, Islam, and the Politics of Marriage in Jordan offers an intriguing look at the contrasts between the traditional values and social practices of rural Jordanians around marriage and the challenges and expectations of young people as their families negotiate the concept of kinship as part of the future of politics, family dynamics, and religious devotion

Part 1

The House: Changing Conceptions of Property and Domestic Space

1

The House

MY FRIEND OMAR’S FAMILY COMPOUND HAD SEEN A FLURRY of activity over the week, with a new concrete and steel rebar structure springing from what had been a vacant lot. I saw him on the street, greeted him, and teasingly asked when he was going to get married. As a man in his midtwenties with a prestigious job in the military¹ and as the eldest son in the family, he immediately grasped the subtext. “I want to wait until I finish the house,” he said and smiled back. Continuing with a line he had probably been using all week, he winked a bit and said, “I want to bring a girl the size of the house.” The local common sense was that the more prestigious the house, the more prestigious (“bigger,” so to speak) a bride he would be able to marry. A year later, as the house was nearing completion, he finally got engaged. Omar eagerly described his bride to me in terms of her job (an engineer), her salary, and the combined household income he was looking forward to when her salary was added to his sizeable military salary and benefits package. His good news was accompanied by a palpable sense of exhilaration and relief at the prospect of being able to support a large and prosperous household that would meet the high expectations that his family and neighbors had for him.

I begin with this bit of banter because it exemplifies how men seek to reconcile exacting standards of masculine competence and feminine modesty with the dynamic economic realities they often face. As I will show, the most striking thing about Omar’s account of his house and impending marriage is the erasure of the driving impetus provided by his father and the broad support of his extended family—to say nothing of the affective bond between him and his prospective wife. This kind of status competition and conspicuous consumption are banal and ubiquitous in Jordan. However, it is important to attend to the novelty of its shifting manifestations over time—especially because people may attempt to naturalize gender roles and erase any evidence of their historical dynamism. In this chapter, I argue that the attempts of Jordanian men to stake their status on their ability to house women in accordance with an exacting code of modesty can lead to an incredible diversity of accommodations. This diversity can occur even within a small community over a short period of time, like the three generations represented by Omar, his father, and his grandfather.

This quest of the middle and upper classes for bigger, more elaborate, and more permanent houses is transforming gender and kin relations across the country. Increasingly robust economic activities are required to actualize such houses that draw women out of the home and into the labor market to support them. In comparison, when Omar’s grandfather married half a century ago, he initially lived in a goat hair tent made by his mother and sisters, on patrimonial lands that he and his brother claimed on the basis of having worked it themselves and their collective willingness to defend it with force if necessary. Family relations have grown to conform to the model of men like Omar and his father (creatures of an external “public” world) who perform wage labor, acquire capital, and use it to house women (in this case, associated with a cloistered, private, or domestic realm). The contemporary Jordanian home reifies this conceptual gendering of space, labor, and property relations and continues to materialize it in the built environment despite radical change.

Nevertheless, money and commodity circulation increasingly suffuse village sociality to the extent that even this model of “public” men (Carver 1996) housing women is growing outdated. There is something quite novel about a man who describes his prospective fiancée in terms of her occupation and salary—although it is increasingly the norm in Jordan.² In contrast, a number of Omar’s uncles and grandparents remarked to me at various points that “I never touched money until I served in the army.” The statement was intended to emphasize that their access to money—even as military-aged men—had been viewed as a challenge to the preexisting gerontocratic order. Thirty to fifty years ago, senior men claimed (not always convincingly) the right to dispose of the family’s capital as their sole prerogative. The older generation’s complaints about changing expectations for the role of money and other commodities in mediating relations between older and younger men tended to fall on deaf ears. What people could not ignore was the issue of women’s par­ticipation in wage labor and the money economy. At the time of research, both men and women in Omar’s village were speaking with trepidation of the imminent tipping point at which career prospects would shift from being a detriment to a woman’s marriage prospects to being an asset.³

