Home and Homeland

Abstract

The formation of Jordanian tribal and national identities is the central theme of Layne's Home and Homeland. This study focuses on the Abbadi tribes of the East Jordan Valley and is based on extensive fieldwork conducted by Layne between 1979 and 1988. Layne's central argument is that for the Abbadi and for Jordanian society in general, tribal and national identities are in dialogic relationships, deriving meaning from and conditioning one another. She challenges approaches to Jordanian social and political identity which compartmentalize individuals according to rigid Palestinian/East Bank/tribal lines, arguing that identities are constantly shifting and being reconstructed through discourse between tribespeople, urbanites, the monarchy, bureaucracy, the intelligentsia, Hashemite rulers, and Western social scientists. In the introductory chapter of this work, the author reviews and assesses notions of social identity. Layne criticizes mosaic and segmentary models of collective identity on two grounds: they are essentialist in tending to posit collective identity in terms of social masses and they provide "pigeonhole" models of identity which require the presence of an observer. Here she introduces a "posture-oriented" approach to identity which "sees identity as meaning constructed on an ongoing basis through the everyday practices of making a place in the world, that is, adopting a posture in the context of changing circumstances and uncertain contingencies." Layne devotes the next three chapters to the Abbadi tribes. She outlines significant changes that occurred in the Jordan Valley in the twentieth century in tenns of the tribes' relationship with land and state. Her case study focuses on domestic space as an expression of how the tribespeople have constructed their social entities in the context of inclusion in the Jordanian nation-state and integration into world capitalism. The author emphasizes the strong threads of ...