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Abstract
This article presents the concept of dispersed rooting in order to understand the significance of Palestinian visual and material productions in Jordan. The authors argue that the production of art and traditional clothing, as well as the consumption of souvenirs, constitutes rooting practices that connect exiled Palestinians to the broader Palestinian people and homeland within the shifting and negotiated limits of protracted displacement in Jordan. By considering the role of art and objects in the rooting of Palestinians, this article elucidates the importance of visual and material culture for the meaning of identity and belonging among a dispersed population of exiled Palestinian refugees. Specifically, it demonstrates how producing Palestinian art and tradition is deeply implicated in the reproduction of the Palestinian self and community. As the analysis indicates, Palestinians produce visual and material culture to root themselves in a world where Palestine persists, and where their belonging to it and its people remains inviolable.
Acknowledgments
The authors would like to extend their sincere gratitude to Anas Amarneh, who served as a research assistant for this project during a three-month fieldwork trip in 2021. Additionally, the authors are grateful to Gözde Burcu Ege, Jessica Winegar, Matthew Johnson, Elizia Artis, Ashley Ngozi Agbasoga, Mariam Taher, Stephen Sullivan, Livia Garofalo, Kaelin Rapport, İdil Özkan, and the participants of the Insaniyyat Third Biennial Conference for offering their support and invaluable insights throughout the different stages of research and writing this article. The authors also thank the two anonymous reviewers, whose thoughtful comments undoubtedly improved the argument and contribution of this publication. Last but not least, we thank Nadim Bawalsa, Maria Khoury, R. Abdelnabi, and the editors at the JPS for their support throughout the editorial process of this article. All errors remain our own. This work was supported by the Wenner-Gren Foundation, Fulbright IIE, and the American Center of Research (ACOR), and both authors contributed equally to the research and writing of this article.
Notes
1 While accurate figures are lacking, Palestinians in Jordan generally assert that they account for up to 70 percent of the country’s population, an estimate which Jordanian nativists contest. See Laurie A. Brand, “Palestinians and Jordanians: A Crisis of Identity,” JPS 24, no. 4 (1995): 46–61, https://doi.org/10.2307/2537757.
2 The years 1948 and 1967 constituted two mass displacements of Palestinians from historic Palestine, while a lesser known third wave of Palestinian refugees fled from Kuwait to Jordan when Iraq invaded Kuwait in 1990.
3 The paper is based on ethnographic fieldwork conducted by the authors in Jordan between 2015 and 2021. Both authors obtained IRB approval for this research, and both were approved by their IRB committees to obtain verbal consent from research participants, which they did throughout the duration of the study. All names of participants have been anonymized in the manuscript.
4 For a discussion concerning some of the problems with using the concept of “diaspora” for the Palestinian context, see Julie Peteet, “Problematizing a Palestinian Diaspora,” International Journal of Middle East Studies 39, no. 4 (2007): 627–46, https://doi.org/10.1017/S0020743807071115.
5 Liisa Malkki, “National Geographic: The Rooting of Peoples and Territorialization of National Identity among Scholars and Refugees,” Cultural Anthropology 7, no. 1 (February 1992): 24–44, https://www.jstor.org/stable/656519.
6 Sandra Dudley, Materialising Exile: Material Culture and Embodied Experience among Karenni Refugees in Thailand (New York: Berghahn Books, 2010), 6.
7 Khatharya Um, “Exiled Memory: History, Identity, and Remembering in Southeast Asia and Southeast Asian Diaspora,” Positions, 20, no. 3 (Summer 2012): 831–50, https://doi.org/10.1215/10679847-1593564.
8 Dudley, Materialising Exile, 6.
9 Glenn E. Robinson, “Can Islamists Be Democrats? The Case of Jordan,” Middle East Journal 51, no. 3 (Summer 1997): 373–87, https://www.jstor.org/stable/4329086.
10 Luisa Gandolfo, Palestinians in Jordan: The Politics of Identity (New York: I. B. Taurus, 2012).
11 Joseph A. Massad, Colonial Effects: The Making of National Identity in Jordan (New York: Columbia University Press, 2001), 235.