Despite this widespread conviction that “tradition” was now on the verge of collapse, earlier ethnographies show how adaptable beliefs about the importance of men housing women can be in the face of rapid social change. A recent example is provided by Linda Layne (1994, 73), who noted that a particular (and highly gendered) bodily “posture” was an important source of continuity in the process of sedentarization as Bedouin families shifted from tents to houses in the 1980s. The way that women moved within—and almost exclusively within—the home was important in maintaining the coherence of gender ideologies at a moment of rapid social transformation. In contrast, I found that the physical space of the home has become a newfound source of continuity as women’s labor is redefined. When Jordan’s median age is twenty-two years old, even comparatively novel architectural arrangements are all that most have ever known. However, the materiality of the home and its ties to broader spatial, labor, and property relations makes it even more difficult to ignore. As a growing literature in English and Arabic shows, fewer and fewer men are able to provide a house and financial support for a wife (if women even want that). These financial barriers to marriage raise the possibility of rising marriage ages and growing populations that never marry unless women contribute financially to household income (Badraneh 2009; Badran and Sarhan 1999; Hasso 2011; Schwedler 2010). In this context, the house itself has become a new way to enlist and transform people’s lived realities into props that support standards of female modesty that are nearly unattainable: if women must leave the home to marry and be properly housed, then that is what they must do. The idea persists that women should be housed and, consequently, ideologically erased from public space—even if women have to go to work to realize some semblance of those modesty standards.

The contradictoriness of these attitudes toward women’s circulation in public space is nothing new—a reality that seems to have been effectively occluded for most younger Jordanians, who tend to assume such contradictions are recent. Drawing on his fieldwork among Jordanian peasants in the 1960s, the anthropologist Richard Antoun (1968) argued that such ideals of modesty remained a cherished model of village sociality, despite the practical impossibility of peasants living up to them. He writes of the complex work of “accommodation” that was necessary to reconcile the realities of agricultural labor with the gender relations valorized by “townsmen,” “Bedouin,” and others who “do not need their wives and daughters to perform agricultural duties and . . . can afford to keep them in a secluded and unproductive state” (Antoun 1968, 677). From the time when Antoun wrote this analysis until Layne wrote hers in the 1980s, the trend was toward the increasing confinement of a growing percentage of women to the physical house. Meanwhile, men were drawn out of village household economies to sustain the household through their participation in an increasingly formalized labor market. There is growing acceptance that the rising costs and expectations associated with the home and the market relations that undergird that home’s construction will eventually pull women into the workforce—reworking notions of personhood, gendered space, labor, and property in the process. What is striking is the degree to which this change can be justified—indeed, often is justified—through appeals to the “traditions” of modesty and propriety themselves.

The first part of this book is located at a point of doubled liminality: the threshold of the home itself and its construction, arguably an obligatory passage point for social reproduction in any community. When the succeeding generation constructs its homes differently, it also constructs its families differently. To track this transformation in the relationship among gender, labor, property, and space, I attempt to trace two phenomena in this part: in chapter 1, I consider the construction of a house, whereas in chapter 2, I consider the construction of a housing market. Chapter 1 is focused on house construction through ethnographic research in rural Jordan. It is built on growing literature on “house societies” (Bahloul 1999; Carsten and Hugh-Jones 1995; Levi-Strauss 1987) and a number of previous studies that foreground the construction of those houses (Dalakoglou 2010; Melly 2010; van der Geest 1998). Chapter 2 is focused on the construction of a housing market through ethnographic and archival research at the Housing and Urban Development Corporation (HUDC). It is built on growing literature that shows how economic markets are literally constructed—much like houses (Callon 1998; Mackenzie 2006, 2009; Zaloom 2006).

Chapter 1 uses the juxtaposition of the tent (which was a common form of housing in Jordan as late as the 1960s) and the various implements of public policy to emphasize the peculiarity of contemporary houses and housing markets and their role in radically shifting the gendering of labor, property, and space in Jordan in a relatively short time. When tracking the experiences of Omar and those of his grandparents’ generation, ideas of public and private serve as an important conceptual pivot point guiding recent shifts in the gendered political economy of the Jordanian household. In addition, its ramifications are important for broader national and international political economies. These shifts in logics of gender, labor, property, and space are transforming the modes through which so-called public and private “spheres” or “domains” (cf. Cannell and McKinnon 2013; Chatterjee 1993; Collier and Yanagisako 1987; Franklin and McKinnon 2001; Strathern 1988) are co-constituted.

