Making mansaf: the interplay of identity and political economy in Jordan's ‘national dish’

Abstract

ABSTRACT In Jordan mansaf has become a national symbol, consumed on major social occasions, served in various forms to tourists and visitors, and imbued with a set of historical and socio-cultural associations. Across historical Syria (Bilād ash-Shām) and northern Arabia dishes similar to what is now considered mansaf have been made and consumed in different historical contexts and have often been linked with ideas of hospitality and protection given to guests and strangers, whose alterity is negotiated and incorporated through the sharing of food. In Jordan particularly, the image of a ‘Bedouin’ feast dish of domestically produced pastoralist ingredients carries a rich symbology of hospitality and welcome, resonant of imagined historical continuities and a shared cultural heritage. This lends the modern ‘national dish’ symbolic power as a tool of nation-building in the fraught and complex environment of modern Jordan, where many claimed identities and solidarities coincide and compete. Far from being a timeless or unchanged relic of an imagined pre-modern desert life, mansaf, its ingredients and the way it is made, served, eaten and deployed have emerged out of a particular set of historical contingencies and are tied closely to projects of identity formation and state-building within the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan. Focusing on this historical constructed-ness and changing practices of making, serving and talking about mansaf, as well as the social relations it reflects, enacts and (re)produces, this article seeks to use the dish as a lens to examine questions of changing political economy and sociality in Jordan.