“Tribes and the Print Trade: Notes from the Margins of Literate Culture in Jordan,” American...

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Tribes and the Print Trade: Notes from the Margins of Literate Culture in Jordan Author(s): Andrew Shryock Source: American Anthropologist, New Series, Vol. 98, No. 1 (Mar., 1996), pp. 26-40Published by: on behalf of the Wiley American Anthropological AssociationStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/682951Accessed: 29-07-2015 00:31 UTC

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IN JORDAN, Bedouin tribes are flourishing in intellectual climates that, just a generation ago, were thought unique- ly inhospitable to them. The print trade is perhaps the most unlikely of these newly tribalized zones. Among Jordan's administrative elites, popular literacy was once prescribed as an antidote to tribalism and other signs of "backwardness." Yet the results of mass education have not been what the bureaucrats predicted. Instead of prompting Bedouin to put away tribal values and adopt modem, nationalistic ones, popular literacy has encour- aged them to read and write about tribal values as if these belonged to (indeed, gave shape to) a modem nation. Today, Amman's bookstores are well stocked with titles celebrating Jordan's tribal heritage, and the countryside is filled with Bedouin historians who transcribe the "talk of the elders" in hopes of someday publishing it.

Muhammad Hamdan, a member of the 'Adwan tribe, is characteristic of this new, textualizing breed (see Fig- ure 1). He has spent the last ten years compiling material for his magnum opus, History of the 'Adwan, a study that exists today only as a massive accumulation of hand- written notes. Its existence in textual form is, for Muham- mad, an achievement as significant as its eventual appearance in print. Like other assemblers of tribal history, Muhammad Hamdan defines his task as the "documentation" (tasjil) of spoken traditions. He imagines himself not as an author but as a conservator and scribe. "If you want the details of 'Adwani history," he advised me,

you must sit with the elders and listen to their talk, then record it. That is my method. See? I create documents. [Muhammad sweeps his hands over the piles of manuscripts that surround us in his study: over 30 'Adwani gasayid (heroic poems) in multiple versions; detailed genealogies of all the major 'Ad- wani clans; old photographs and travelogues; transcripts from dozens of interviews.] And this is important work because when the old men die, their sons will forget these poems and stories; not all of them, but each generation forgets until a century from now, What is left? That is the problem. We 'Adwan do not write our own history. Everything is talk and oral recollections [haki wa sawalif].

The 'Adwan have long dominated political life in the Balqa, the area of central Jordan stretching from the Jordan valley to the borders of Amman. From the mid- 1700s to the mid-1900s, the paramount shaykhs of the Balqa were all 'Adwani, a fact the 'Adwan assert liberally and with great pride. Haj 'Abdullah Miflih Sa'id al-Sagr, one of the oldest living shaykhs of the 'Adwan, gave me the following account of his tribe.

The 'Adwan are exceptional men. This country: we are the ones who ruled it. The 'Adwan came to this land from the east, from the Hiaz. Two brothers: Fayiz and Fawzan. One of them died. The other remained and seized the land and all the best wells, springs, and stream beds from the tribes living in the Balqa. [His sons and grandsons] took the shaykhdom... and ruled the land. That's the beginning.

As for the Arabs we found on the land, these people became followers of the 'Adwan. Their shaykh was Ibn 'Adwan, from that day to this day. The poet said: "Those are the 'Adwan / shaykhs of the region for ages / pillars of the Balqa / and a lantern in the midst of the country."

For Muhammad Hamdan, who is not yet 40 years old, these words have an antique flavor. Muhammad has lived his entire life in a modem, nontribal state, an "age of

ANDREW SHRYOCK is Assistant Professor, Department of Anthropology, State University of New York at Buffalo, Buffalo, NY 14261, and Fellow (1995-96), Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, NJ 08540.

American Anthropologist98(1):26-40. Copyright? 1996, American Anthropological Association.

ANDREW SHRYOCK / STATE UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK AT BUFFALO

Tribes and the Print Trale: Nates

from the Marglins 0 literate Cult!re

in Jorlan



TRIBES AND THE PRINT TRADE IN JORDAN / ANDREW SHRYOCK 27

....... ';> ........'i~~~~~~' titl "Psh. He wa a mo >ctdbytem Amiran,it Shaykh Majid bin Sultan,

'~' ~ ................~ ...... . . ............?::':':::,!iiw. :~~i , ~ Whe Majid died in 1946, the 'Adwan were left without a

:3 :: : g.......... ........::::::!1!?~:':~ | Amr Abdul lah

became king of

an

independent

Transjor- l-- ~,~~~~~ '. :~ * danl, anld

the

ascendanlcy

of the Hashemites over the 'Ad-

'~:;::: ~ ~ ~~~" | | | wan and

other indigenous notables was at last made

<.>

>?94#4! | | | | | -n ;complete.