“OIKONOMY” OF HAIR, MUD, AND STONE

The emergent liberal notion of private and public as a contradictory mixture of oppositions (between individual and collective, interiority and exteriority, market and state) is fully present in Jordan. Use of the terms ‘amm (“public” or, more literally, “general”) and khass (“private” or, more literally, “particular” or “special”) has increased. Jordanians now speak of privatization (khiskhisa) and the public sector (al-qita‘ al-‘amm), just like everyone else who encounters the logics of neoliberal globalization and its avatars. In fact, the HUDC is one of the numerous bi-bi-bis (PPPs; public-private partnerships) proliferating across the Arab world and elsewhere. Such conceptions of public and private remain in tension with older local conceptions still embedded in the physical structure of the household and its peculiar gender, labor, and property relations. This means that certain aspects of these older conceptions continue to exert significant effects, even among young people like Omar. First, I will attempt to provide a brief sketch of the tent’s structure and its animating logic. Second, in contrast to the highly abstracted notion of public and private that these organizations promote, I will discuss the home’s relationship to literal “bread and butter” issues: the production of wheat, barley, milk, and meat. From these, I will turn to the home’s relationship to a tangible set of concerns around interiority and exteriority, visibility and invisibility. In the second half of the chapter, I will contrast this pastoral mode of dwelling with those of the latter half of the twentieth century. These newer modes of dwelling have emerged with the advent of government jobs, concrete houses, and a veritable army of consultants and experts eager to bring their own Anglo-American notions of labor relations, domesticity, and property to the region.

Figure 01_1. A diagram of a hypothetical tent. It uses some of the most common terms and emphasizes the bodily metaphors and deixis used to discuss the house and its constituent parts. However, there is a lot of variation in terminology, especially when it comes to the names of the poles. For instance, the saha is often called the mu‘and. The pole on each side in the middle is usually referred to as the kasir, but some people use the term ‘amr—despite the fact that this term is more commonly used to refer to poles in the rear. Zafir is another term for these rear poles. Moreover, even the terms that evoke parallels with the body are not universally used. For instance, “the hand” (al-iyd) is sometimes called the muqaddim, whereas “the foot” (ar-rijl) is often called the fahiq.

The goat hair tent is a vexed but central image in a diverse array of ideological depictions of Arab heritage and culture. It simultaneously serves as a focal point for certain strains of nationalism and chauvinism (see the widespread popularity of Bedouin soap operas in the Middle East) and as a trope in orientalist imaginaries of the region. The Bedouin tent has arguably served the same functions in orientalist discourse that the tepee has in certain racist depictions of Native Americans by rendering its inhabitants primitive, close to nature, and, above all, easily separated from their land and any resources it might hold. Such discourses obscure the subtle but widespread transformation of the landscape by both Native Americans (Berkes 1999 Cronon 1996; Peacock and Turner 2000) and Bedouins long before the arrival of White settlers and resource extractors. My goal in highlighting the tent is to draw attention to the broader ecology in which it is implicated. I acknowledge the problematic uses to which the image of the tent has been put in the past. However, the tent can also put into sharp relief the peculiarities of the gendered political economy of public and private promulgated by various facets of contemporary global governance such as the World Bank, the US State Department, and the United Nations.

The basic architectural principles of the Bedouin goat hair tent are relatively simple. The tent forms a vaguely rectangular shape that is achieved by stretching a piece of fabric over a more or less rectangular grid of poles. These poles are held perpendicular to the ground by the tension of the ropes and the fabric pushing downward on the them. The poles are arrayed so that a longer center pole⁴ (al-wasit) is flanked by two shorter poles stretching the length of the tent. I have spent a fair amount of time visiting with friends in Jordan who put up such tents while tending crops on land rented far from their permanent homes. Today these tents are likely to be made of burlap sacks or repurposed United Nations Refugee Works Administration tent fabric rather than painstakingly woven goat hair; however, the effect is the same. People passing the growing season in a tent emphasize that it can be a good way to save on gas and take advantage of the cooling summer breezes.

I used to make a point of asking elderly Bedouin men in Jordan about the names for the constituent parts of the Bedouin goat hair tent—not the least because everyone seemed to enjoy teaching the foreign anthropologist the obscure minutiae of a bygone era. A number of elderly men were even kind enough to draw diagrams for me. At first, I thought it would be useful as a conversation starter that might lead comfortably into stories, jokes, and ad hoc social theorizing. Indeed it did. It soon became clear that there was also great diversity of experiences and terminologies that people would express through their narrations of the tent. Some aspects were ubiquitous: The tent was always conceived as divided into two parts—the masculine shiq and the feminine muharam. But was the shiq on the right or the left? A man once told me it varied by tribe: his tribe put the shiq on the left. Seeming to contradict his thesis, he then added, “but the path here is on the right so I put the shiq on the right so [male] guests wouldn’t walk by the muharam.”

Nevertheless, there was a certain spatiotemporal ordering of this gendered polarity that seemed to transcend the countless individual experiences of the tent. For my part...