Home and Homeland

Abstract

The formation of Jordanian tribal and national identities is the central themeof Layne's Home and Homeland. This study focuses on the Abbadi tribes of theEast Jordan Valley and is based on extensive fieldwork conducted by Laynebetween 1979 and 1988. Layne's central argument is that for the Abbadi and forJordanian society in general, tribal and national identities are in dialogic relationships,deriving meaning from and conditioning one another. She challengesapproaches to Jordanian social and political identity which compartmentalizeindividuals according to rigid Palestinian/East Bank/tribal lines, arguing thatidentities are constantly shifting and being reconstructed through discoursebetween tribespeople, urbanites, the monarchy, bureaucracy, the intelligentsia,Hashemite rulers, and Western social scientists.In the introductory chapter of this work, the author reviews and assessesnotions of social identity. Layne criticizes mosaic and segmentary models ofcollective identity on two grounds: they are essentialist in tending to posit collectiveidentity in terms of social masses and they provide "pigeonhole" modelsof identity which require the presence of an observer. Here she introduces a"posture-oriented" approach to identity which "sees identity as meaning constructedon an ongoing basis through the everyday practices of making a placein the world, that is, adopting a posture in the context of changing circumstancesand uncertain contingencies."Layne devotes the next three chapters to the Abbadi tribes. She outlines significantchanges that occurred in the Jordan Valley in the twentieth century intenns of the tribes' relationship with land and state. Her case study focuses ondomestic space as an expression of how the tribespeople have constructed theirsocial entities in the context of inclusion in the Jordanian nation-state and integrationinto world capitalism. The author emphasizes the strong threads of ...