ubthe days

of

Majid

and

Sulta," an 'Adwan b ~ ~ ~ > ~-? ?.. ~~:_ ~~~ ~ shaykh told me,

_i

Xf tX ; ; i0; 0+ _

~~~~~He 'Adwa haid pwer of theru shyk.wnrelt, Mad was goenmn

_Xf

k >3

Ami~~~~~~~~~~rejspete lit. Abdullah.fae Bus. aften Majid, entre luktahboen ;~i~iiii~,:i~,~:::~! i:~is _ . ur doiwn,o Abuwasiihed.uld stayknrseu to greephm Wlacoe,y

;; * w S ~~~~~~~Majid Weloday, ya Shaykh pofwerBlq Shykhsoperajing witahegven

= % %~~~~~~~~~~~~~~H k n ent Majid wsuporin tru shaykh. Inraity, Maji 'Awas havonlth

'' _ L 1 " ................ E _~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~..

Muhamrrad Hamdan, conservator and scribe, sips tea.

government"

(zaman al-hakumah)

in which

the

strength

: !-X

of

the

'Adwani shaykhdom has been

waning

steadily for

X '' . decades. In 1921, the British established the state of '9^ -

! _ !^!!-

Transjordan, with the Amir Abdullah, a Hashemite prince ': ~:0 '

from Mecca, as its ruler. In 1923, Sultan al-'Adwan, para- . . . . 4

mount shaykh of the Balqa, and his son,

Majid,

attempted

E ~,.....

feated and fled to Syria, where they sought refuge among - t s' '_

the Druze. The rebel shaykhs (see Figures 2 and 3) were h _A 6

alty by conferring grand titles upon them and reserving a ~:.!t: ::~ . . .....- place for them in his government. : _ At0 - 60e '>-

Drawn from the preparatory notes for Muhammad ;---;

Hamdan's History of th 'Adwan, the following observa- ~ . -: ;-S- :2 tions describe Shaykh Majid Sultan as he came to be =0 ;4 0,

known in the years after the 'Adwani Revolt. - _:-0_

Majid had the attributes of power. He was tall, white, strong, . . ... ^ **i><

and blessed with talents from God. In his diwan, there was 3 -i- D --_ --S>_ A _ 3

silence

and

respect. He had no need of women. His father,

*-? 00 X t_9

Sultan, married 69 times, but Majid lowered his head in the i . . . . : ~,,':~~ ....0 0 04000_ presence of women. He was literate and religious, coura- 3>li9l 0; ;0$ 00S_ Evz- 6 3

brilliarlt. He excelled in the art of politics. He was a nationalist who loved his country. He supported the anti-imperialist reb- Fgr els in Syria and Palestine. He received thie title "Shaykh of theShyhulaa-'dn,sykofllBqahyh.



28 AMERICAN ANTHROPOLOGIST * VOL. 98, NO. 1 * MARCH 1996

dred fifty years later, Muhammad Hamdan works as a clerk in a textbook warehouse in the Jordan valley, and the bulk of his income comes from agriculture. At certain times of year, I could find him selling lettuce from his irrigated gardens to passersby on the road. When I first toured his farm in the Jordan valley, Muhammad left no doubt in my mind that he was, by trade and inclination, a committed agriculturalist. He wanted me to understand, however, that things had once been different.

[We followed the irrigation channel out to a squash field. Muhammad's father, brother, and sister-in-law were there, picking squash, throwing them into styrofoam boxes, loading them onto a truck. We chatted with them for a while, tossed in a few squash ourselves, then headed back to the house. As we trudged across the field, Muhammad made the following observation.] Muhammad: In my grandfather's time, when I was a boy, no 'Adwani would do this... farm like this. He would consider it beneath him; he would leave it to his slaves and field hands. Or maybe he would let out his land [to a client tribe] on shares. But nowadays we all work in the fields and no one says 'ayb [disgrace]. [If so, then why bring it up in this obviously self-conscious way? I decide to probe for the stigmatized link between farmwork and peasant origins.] Andrew: Nowadays, everyone is a peasant. In an economic sense. What do you think? Muhammad: Ha! Peasant by occupation, Bedouin by blood. It's close to that It's close. But don't use that word-"peasant" [fiUah] -around the 'Adwan. It's like a curse. Say "fanner" [muzari']. It's nobler. Andrew: Sorry. I was just joking. Muhammad: We consider ourselves nobler than peasants, but if we were really peasants ... by blood I mean ... we would produce two, three, four times the crop we produce now. They have more energy for this kind of work. But the Bedouin, especially the 'Adwan-because we were the powerful shaykhs and had slaves and tenants-our heart is not yet accustomed to the farming life. In the past, what was the work of the shaykhs? Raiding, war, making feasts, sitting in councils, preparing coffee for one's guests, collecting khawa [tribute] from weaker tribes. How can men like that ever become energetic farners? It will take many, many years of develop- ment.

At moments like these, Muhammad seemed acutely aware of the gap in experience that separates the chivalric glory of his ancestor, Shaykh Hamud, from the comfortable (but rather mundane) existence of a farmer and clerk. That chasm, which opens wider with each passing generation, holds an intellectual puzzle Muhammad must solve: "If my ancestors were mighty shaykhs, and their blood is my blood, then why do I no longer resemble them?" When Muhammad records tribal history, he is trying to solve this riddle by means specific to a literate, compulsively histor- icizing age. He goes about his scribal tasks in a mood of urgent nostalgia (see Figure 4), as if his own textual intervention will be able to consolidate (even revive) a

Figure 3 Shaykh Majid al-'Adwan: "He had the attributes of power."

power King Husayn lets us keep, and don't listen to any other talk.

This residual, co-opted power is still quite impressive. 'Adwani shaykhs continue to play a leading role in Jorda- nian politics, with members in both houses of parliament, in the upper ranks of the military, and in various government ministries. Still, the authority gained by way of plebiscites and royal decrees pales in comparison to the power wielded by tribal strongmen in the glorious "age of shaykhs" (zaman al-shyukh). Today, Adwanis sit decor- ously in government councils, but in the not-so-distant past their grandfathers cut off the heads of Turkish Pa- shas, routed Bedouin armies ten times their size, and collected tribute to "the gates of Syria."

Muhammad Hamdan, our local historian, finds himself equidistant from the modem and the historical arenas of 'Adwani power. His sixth lineal ancestor, Hamud Salih al-'Adwan, was overlord of the Balqa tribes and a warrior whose victories are memorialized in epic verse. One hun-




Figure 4 Muhammad (in checkered head scarf) tries to decipher the epitaph of an 'Adwani shaykh. Faded inscriptions and mortuary pictographs are among the only "tribal documents" that survive from the days before government.

shaykhly legacy that today, in an age of literacy and for- getting, is more vulnerable than ever.

Into the Mainstream

Modem print culture was once the medium in which ethnographers gave shape to their more obvious fascina- tions: "the oriental, the ancient, and the primitive" (Goody 1990). Today, the print medium is an ethnographic problem in its own right. It has brought men like Muhammad Hamdan into new relationships with their own histories, and relationships of this sort compel us to look carefully at the representational strategies we encounter and adopt in the field. Increasingly, the communities anthropologists study are already being scrutinized by local intellectuals who see their work as part of aprogressive, modernizing, nationalistic project; these authors are apt to equate ethnography (as Western-trained anthropologists practice it) with a taste for primitive things, with a desire to accentuate all that is traditional and unsophisticated.1 My partnership with Muhammad Hamdan was colored by this

preconception, and not without cause. Whereas I embraced 'Adwani oral history in hopes of relativizing the authority of Western historiography, Muhammad embraced textual history as a way of transcending the limits of a spoken, genealogically fragmented past. Muham- mad's agenda was recognizably modem; mine was less so. In fact, most Jordanians were shocked by my retrograde fascination with the talk of old men, while the old-fash- ioned, almost talismanic appeal of print technology in Bedouin intellectual circles took me completely by surprise.