12 The reasons for Black September and the reactions within the Jordanian government and of the late monarch, King Hussein, are complicated and have been discussed in detail in other works, including Philip Robins, A History of Jordan (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2019); Nigel Ashton, King Hussein of Jordan: A Political Life (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2008); Hussein Sirriyeh, “Jordan and the Legacies of the Civil War of 1970–71,” Civil Wars 3, no. 3 (2000): 74–86, https://doi.org/10.1080/13698240008402447.
13 Adnan Abu-Odeh, Jordanians, Palestinians, and the Hashemite Kingdom in the Middle East Peace Process (Washington, DC: United States Institute of Peace, 1999).
14 Hanan Toukan, The Politics of Art: Dissent and Cultural Diplomacy in Lebanon, Palestine, and Jordan (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press 2021).
15 Massad, Colonial Effects.
16 Sally Howell, “Modernizing Mansaf: The Consuming Contexts of Jordan’s National Dish,” Food and Foodways 11, no. 4 (2010): 215–43. https://doi.org/10.1080/713926376.
17 Massad, Colonial Effects, 250.
18 Curtis R. Ryan, Jordan and the Arab Uprisings: Regime Survival and Politics beyond the State (New York: Columbia University Press, 2018), 98.
19 Jillian Schwedler, Protesting Jordan: Geographies of Power and Dissent (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2022).
20 Ethnographic research for this section was conducted by Kyle Craig.
21 The website for the campaign is http://topalestine.org/en.
22 Anonymous interview conducted by Kyle Craig, al-Nasr refugee camp, December 2019.
23 Gannit Ankori, “‘Dis-Orientalisms’: Displaced Bodies/Embodied Displacements in Contemporary Palestinian Art,” in Uprootings/Regroundings: Questions of Home and Migration, ed. Sara Ahmed et al. (London: Routledge, 2003), 59.
24 Tina Malhi-Sherwell, “Imaging Palestine as the Motherland,” Abwab, no. 23 (1999): 160–66, https://www.hagar-gallery.com/Catalogues/Self_Portrait_03_01.pdf; K. Luisa Gandolfo, “Representations of Conflict: Images of War, Resistance, and Identity in Palestinian Art,” Radical History Review 2010, no. 106 (2010): 47–69, https://doi.org/10.1215/01636545-2009-020.
25 Khelil Bouarrouj, “Palestinian Cartoonist: ‘Like Cactus, We are Tough and Patient,’” Palestine Square (blog) Institute for Palestine Studies, February 8, 2017, https://www.palestine-studies.org/en/node/232210.
26 Amanda Batarseh, “Raja Shehadeh’s ‘Cartography of Refusal’: The Enduring Land Narrative Practice of Palestinian Walks,” Cambridge Journal of Postcolonial Literary Inquiry 8, no. 2 (2021): 232–52, https://doi.org/10.1017/pli.2020.38; Emily McKee, Dwelling in Conflict: Negev Landscapes and the Boundaries of Belonging (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2016).
27 Dima Saad, “Materializing Palestinian Memory: Objects of Home and the Everyday Eternities of Exile,” Jerusalem Quarterly, no. 80 (Winter 2019): 14, https://www.palestine-studies.org/en/node/1649530.
28 Nama’a A. Qudah, “Al-Wehdat Refugee Camp: The Production of Space between Legislation and Practice” [in Arabic], Majallat al-Dirasat al-Filastiniyya, no. 130 (Spring 2022): 73–84, https://www.palestine-studies.org/en/node/1652677.
29 Batarseh, “Raja Shehada’s,” 236.
30 Stuart Hall, “Cultural Identity and Diaspora,” in Identity: Community, Culture, Difference, ed. Jonathan Rutherford (London: Lawrence & Wishart), 224.
31 See also Laleh Khalili, Heroes and Martyrs of Palestine: The Politics of National Commemoration (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2007).
32 Anonymous interview conducted by Kyle Craig, al-Baq‘aa refugee camp, August 2021.
33 Despite artists’ different strategies for producing art under government surveillance and censorship, even supposedly “safe” artworks can be subject to removal. See also Qudah, “Al-Wehdat Refugee Camp.”
