Political and Economic Conflict within extended Kin Groups and its Effects on the Household in a North Jordanian Village

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This article deals with socio-cultural change in a rural, tribal vi11age. It also clarifies the status or the vi11age ’s highest official and explains how it was transformed from the role of a traditional village strongman into that of a mayor who governs by virtue of state authority. Current political conflicts motivated by the struggle to control the mayor’s office form one aspect of this study; the other concerns conflict over land. Fights broke out among the villagers over landholdings in the urbanized center of the village which had been held collectively by families but which were divided into individual parcels in 1989. These landholdings fell into three categories; nearby threshing fields where crops were collected during summers; fields on the outskirts of the village; and undeveloped lands used only for grazing livestock. Some of the study’s conclusions are: that the domestic groups of this village do not resemble each other. Nor do they resemble the romantic and traditional groups of other Arab villages as they are described in the anthropological and sociological accounts written by Arab researchers. During my fieldwork I observed that each individual had his own peculiarities and his own social relations. Thus the solidarity of the kinship group is weakening or is in the process of disappearing.