The irony one detects in this arrangement is not based on the breakdown, or even the fuzziness, of cultural boundaries. Muhammad's approach to history, as much as my own, was defined in reference to a mode of cultural representation-namely, modernism-that is hardly fad- ing away. Its elasticity and relentless spread now compel the imagination of ethnographers and indigenes alike. Despite current appeals to fragmentation, hybridity, rupture, dislocation, and deterritorialization, the ethnographic present is shaped almost everywhere by a hege-



30 AMERICAN ANTHROPOLOGIST * VOL. 98, No. 1 * MARCH 1996

monic, globalizing structure of ideas and practices "which emerged in Europe from about the seventeenth century onwards and which subsequently became more or less worldwide in their influence" (Giddens 1990:1).2 This global structure cannot be defined, nor can it represent itself, without resort to textual historicism of a peculiar type.

It is widely assumed, for instance, that popular literacy and mass communication have played a central role in the evolution of this global systei~ In his essay on the origin and spread of nationalism, Benedict Anderson iden- tifies "print capitalism" as the engine of modernity. Its products? The novel, newspapers, secular historical narratives, and national communities held together (and pushed apart) by vernacular print languages. "What ... made the new communities imaginable," Anderson writes, "was a half-fortuitous, but explosive, interaction between a system of production and productive relations (capitalism), a technology of communication (print), and the fatality of human linguistic diversity" (1991:43). Mu- hammad Hamdan's textualizing agenda results from the same explosive interaction. Jordan's public schools, by producing a literate, nationally minded populace, have created a market for tribal literature. The same institu- tions have fostered new languages of identity-"standard- ized, literacy and education-based systems of communication" (Gellner 1983:54)-that demand the relationship between "tribe" and "state" be worked out in explicitly historical terms.

These new languages of identity have tremendous assimilative powers. Muhammad Hamdan suspected, for instance, that large chunks of 'Adwani history were cata- logued and neatly stored away in British archives. He was fight. The ingredients for a conventional ethnohistory of the 'Adwan--travelogues, diplomatic correspondence, in- telligence reports, geographical surveys, interviews with dominant shaykhs, and a grid of calendar dates-were already circulating in Britain decades before the Balqa came under British control in 1921. Frederick Peake, British commander of the Arab Legion, used these materials and the oral histories available to him to assemble his History of Transjordan and Its Tribes (1935), the monograph that brought the Hashemite regime and its subject tribes into the "family of nations" several decades before Jordanian nationalism was actively cultivated by the Hashemites themselves.

As an authoritative discourse, modern historiography belongs to the imperial West. Its ability to envelop Other histories is a feat accomplished by the universaliza- tion of Western analytical categories. The "records that make possible the writing of a history of historical cultures," Hayden White argues, "are the very records that make possible the writing of a history of the so-called nonhistorical cultures" (1987:56). As ethnography be- comes increasingly historical in its methods, it too is

changing from an "Otherizing" discipline to a "mainstreaming" one. The dominant trends in current anthropology-historicism, reflexivity, and the study of (trans)nationalism, political economy, and world systems-are marked by a desire to dissolve essences, articu- late what once was held separate, and explore the globali- zation of public culture in a metropolitan age. These tendencies are not merely ethnographic fashion; they are the ideological partner of expanding international mar- kets and the delocalization of industrial production, trends that can proceed only if cultural islands are broken up and rendered compatible with the flow of ideas, commodities, and labor through them.3 The sociopolitical results, as Appadurai diagnoses them, are predictable: "landscapes of group identity... around the world are no longer familiar anthropological objects, insofar as groups are no longer tightly territorialized, spatially bounded, historically unselfconscious, or culturally homogeneous" (1991:191).

This is the world in which Muhammad Hamdan writes against the spokenness ofthe 'Adwani past. It is the world in which Lila Abu-Lughod (1993) urges ethnographers to "write against culture" and in which Edward Said (1978) asks us to deconstruct the cultural politics that sustains "the Orient" as an analytical object. These authors are united by a common appeal to historical writing as a response to problems created by the uneven, hierarchical distribution of modem social forms, an unevenness on which models of backwardness, insularity, and stigmatized Otherness are built. In the Middle East, Abu-Lughod argues, anthropology's commitment to the present has succeeded only in exchanging an essential- ized Orient for the "essentialism of Arab culture." When ethnographers finally decide to historicize their work, she writes, "the result will be to make more fluid the boundaries of anthropological discourse on the Arab world" (Abu-Lughod 1989:301).

Like Said, Abu-Lughod is a cosmopolitan intellectual who lives and writes in the metropolitan West; fluid cultural boundaries make her work (and her identity as an Arab American scholar) both possible and highly market- able. Muhammad Hamdan, by contrast, is a marginal figure even in Jordanian circles, and his relationship to modernity is plagued by trade-offs and complications. Like other Bedouin historiographers, he is discovering that the assumptions that motivate modem historicism cannot be neatly applied to tribal materials and that 'Ad- wani oral traditions encode sentiments and narrative structures that actively resist their own representation in print. In his efforts to preserve tribal identity in literary forms "fit for the modem age," Muhammad Hamdan has come face-to-face with the imrnense, assimilating power of Jordan's national print culture. Inclusion in this new medium exacts a price that, to the minds of many 'Ad- wanis, is not worth paying.




Andrew: Ya Haj, what happened to the dates? Haj Khalaf: I rubbed them out. They are all wrong. Conder makes mistakes. Mistakes can happen. Andrew: How do you know the dates are wrong? Haj Khalaf: If Qoblan were alive in 1880, like Conder says, then X would have seen him... because X was 120 years old when he died a couple of years ago. I took history from him, and he said to me, "I never beheld Qoblan." [I didn't dare argue with the Haj. The authority of the entire system of isnad-the "chains of transmission" from narrator to narrator-was at stake. The truth of the received oral tradition is buttressed by the great age of eyewitnesses, men who are often said to have died 20 years or more after the century mark. By suggesting that X could not have been more than 100 years old when he died, I would only be placing his credibility, and that of Haj Khalaf, in doubt.] Andrew: That's very old. Not many people live that long nowadays. Haj: Yes. The food was better in the past. Everything was fresh. We drank fresh milk every day; we slaughtered meat from our own herds. Today, our food is imported in cans. ['Ali Barakat interrupts] 'Ali: Yes. This is true. My father Barakat, God have mercy on him, lived to be 93 years old, and he took his knowledge from his father, Filah, who lived 126 years. Filah was one year old when Nimr [a great 'Adwani shaykh (d. 1823)] passed away. He said to my father, "I remember beholding Nimr as though in a dream." See how things are? Andrew: Yes. 'Ali: The history you receive from the Haj and me... we took it from men whose fathes saw Nimr himself. Isn't that right, Haj? Haj: Yes. All the great battles... our grandfathers witnessed them.

