Settling land, unsettling people: Living with and contesting land, social change and grand schemes in rural central Jordan

Abstract

ABSTRACT In this article I consider how changing legal and social conceptions of land usage and ownership in rural central Jordan offer ethnographic purchase on broad questions of historical change and political economy. Yet equally, I show how this topic shows the limitations of such broad questions, and how reducing local processes into them can obscure historically contingent but enduring practices and patterns of land relations. I consider how reforms stemming from different visions of history and of modernity, in the face of colonial, post-colonial and neoliberal processes of land registration and settlement, and of mass-migration and urban expansion, have combined and clashed, leaving partially fulfilled grand projects and palimpsest-like marks on local political economy, but also how they have been adapted, contested, resisted, and reproduced by rural Jordanians. I particularly consider how the imposition of neoliberal land reforms since the 1980s has coincided with the rise of the hijjah; the trade and sale of semi-legal deeds of protection and cessation over tracts of tribal land, left in an ambiguous state of registration by successive modernist state-building schemes. This has enabled a kind of commoditization to emerge, but one which runs against the grain of official thinking on land tenure, and which partakes instead in very different notions of authority, legitimacy and sovereignty.