34 Kyle B. Craig, “The Challenges of Palestinian Solidarity in Amman’s Street Art Scene, Middle East Report Online, March 30, 2022, https://merip.org/2022/03/the-challenges-of-palestinian-solidarity-in-ammans-street-art-scene/.
35 Craig, “The Challenges of Palestinian Solidarity.”
36 Craig, “The Challenges of Palestinian Solidarity.”
37 Schwedler, Protesting Jordan.
38 Michael Vicente Pérez, “Materializing the Nation in Everyday Life: On Symbols and Objects in the Palestinian Refugee Diaspora,” Dialectical Anthropology, no. 42 (2018): 409–27, https://doi.org/10.1007/s10624-018-9505-x; Geneviève Zubrzycki, “Traces and Steps: Expanding Polishness through a Jewish Sensorium?,” in National Matters: Materiality, Culture and Nationalism, ed. Geneviève Zubrzycki (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2017), 193–215.
39 See also Qudah, “Al-Wehdat Refugee Camp.”
40 Ethnographic research for this section was conducted by Michael Pérez.
41 Christopher Tilly, “Objectification,” in Handbook of Material Culture, ed. Christopher Tilley et al. (London: Sage Publishers, 2006), 60–73.
42 Anonymous interview conducted by Michael Pérez, Juwaideh, June 2007.
43 Jo Kelcey, “‘Whose Knowledge?’ Putting Politics Back into Curriculum Choices for Refugees,” in Comparative Perspectives on Refugee Youth Education: Dreams and Realities in Educational Systems Worldwide, ed. Alexander W. Wiseman et al. (New York: Routledge Press, 2019), 271–91.
44 Tilley, “Objectification,” 63.
45 Hall, “Cultural Identity and Diaspora,” 223.
46 Anonymous interview conducted by Michael Pérez, Shmeisani, July 2015.
47 Ilana Feldman, Life Lived in Relief: Humanitarian Predicaments and Palestinian Refugees (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2018).
48 As a result of the 1967 war, approximately 20,000 Palestinians living in Gaza—most of whom were already refugees displaced in the 1948 Nakba—fled to Jordan (Lillian Frost, Report on Citizenship Law: Jordan (European University Institution, 2022), 19, https://cadmus.eui.eu/bitstream/handle/1814/74189/RSC_GLOBALCIT_CR_2022_2.pdf?sequence=1.). For a discussion of the history of Jordanian nationality laws, see Frost, Report on Citizenship Law.
49 Anna Kvittingen et al., “Just Getting By”: Ex-Gazans in Jerash and Other Refugee Camps in Jordan (Oslo: Fafo Foundation, 2019), https://www.fafo.no/zoo-publikasjoner/fafo-rapporter/just-getting-by.
50 Anonymous interview conducted by Michael Pérez, Jerash refugee camp, August 2016.
51 “Self-understanding … is a dispositional term that designates what might be called ‘situated subjectivity’: one’s sense of who one is, of one’s social location, and of how (given the first two) one is prepared to act,” as cited in Rogers Brubaker and Frederick Cooper, “Beyond “Identity?,” Theory and Society 29, no. 1 (February 2000), 17, https://www.jstor.org/stable/3108478.
52 Lillian Frost, “Ambiguous Citizenship: Protracted Refugees and the State in Jordan” (PhD diss., George Washington University, 2020), 152.
53 Michael Vicente Pérez, “Minoritising Gaza Refugees in Jordan,” in Minorities and State-Building in the Middle East: The Case of Jordan, ed. Paolo Maggiolini and Idir Ouahes (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2021), 131–50; Michael Vicente Pérez, “Living as Enduring: The Struggle for Life against the Limits of Refuge among Gaza Refugees in Jordan,” in Un-Settling Middle Eastern Refugees: Regimes of Exclusion and Inclusion in the Middle East, Europe, and North America, ed. Marcia C. Inhorn and Lucia Volk (New York: Berghahn, 2021), 121–33.
54 Igor Kopytoff, “The Cultural Biography of Things: Commoditization as Process,” in The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective, ed. Arjun Appadurai (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 64–92.