All these numerical ages 93, 126, 120-were, like the great battles Haj Khalafs grandfathers had seen, fully detached from chronological time, and as Muhammad Hamdan had already concluded, any attempt to bring tribal personages or events into calendrical time would be

immediately resisted since 'Adwanis cherish the antiquity of their grandfathers' speech.

Muhammad: If I start to arrange things by date, everything will become confused. "This happened in that year." "No. My grandfather was alive at that time, but he never saw it." And so on. I think it is better to deal with periods and generations, because the order of the genealogy is known. Andrew: What would people think if you wrote in your book that Qoblan died in 1890, or that the Turks came in 1867?... because these are fairly certain dates. Muhammad: The dates are certain. Yes. But the elders passed on their history without dates, so you can't make them fit, and they think that you are trying to say Haj X is a liar. If you try to use dates, that's what they think.

In fact, Muhammad, a university-trained historian, seemed as little concerned with dates as the old men. His History of the 'Adwan, which he read to me aloud over a period of three weeks, contained only a handful of

Histories That Cannot Be Written

The photograph, fine child of the age of mechanical reproduc- tion, is only the most peremptory of a huge modem accumulation of documentary evidence (birth certificates, diaries, report cards, letters, medical records, and the like) which simultaneously records a certain apparent continuity and em- phasizes its loss from memory. Out of this estrangement comes a conception of personhood, identity ... which, because it cannot be remembered, must be narrated. [Anderson 1991:204]

Though it consists mostly of oral testimony, Muham- mad Hamdan's History of the 'Adwan is supported by an abundance of documentary evidence. Europeans who traveled in the Balqa during the Victorian era wrote color- ful accounts of their 'Adwani escorts, shaykhs of the Nimr and Salih clans.4 Travelers took photographs of these men as well. Today, over a hundred years later, the 'Adwan are

engaged in disputes about the veracity of this material and the extent to which they can claim it, use it to boost their

clans, and keep others from doing the same. Because these alien documents concern local identities which, unlike those Anderson describes above, are not yet lost to

memory, they must somehow be attached to narratives that already exist. This enterprise, which makes texts answerable to authoritative talk, is seldom accomplished smoothly.

Getting the Dates Right

'Ali Barakat took me to HaJ Khalaf, grandson of the great shaykh Goblan (d. 1890), in search of poetry and "the book." The first was easy to come by; Haj Khalaf was accustomed to reciting gasayid (heroic verse) for foreign scholars, and his 90-year-old voice was still deep and resonant. "The book" was harder to extract. When 'Ali Barakat asked to see it, the Haj pretended not to know where it was. He had let Muhammad Hamdan borrow the book before, and it had taken him months to retrieve it. 'Ali Barakat did not press the issue.

A few minutes later, when our conversation turned to Goblan, the Haj swiveled abruptly and began to rum- mage through a box stored in the closet drawer behind him. Out of it he drew a tattered copy ofKitab al-Rahhala, or The Book of the Traveller, a collection of excerpts from the English travel literature which had been trans- lated into Arabic by Suleiman Musa (n.d.), a leading Jor- danian historian. The book contained a passage fromHeth and Moab (1883) in which Lieutenant C. R. Conder, a British surveyor, extols the virtues of his companion, Shaykh Goblan al-Nimr. The book was ceremoniously passed around the room. When I got my chance to thumb through it, I noticed that Conder's dates, every last one of them, had been meticulously blotted out.



32 AMERICAN ANTHROPOLOGIST . VOL. 98, NO. 1 * MARCH 1996

approximate dates-most of them surprisingly inaccu- rate-until 1921, the year the Hashemite Kingdom was established and the modem era began.

By rejecting the chronological nature of textual history, Muhammad and Haj Khalaf were, in different ways, protecting a rhetorical space in which the words of certain men, most of them long dead, could still be conveyed with authority. 'Adwani space has already been reconfigured to fit the demands of a postcolonial state which must map and measure every inch of soil over which it is sovereign. Once 'Adwani history is rendered conformable to the temporal standards by which modem governments map and measure the past, it can be administered with the same effectiveness.

As we were preparing to go, 'Ali Barakat asked to borrow Haj Khalaf's copy of The Book of the Traveller. The Haj, acting as our host, was in no position to refuse, but he relinquished the book with obvious reluctance, as if he were losing control of a sensitive document which should not be allowed to circulate widely. By scratching out the erroneous dates, Haj Khalaf had succeeded in making the book fit for the eyes of other 'Ad- wanis he knew. Yet as his grandson Faris pointed out to him: "Ya Haj, you cannot keep other people from seeing those dates. Will you go from house to house in Jordan and erase them all? These are things one person cannot control."

Six months later, when I left Jordan, 'Ali Barakat had not yet returned Haj Khalaf's book.

Provocative Photos

Next, 'Ali Barakat took me to Haj 'Abd al-Jalil in search of "the picture" (Figure 5). This artifact, 'Ali in- formed me, was something I absolutely must see. It was not currently hanging in the Haj's diwan, but he gladly fetched it from a back room and placed it, with curatorial

delicacy, in front of us. It was a striking photo, sepia-toned and enlarged several times to accommodate its gold, ro- coco frame. The subjects were three young Bedouin seated before a stone edifice, armed with swords, daggers, and pistols. Each was attired in a flowing cloak; one wore a pair of fine leather boots. Their head scarves were held in place by unusually thick camel-hair braids, and they were affecting the sullen, "dangerous" look that Bedouin admire. I stared at the picture while 'Ali Barakat and the Haj remarked on the regal comportment of the three men.

"They are 'Adwani shaykhs," said 'Ali. "Look at their appearance!"

Haj 'Abd al-Jalil proceeded to tell me the picture's story.

"It is a copy," he said. "The original came from Britain. They say three names were written on the back of it: Goblan, 'Abd al-'Aziz, and Fayad al-Bakir. These men, as you know, were famous shaykhs of the Nimr, which is our clan."

"Ya Salam [Peace be] !" I exclaimed, and the Nimris in the room were pleased by my excitement.

I was eager now to see the original. Haj 'Abd al-Jalil told me it was hanging in the house of Nawfan Sa'ud al-'Adwan, retired member of the Upper House of Parlia- ment. I privately doubted that these three men were really Goblan and company, since camera work was not done in the Balqa before the 1860s, and Goblan and 'Abd al-'Aziz were, by then, already old men. The figures in the picture looked young; moreover, the fat camel-hair braids they wore over their head scarves would not come into vogue until the early years of the 20th century.

Muhamrnad Hamdan is a distant cousin of Haj Naw- fan, so I asked him if he would accompany me to the house of the old Senator, "to look at the picture of the Nimri shaykhs." Perhaps, I suggested, there would be names and dates written in English on the back.

[Muhammad begins to laugh.] Muhammad: You mean the picture of the three men sitting together? Andrew: Yes. Do you have a copy? Muhammad: No. But I've seen it. Who told you those men were from the Nimr? [I rehearse the details of my visit with Haj 'Abd aldJalil. Mu- hammad, all the while, shakes his head in disagreement. Once again, I have stumbled into someone else's argument, and Muhammad, who is always trying to save me from misinfor- mation, wastes no time in setting the record straight.] Muhammad: I'll tell you the story of that picture. It comes from Spain. Not from Britain. Andrew: From Spain? Muhammad: Yes. Muhammad 'Afash [a member of Muham- mad's own clan, the Salih] was Ambassador there, and someone in the government gave it to him as a gift.... The men in the picture are not from the Nimr. They belong to the Salih. To us. The one sitting in the middle is Dhiyab Fayiz 'Ali; the other two are and . They say those names

