Abstract
This article analyzes the microprocesses that imbue bread with meaning and the macropolitics that shape its subsidized provision. It begins by outlining bread’s multiple forms of value and significance, some easily quantifiable, others not. It problematizes the predominant approach to studying moral economies before putting forth an alternative framework. Drawing on eighteen months of fieldwork in Jordan, the following empirical sections examine the different ways in which bureaucrats, bakers, and ordinary citizens portray the government’s universal subsidy of Arabic bread. I unpack the diverse opinions encountered in the field and discuss their links to the Hashemite regime’s polyvalent legitimating discourse. The article then dissects the politics of provisions that contribute to the bread subsidy’s paradoxical persistence. It concludes by considering the relationship between moral economies, opposition politics, and authoritarian power in the context of Jordan’s ongoing food subsidy debate.
Highlights
This article analyzes the microprocesses that imbue bread with meaning and the macropolitics that shape its subsidized provision
It problematizes predominant approaches to studying moral economies before putting forth an alternative framework to analyze the views articulated by producers, consumers and distributors when discussing bread
The final section relates these moral economies of bread to the politics of provisions that shape welfare outcomes in the Hashemite Kingdom
Summary
Bread’s nutritional importance is primarily tied to its centrality in the diets of Jordan’s poor. Due to their ties to health, customs, and communal relations, certain foods become omnipresent elements in everyday life They lie at the heart of social identities and can function as an articulation of entrenched traditions and cultural idioms that develop over time.. As Jane Cowan argues for dance in the context of northern Greece, eating can provoke that sense of recognition—which though not inevitable is still by no means rare—that one is morally part of, just as one is corporeally merged with, a larger collectivity, a recognition that, as a profoundly visceral knowledge, carries the force of absolute conviction.15 Staple foods such as bread take on their meanings partly through such patterns of communal consumption among members of a social group, in the process obtaining metaphoric associations with collective values and coveted circumstances. Debates over social policy and distributive justice, and in the MENA region, are swayed by arguments that draw on akhlaq (morality), a socially constructed set of equivocal standards and judgments against which behaviors are assessed, the “forms and acts by which commitments are engaged and virtue accomplished . . . albeit in the face of numerous constraints.” So long as the ruling order and the citizenry justify their actions with reference to values and morality, the struggle for the symbolic high ground remains crucial.
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