55 Ethnographic research for this section was conducted by Michael Pérez and Kyle Craig.
56 Salam Al Mahadin, “Tourism and Power Relations in Jordan: Contested Discourses and Semiotic Shifts,” in Tourism in the Middle East: Continuity, Change and Transformation, ed. Rami F. Daher (Cleveland, OH: Channel View Publications, 2007): 308–25; Kimberly Katz, “Legitimizing Jordan as the Holy Land: Papal Pilgrimages–1964, 2000,” Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and The Middle East 23, no. 1–2 (2003): 181–89, https://muse.jhu.edu/article/191274.
57 Many Palestinians in al-shatat travel through Amman to get to the King Hussein bridge crossing into the West Bank to avoid Israel’s notorious practice of denying Palestinians carrying Western passports access through Ben Gurion Airport—often following hours of exhausting and humiliating questioning by Israeli authorities, all part of the regime’s systematic attempts to keep Palestinians out to the greatest extent possible.
58 “Impossible Ethnographies; Notes on Israeli’s Blockade of Palestinian Anthropology,” Insaniyyat: Society of Palestinian Anthropologists, 2023, https://insaniyyat.org/impossible-ethnographies-notes-on-israels-blockade-of-palestinian-anthropology; Kyle B. Craig, “My Academic Career Has Been Characterized by Efforts to Prohibit Dialogue on Palestine and with Palestinians. For This Reason, I am Voting ‘Yes’ in the AAA Vote to Boycott Israeli Academic Institutions,” Anthrodendum, June 25, 2023, https://anthrodendum.org/2023/06/25/my-academic-career-has-been-characterized-by-efforts-to-prohibit-dialogue/.
59 Ted Swedenburg, “The Kufiya,” in Global Middle East: Into the Twenty-First Century, ed. Asef Bayat and Linda Herrera (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2021), 162.
60 Jordan Tourism Strategy: 2021–2025, Jordan Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities, January 2020, https://procurement-notices.undp.org/view_file.cfm?doc_id=267337.
61 Anonymous interview conducted by Kyle Craig, Amman, August 2021.
62 In 1924, the Supreme Muslim Council assigned the Hashemite family official custodianship of Jerusalem’s Muslim and Christian holy sites.
63 Anonymous interview conducted by Kyle Craig, Amman, August 2021.
64 Karen Culcasi, “Warm Nationalism: Mapping and Imagining the Jordanian Nation,” Political Geography 54 (September 2016): 7–20, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.polgeo.2016.05.002.
65 Nasser Abourahme, “The Productive Ambivalences of Post-Revolutionary Time: Discourses, Aesthetics, and the Political Subject of the Palestinian Present,” in Time, Temporality and Violence in International Relations: (De)fatalizing the Present, Forging Radical Afterlives, ed. Anna Agathangelou and Kyle Killian (New York: Routledge, 2016), 148.
66 Abourahme, “The Productive Ambivalences,” 148.
67 Kopytoff, “The Cultural Biography of Things.”
68 Ruba Salih and Sophie Richter-Devroe, “Cultures of Resistance in Palestine and beyond: On the Politics of Art, Aesthetics, and Affect,” Arab Studies Journal 22, no. 1 (Spring 2014): 8–27, https://www.jstor.org/stable/24877897.
69 Jamal Nabulsi, “Reclaiming Palestinian Indigenous Sovereignty,” JPS 52, no. 2 (2023): 24–42, https://doi.org/10.1080/0377919X.2023.2203830.
70 Rasha Salti, “From Resistance and Bearing Witness to the Power of the Fantastical: Icons and Symbols in Palestinian Poetry and Cinema,” Third Text 24, No. 1 (2010): 39–52, https://doi.org/10.1080/09528820903488893.
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Kyle Benedict Craig
Kyle Benedict Craig is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Anthropology at Northwestern University. Michael Vicente Pérez is associate professor of anthropology at the University of Memphis and affiliate assistant professor at the University of Washington.
Michael Vicente Pérez
Kyle Benedict Craig is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Anthropology at Northwestern University. Michael Vicente Pérez is associate professor of anthropology at the University of Memphis and affiliate assistant professor at the University of Washington.