Figure 5 Three 'Adwani shaykhs. A source of contention.




were written on the back of the picture, but they had to cut them off when they fit it for its frame. Andrew: Do you think they would let me take a picture of it? Muhammad: A picture of the picture? You don't have to do that. Just go to the studio in town. The photographer keeps a negative. He'll make a copy for you if you want one.

At that point, Muhammad disappeared into the next room and returned with one of his many folders. In it were newspaper and magazine clippings about the 'Adwan and several snapshot photos. Muhammad plucked one from the pile and submitted it for my inspection (Figure 6). It had been colorized. The subject was another heavily armed shaykh, wearing the same fat camel-hair braids and the same cloak, the same gun and scabbard belts running across his chest. This photo and that of "the three shaykhs," I thought to myself, must have been taken in the same period. Only the artificially blue eyes, the lightened skin, and the pink lips set this man apart from the shaykhs Haj 'Abd al-Jalil had shown me.

"This man," Muhammad said, "is Dhiyab Fayiz 'Ali al-'Adwan. I took this picture from his family. One of the old widows remembered his likeness. She remembered seeing him when she was a little girl, before he was killed by his cousin [c. 1915], and she said to me, 'That man is Dhiyab Fayiz 'Ali.' Take this picture to the studio and have a copy made. You can put both pictures in your book... along with the proper names that belong on them."

The contested area I was preparing to enter began to take shape when I delivered Muhammad's picture to the studio. The antique photo of the three shaykhs was, to my surprise, framed and on display in the small waiting area at the front of the store. I held the colorized photo up against it, comparing the man in the middle with Muham- mad's recomplected "Dhiyab Fayiz 'Ali." They seemed, indeed, to be the same man. The hilts oftheir daggers were identically embellished.

The shop owner, discerning my interest in Bedouin pictures, brought out several well-known photographs of 'Adwani shaykhs. Occasionally, 'Adwani customers would request that he enlarge these photographs and frame them, or shrink them to wallet size, so he always kept a few copies on hand. The three shaykhs picture was the most popular of his collection. I asked who the men in the picture were.

"Well," he said, with a sly twist in his voice, "that depends on which family you belong to: the Salih or the Nimr."

"They say their names were written on the back of the original. Did you ever read those names?" I asked.

"No. I don't know anything about that," he said. His attention was focused now on Muhammad's col-

orized photo. He had never seen it before and was eager to add it to his lucrative collection. Little did he know that my obsession with these nameless photos would bring him a fresh round of 'Adwani business. Once I mentioned

Figure 6 The recomplected shaykh. Who is he?

the fact that these photographs might appear in my book, establishing the identity of the three shaykhs and profess- ing one's genealogical attachment to them became something of a cause celebre for members of the Salih and Nimr clans. Divergent accounts of where the pictures came from, how they got to Jordan, who was in them, who said so and why began to spring up everywhere. Buying the pictures and hanging them on the walls of one's own home turned out to be the most decisive means by which a person could gain control over what was considered, by everyone involved, a kind of "documentary evidence."5

But evidence in support of what? The answer to this question lay in the political signifi-

cance of photography itself. For most 'Adwani men, cam- eras were meant to preserve images of propriety, solem- nity, and power. They balked at my attempts to take casual, unposed shots. They insisted on wearing their best clothes, donning a pair of "scholarly" glasses (sometimes my own), placing a service of tea or a coffee thermos in




Figure 7 A gallery of dignified poses.

front of them as a sign of hospitality. Only in recent years have people begun to smile at the camera, and many of the older men still meet the lens with an imperious scowl. For them, photographic representation is a context in which individuals should present their noblest, most public face. The nobler the face--and the more public its expression- the more likely it is to merit photographic attention (see Figure 7).

When European travelers introduced photography to the Balqa, I was told, they used it to preserve the like- nesses of those who were strong, those who were the noblest and most public of men. Thus, when I asked a member of the Hamud clan to identify the men who sat in the picture of the three shaykhs, he responded by naming the ancestor who, in his view, was most worthy ofthe lens.

Fulan: The one sitting in the middle is Hamud, son of Salih. My ancestor. The other two are... God knows best [Hamud Salih was almost certainly dead before 1840, the year in which photography was invented. It is hardly possible, then, that the man in the middle could actually be Hamud.] Andrew: I thought the three men were shaykhs of the Nimr. Fulan: No. No. The foreigners always came to us, the Salih. Hamud was shaykh of the entire Balqa. The Nimr were just escorts. Do you understand? Escorts. Hamud was above this kind of work, but he knew about it because it was done under his protection.

The Nimr were indeed escorts, but nothing in Fulan's statement can prove that the men in the picture of the three shaykhs are descendants of Salih. The logic of the argument, as Fulan wanted me to understand it, works in the opposite direction: given the structure of power that existed in the age of shaykhs-when the Salih were ulti- mate protectors and the Nimr were only escorts-the fact that the Salih would appear in a photograph taken by Europeans rather than the Nimr was already proven, insofar as it could be.

The photographs that are nowadays attached un- equivocally to known 'Adwani shaykhs-to Majid and Sultan, for instance-were taken after the Amirate of Transjordan was established in 1921. Like the chronological dates that had to be scratched out of Haj KhalafsBook of the Traveller, the documentary apparatus that defines fully modem portraiture is constituted so as to deny certainty to the historical attachments tribesmen create using the photographic residues of the shaykhly era. When Faris al-'Adwan hung up his new, lavishly framed portrait of the three shaykhs, he placed a posterboard caption beneath it that read, "These men are shaykhs of the Nimr tribe: X, Y, and Z." The caption could be discreetly re- moved whenever friends from the Salih came by to visit. Yet Faris's attempt to fix the identity of the shaykhs in writing was vigorously resisted by members of his own clan, who had different ideas about whose ancestors these




three Nimr might be. When his own father accused him of using the picture to "sow discord," Faris decided to throw the caption away. His experiment in textuality-detach- able textuality-had failed.

Muhammad Hamdan, meanwhile, was creating his own monument to the shaykhly past. It was characterized by the same indefiniteness that the Nimr had imposed on Faris's creation. Yet in Muhammad's case, the sense of "indefiniteness" was oddly accentuated. He placed his photograph-an enlarged, framed copy of the pastel shaykh-in the public guest room of his home, but in hanging it he produced a shrinelike space in which very different representations of time, identity, and power could all be simultaneously displayed (see Figure 8). The picture of the nameless shaykh was placed in the company of a framed passage from the Quran, a clock, and an official portrait of King Husayn.

"What will you tell people when they ask who the shaykh is?" I asked after complimenting Muhammad's arrangement.

"I will say he's an 'Adwani shaykh," he said, "possibly from the Salih. That's all."

I had seen this gallery in other homes. It always contained the same four elements: the Quran (emblem of eternity, sacred truth, and the authority of God); the clock or calendar (marker of humanity's passage through pro- fane, earthly time); the King (master of secular time and steward of God's authority on earth); and the ancestor

(link to a tribal era that exists now-and has always existed?.-only at the margins of the universe that calendars, dynasts, and sacred texts create). In some cases, the ancestor is represented only by his sword or pistol, and these artifacts, too, are subjected to the same contestation that surrounds old photographs: "They say that sword hanging on the wall is the sword of Dhiyab, but truth is, they bought it in Syria last year." No one, however, suspects that the clocks, the Quran, or the King are anything other than what they appear to be.

This discontinuity in the nature of historical certainty is unselfconsciously embraced by 'Adwanis themselves. The temporal hinterland, where clocks and calendars have nothing to measure, belongs to them. They can ex- clude others from it, or retreat into it, as easily as their ancestors moved through a Balqa landscape that was more literally remote. The allure of old photographs- which are much more popular than those taken within living memory-lies in the struggle to make them one's own and deny them to others. The same can be said of poetry, genealogies, and stories of clan origins, all of which are equally contested as forms of historical truth. The rhetorical spaces in which these struggles occur, because they are spoken and as transitory as a passing comment, cannot be controlled by the dictates of textual historicity. Names are cut off, dates are scratched out, squares of poster board are reluctantly thrown away. The

Figure 8 Muhammad's display. A shrinelike space.



36 AMERICAN ANTHROPOLOGIST * VOL. 98, NO. 1 . MARCH 1996

appeals to "textual evidence," in spite of it all, continue unabated.

A Voice No Longer Fit to Print

Marginality exacts its price. The rhetorical power 'Adwanis exercise beyond the intellectual reach of the modern state cannot be similarly exercised within the ideological space the state controls. This explains one of the more startling ironies of the current tribal literature: members of the Balqa's shaykhly lineages-the men whose ancestors figure so prominently in the documentary accumulations of the 19th and early 20th centuries- are nowhere to be found among the authors of popular books about the Jordanian tribes. The most widely read tribal historian in Jordan, Dr. Ahmad 'Uwaydi al-'Abbadi, belongs to a clan that boasts no great shaykhly tradition. A lack of textual evidence has not kept Dr. Ahmad from discovering that his clan descends from the prophet Mu- hammad. It has not kept him from arguing, in dozens of publications, that the Bedouin tribes are the true embodi- ment of the "new Jordanian national identity."

Meanwhile, Muhammad Hamdan, for all his manuscripts, antique photos, and excerpts from English travelogues, has yet to publish any of it. Neither is his creative block (which has continued for several years) reducible to the personal travails of an individual author. It is symp- tomatic, instead, of a more general 'Adwani attachment to forms of power and identity that, although they still flour- ish in speech, cannot be easily adapted to print. Indeed, Muhammad's urge (and inability) to reissue this identity in textual forms can be taken as evidence of the ongoing "domestication" of 'Adwani power under the Hashemite regime.

In the days before government, Muhammad's ancestors could afford to leave their publicity to others. Slaves and client tribes glamorized the deeds of 'Adwani heroes in epic verse, and the shaykhly names that surface time and again in the European travel literature are also grandiloquently preserved in the poetic consciousness of the Balqa tribes. The great shaykh Dhiyab "draws his sharpened sword / He makes the corpses pile up in mounds / He makes them pile up like piles of stone." The infamous Qoblan al-Nimr "On his yellow steed, like a bird swooping down ... slew the star of their horsemen / The best of their horsemen is flesh now for birds." The verses below, composed in the 19th century, commemorate an 'Adwani victory in battle.

I ask a gift from the Lord of Creation, a.tlab al-'ata minn rabb al-biraya

Lord of the throne and honor of those who seek Him. rabb al-'arsh wa 'izz al-manafi

They grant the gift, the Sons of the Graydi [the 'Adwan], ya'tnm bi-l-'ata 'iyal al-graydi

Who in their giving are fertile as a meadow. ya iUi bi-l-'ata rodin khasabi

The gift is given by a generous shaykh, ya'.ti bi-l-'ata shaykh karim

The light of our land, whose name is Dhiyab. nur biladina wismu dhiyabi

How many legions has he scattered completely, wa kamm minn sarbatin farrag mashira

With swings ofthe sword and strikes of the dagger? bi-darb as-sif ma' darb al-harabi

In his hand lies a Yemeni sabre wa bi-yaddu shimshlrin yimfmi

That cuts off the head at the tip of the spine tagatt ar-ras minn hadd al-'aldbi

These images of martial prowess and godlike generosity, when recalled by 'Adwanis today, provoke a mood of bittersweet reminiscence. The Yemeni sabres hang aus- terely on living room walls, relics of another time (see Figure 9), and most 'Adwanis, should they ever find themselves on horseback, would probably not bring to mind the majesty of "falcons swooping down on their prey." The art of politics has changed dramatically since the days of Dhiyab and Goblan (c. 1830-90), and bellicose poetry composed in honor of long dead 'Adwani shaykhs, with its valorization of swordplay and slaughter, can sound like resurgent barbarism even to Muhammad Hamdan's sym- pathetic ears. "The old structure of the shaykhdom is gone," he told me.

Today, there is only respect and exchange [ihtiram wa tabadul] among the tribes. What I'm giving you now is the general pattern of 'Adwani history. First we dominated the oter tribes completely. A relation of strong to weak. Then we became like parts of a single body, with 'Adwan at the head. Then dominance was taken by the govenmuent, and we all became, as they say, one family. King Husayn is the father of that big family. Today there is only respect and exchange.

This moralistic incantation, which appears time and again in Muhammad's History, is clearly meant as an act of deference: not to other tribes, perhaps, but certainly to King Husayn and the patriarchal order on which his government is established. The etiquette of "respect and exchange" is the manner that "sons" (the Jordanian tribes) should adopt in the presence of their "father" (the Hashemite monarch), and the observance of this etiquette tumns certain historical topics and modes of expression into evidence of disrespect.

Modernity and Genealogical Community: A Dialogic Encounter?

The new history Muhammad Hamdan is constructing by textual means bears an uncanny resemblance to the




'Adwani histories once constructed only in speech. It is organized along genealogical lines; it gives privilege to poetry and heroic tales; it contains no master narrative, only a fragmented structure of mutually irreconcilable clan narratives; it gives little weight to chronology or documentation. The intellectual legitimacy of Muham- mad's History of the 'Adwan is determined by its con- nectedness, via specific isnad (chains of transmission), to voices, identities, and forms of community that are much older than the Jordanian state. And yet the publication of tribal histories written in this style-which closely resem- bles the genealogical compendia produced in the early Islamic centuries (Dresch 1990)--is consistently de- scribed by Muhammad Hamdan and other Bedouin historiographers (al-'Abbadi 1986) as a necessary step toward the creation of a tribal society that is fully modern, literate, and nationalistic.

Apart from its dissemination in print, however, there is nothing stereotypically "modern" about this new historiography. In fact, the bulk of Jordan's tribal literature is marked by Lyotard's diagnostic sign of the postmodern: namely, "incredulity toward metanarratives" (1979:xxiv). Metanarratives are hard for tribal authors to construct, since other tribesmen do not willingly grant them the privilege of combining or juxtaposing received oral traditions in novel forms. Muhammad Hamdan's History of the 'Adwan is the story of his own line of descent and its relationship to other 'Adwani and non-'Adwani groups, each "spoken for" by its own narrators. He hopes to construct a master narrative based on the idea of "shaykhdom," but this experiment, he suspects, will be rejected by most 'Adwanis. "Because everyone," Muham- mad notes, "says his ancestor was the real shaykh."

All of this stems ultimately from a genealogical model of community, from a tendency to parse society into vertical lines of transmission and inheritance, some biological, others intellectual. This way of thinking about community is by no means confined to tribal quarters. The nationalist rhetoric which pervades Jordan's popular media and public schools is devoted to the creation of loyalty to King Husayn, a dynast whose political legitimacy rests squarely on the fact that he descends from the Hashemite leaders of the Great Arab Revolt, who descend, in turn, from the House of the Prophet. For members of Jordan's "Islamic movement," the weakness and social injustice that beset the modem Arab nation-state are a result of disruptions in the chainlike transmission of Islamic law and culture. The advocates of Western-style modernity, for their part, must continually justify their agenda by linking it, literally and figuratively, to ancestral figures and authentic (i.e., non-Western) virtues.

The images of community now popular in Jordan-at once dynastic, Islamic, ancestrally inclined, pyramidal, unitarian, and self-consciously modernizing-are part of a "discursive tradition" which, to borrow from Asad

Figure 9 "In his hand lies a Yemeni sabre / that cuts off the head at the tip of the spine." An 'Adwani boy shows off a family relic from the age of shaykhs.

(1986), "includes and relates itself to" the models of Arab- Muslim community elaborated in the historical writings ot the first three Islamic centuries (see al-Duri 1983). This rich ideological complex, along with the genealogical imagination that animates it, is being reproduced, resisted, and reinterpreted in the intellectual spaces created by modem print cultures and electronic mass media. Throughout the postcolonial Middle East, the cosmopolitan intellectuals who preside over this "conversion project" have been drawn into mimetic relationships with patterns of high culture now dominant (or once dominant) at the metropolitan center. "In the West," Said writes,

post-modernism has seized upon the ahistorical weightless- ness, consumerism, and spectacle of the new order.... Yet in the Arab and Islamic worlds many artists and intellectuals like Adonis, Elias Khoury, Kamal Abu Deeb, Muhammad Arkoun, and Jamal Ben Sheikh are still concerned with modernity itself, still far from exhausted, still a major challenge in a culture dominated by turath (heritage) and orthodoxy. [1993:329]

The Bedouin historiographers I worked with in Jordan are not cosmopolitan intellectuals. Nonetheless, their research is propelled by this same intermingling of forces.




Just as the poetry of Adonis cannot be understood without first understanding the Arab encounter with modem verse, so Muhammad Hamdan's wary encounter with modem print media cannot be understood apart from the world of spoken authority and genealogical identities he inhabits. "Such a dialogic encounter of two cultures," Bakhtin argues, "does not result in merging or mixing. Each retains its own unity and open totality, but they are mutually enriched" (1986:7).

Muhammad Hamdan, whose work languishes in un- published manuscripts, might wonder at Bakhtin's prom- ise of "enrichment." In an age of mainstreaming and dis- solving cultural essences, the dialogue between tribe and state is just as likely to end in silence, in circumlocution and self-censorship. It is precisely because "merging and mixing" are not the inevitable result of dialogue that mutings of this sort so often occur. The Bedouin authors I worked with in Jordan knew well the price of publication: most of what counts for tribal history (agonistic poetry, tales of violent conflict, and genealogical disputes) must be left out of their books. Meanwhile, the politically benign and practically useless tokens of Bed- ouin identity (the old coffee grinders, long-stemmed pipes, handwoven textiles, camel saddles, and tobacco bags) stream into folklore museums and gift shops all over Jordan.6

Not Easily Commodified, Not Quite Conformable

The logic of commodification is turning Bedouin material culture into a line of "identity products" almost anyone, German tourist or Palestinian urbanite, can adapt to private or public uses. The market for tribal literature, by contrast, is made up almost entirely of tribal Jordani- ans. Their engagement with print media is generating identities that, although common throughout the Arab- Muslim world, remain tenaciously local. The discontinuity between these two commercial spheres-one largely imagistic and open, the other delimited by local languages and histories-is reproduced in the gap between mainstreaming and localizing approaches to cultural representation. Appadurai's call for a more cosmopolitan ethnography, for instance, gives precedence to the "global cultural order created by cinema, television, and VCR technology" (1991:198). The same image-making complex, mediated through highbrow literature (another mass market commodity), is the subject of Said's Culture and Imperialism (1993), and of cultural studies in its more refined guises. It is understandable that scholars who study commercial images and cultural commodities would seek to deterritorialize and reconnect human communities. This, in fact, is precisely what the multinational corporations who oversee commodity flow seek to ac- complish. Whether one is promoting a common market or

a common humanity, the demolition of boundaries is perfectly in order.

The work of tribal historiographers in Jordan is not yet part of this metropolitan, transnational domain. It belongs, instead, to the realm of "anti-systemic move- ments" (Wallerstein 1982), and its object of resistance is the anonymous fealty Jordanian nationalism requires of its citizens: "Today we are all one tribe, and King Husayn is our shaykh." By insisting on the genealogical unique- ness of specific tribes, by insinuating that true Jordanians can only be of tribal (as opposed to Palestinian) descent, the tribal print trade shares many of the troublesome features Abu-Lughod attributes to anthropological models of difference: it "ends up constructing, producing, and maintaining difference," and it "helps give cultural difference (and the separation between groups of people that it implies) the air of the self-evident" (1993:12). Books about the Jordanian tribes are meant to do this. They are replete with identities, historical events, and narrative forms that would have little significance, and virtually no appeal as commodities, to a metropolitan readership. This palpable Otherness often provokes an exasperated response from the metropolitan critics who encounter it. Said's comment on Palestinian historical sensibilities, which might as easily be applied to the work of tribal Jordanians, is typical of the incomprehension that greets cultural representations from the periphery.

Since our history is forbidden, narratives are rare; the story of origins, of home, of nation is underground. When it appears it is broken, often wayward and meandering in the extreme, always coded, usually in outrageous forms-mock-epics, sat- ires, sardonic parables, absurd rituals-that make little sense to an outsider. [1986:20]

Yet even if the histories were not forbidden (by the power of the state or the inhibitions of "respect and exchange"), it would be quite difficult to impose on them the kind of unitary, accessible, narratively coherent shape Said prefers. The manuscripts that accumulate in Muham- mad Hamdan's office are not conformable to the logic of "print capitalism," or to the imagined communities it so predictably engenders. They are testament, instead, to a discourse "which is not itself easily commoditized and to which the commodities of the market are not altogether relevant" (Hannerz 1992:238). This discourse is modern; it is nationalistic and historical; and it contests everything those terms mean to the powers who invoke them: metanarrative, unified chronology, and the nation as an "anonymous communion" of citizens.

"What I am giving you," Muhammad stressed as he read to me from hisHistory of the 'Adwan, "is dangerous knowledge. It cannot be published in Arabic."

The threat to which Muhammad refers is located in the gap between official, state-sponsored definitions of national identity and the alternative visions his own tex-




tual agenda makes possible. Ideological alternatives of this sort are as much a challenge to contemporary ethnography as they are to postcolonial regimes. If we lock Other modernities into frameworks defined by "the history of historical cultures" (White 1987:56), then the critical po- tential they contain will be lost to us, and we will not be likely to publish "dangerous knowledge" in any language.

Epilogue: The Indignity of Dignified Silence

"In the tent of Majid al-'Adwan," an old 'Adwani told me, "you could hear a coin hit the carpet, even if the person who dropped it sat with the slaves, 100 meters away. No one lifted his voice in Majid's presence."

This same respectful silence-imposed by fathers on sons, by men on women, by the strong on the weak-was imposed on the 'Adwan by force. Maqid's uprising of 1923 was soundly defeated, but his shaykhly self-image was not similarly crushed. Majid's continued "arrogance" in the face of Abdullah's rule has given rise to endless specula- tion about the cause of his death in 1946. The following anecdote, told to me in confidence by dozens of'Adwanis, revolves around the entrenched distrust of hierarchy and powerful hosts whose ability to silence their guests can sometimes be final.

The Amir Abdullah threw a feast, and he invited all the shaykhs of Jordan. Majid sat next to him, in the place of honor. When they finished their meal, the Amir told Majid a secret. He said, "The British are going to make me King. What do you think?" Majid said, "You should stay an Amir. It's better for you." The Amir said, "Why?" Majid said, "Because a king should have his own army and control it. You don't. A king should have his own mint and stamp his own coins. You don't." The Amir was enraged and accused Majid of jealousy. He said, "Do you want to be king in my place?" That same night, Majid died. He just slumped over and died. Blood flowed from his nose. We cannot be sure, but many people believe to this day that he was poisoned. God knows best.

Muhammad Hamdan found this story hard to credit. "They also say," he told me, "that Majid is still alive.

The Amir Abdullah drugged him and sent him away to England where he is kept in a secret military prison."

I admitted to Muhammad that several 'Adwanis had told me the same thing.

That the death of the last great 'Adwani shaykh and the coronation of Jordan's first king took place in the same year, however, did not strike Muhammad Hamdan as a simple coincidence of history. The passing ofMajid al-'Ad- wan signified, for him, the end of the tribal era, and the shift to new forms of political consciousness has not yet given birth to new forms of 'Adwani historical narrative. Muhammad's History of the 'Adwan closes abruptly, in 1946, with the following observation.

After Majid's death, his oldest son Hamud was named shaykh of the Balqa shaykhs. He had clamored for the position. It was his dream. But the title no longer conveyed official rights or duties. Hamud disappeared from the scene. He has no weight in tribal affairs. He became a private person. He is still alive, but many people think he is dead. The new power was Nawfan Sa'ud, who was appointed to the Upper House of Parliament upon Majid's death. He was close to the Hashemites and favored by them. His strength grew through cooperation with the government, just as Majid's had grown through opposition to it.

As a historian, Muhammad finds himself in a no-win situ- ation. If he eliminates from his History of the 'Adwan all the themes and events that undermine the contemporary spirit of "respect and exchange," then he partakes in the domestication of his own tribe. If he chooses, instead, to assert the grand, domineering themes of the "age of shaykhs," he risks offending other tribes (who now consider themselves equal to the 'Adwan); he risks upsetting his fellow 'Adwanis (who have their own versions of the past to assert and protect); and he risks offending the government (which cannot allow other sovereignties, even historically eclipsed ones, to take root in its domain).

In all of this, Muhammad is a victim of the real historical power of the 'Adwan. His identity is firmly grounded in the shaykhly era, and the memory of local might-now reduced to a kind of haughty nostalgia- makes new identities hard to imagine in any terms other than loss. For Muhammad, a history recounting this loss is not desirable. Certainly it would be undignified. The only options that remain, in publication as well as politics, are to play a supportive role in the governance of Hashemite Jordan, as Senator Nawfan Sa'ud has done, or cling to the majesty of another age, as Paramount Shaykh Hamud Majid has done, and slowly fade away.

Publish or perish. Whichever path Muhammad chooses, he will contribute to a modem political enterprise whose business, since it came to the Balqa in the 1920s, has been the reconfiguration of identity and the redistribution of power.

Notes

Acknowledgments. My research in Jordan (1989-90) was funded by a National Science Foundation grant and a Fulbright- Hays fellowship; it was sponsored by the Institute for Archaeol- ogy and Anthropology at Yarmouk University. Thanks go to Paul Dresch and Robert Femea for their helpful comments on earlier drafts of this essay, which were presented at the 1994 annual meetings of the American Anthropological Association and of the Middle East Studies Association. Dale Eickelman, Brinkley Messick, Gregory Starrett, and two anonymous reviewers also offered insightful commentary. None of these persons, institu- tions, or agencies would necessarily endorse the views ex- pressed here, and I alone am responsible for any errors found in the text.




1. This scenario is common in nation-states that advocate modernism while cultivating an antique, classical tradition which stands for greatness (and decline). In these settings, ethnographers who question official articulations of modernity and the classical past are immediately suspect. "Against the Grain: Nationalism and the Politics of Ethnography," a panel presented at the 93rd Annual Meeting of the American Anthro- pological Association, explored the vexed relationship between ethnographers and the nationalist intellectuals who supervise, scrutinize, and sometimes actively undermine their research (Karakasidou 1994). Not surprisingly, discussion centered on fieldwork done in places associated with ancient "high cultures": China, Greece, the Balkans, India, the Middle East.

2. To sample the latest forms of the genre, see Harding and Myers 1994.

3. Featherstone 1990; Hannerz 1992; and Harvey 1989. 4. Conder 1891; Merrill 1881; and Tristram 1873. 5. The photograph's power to represent the past in ways both

artificial and convincingly real is brilliantly diagnosed in Sontag 1977.

6. For an intriguing look at the relationship between Bedouin material culture and Jordanian national identity, see Layne 1994.

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