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THE ARCHITECTURE OF ENVIRONMENT: BUILDING HOUSES ALONG THE GREAT RIFT VALLEY IN JORDAN

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 September 2018

Bridget L. Guarasci
Bridget L. Guarasci*
Affiliation:
Bridget L. Guarasci is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Anthropology, Franklin & Marshall College, Lancaster, Pa.; e-mail: [email protected]
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Abstract

This article analyzes the restoration of Jordan's UN Dana Biosphere Reserve cottages for ecotourism and home building in the neighboring village of Qadisiyya as competing land projects. Whereas a multimillion-dollar endowment from the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) restores Dana's houses as a “heritage” village for a tourist economy, families in Qadisiyya build houses with income from provisional labor to shore up a familial future. Each act of home building articulates a political claim to land. This article argues for attention to the architecture of the environment in the comparison of two, once-related villages. A comparative analysis of Dana and Qadisiyya reveals the competing socio-political objectives of home building for the future of Jordan and the implications of environment in that struggle.

Keywords

aestheticsarchitecturedevelopmentenvironmenthouseJordanNGO
Type
Article
Information
International Journal of Middle East Studies , Volume 50 , Special Issue 3: Environment and Society in the Middle East and North Africa , August 2018 , pp. 513 - 536
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2018 

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References

NOTES

Author's Note: I thank Sarah El Kazaz, Gökçe Günel, Sophia Stamatopoulou-Robbins, Elana Buch, Geoffrey Hughes, Andrew Shryock, the editors of IJMES, and three anonymous reviewers for their generative comments on drafts of this article. I thank Muʿad Al Qawabeah for his research assistance in Tafileh. I thank the American Center of Oriental Research whose CAORC Senior Fellowship supported my 2012 research and Franklin & Marshall College for grants that funded my follow-up ethnography.

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25 All names in the manuscript have been changed to protect the confidentiality of my research participants.

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30 That familial homes are built with migrant labor is a global phenomenon; Melly, “Inside-Out Houses.”

31 The Sharra highlands are part of the Mountain Heights Plateau abutting Jordan's Wadi Araba, which is a part of the Jordan Valley and comprises a section of the Great Rift Valley extending from Turkey down through East Africa along the Jordanian–Israeli border.

32 Al-Akh Sabah is the name of one of the three major tribes in Qadisiyya, representing 20 percent of the village. It designates geography, but is not used as a surname. I use al-Akh Sabah as a surname here to provide both context for the village and anonymity for individual members of this tribe.

33 United Nations Development Programme, “Arid Region Nature and Natural Resources Conservation and Rehabilitation—Azraq Component” (project document for UNDP, Amman, Jordan, 1993).

34 Biosphere reserves are “sites of excellence” recognized by UNESCO for their efforts to implement the 1992 Rio Convention on Biological Diversity by promoting sustainable development through local community efforts and biodiversity conservation science; UNESCO, “Biosphere Reserves—Learning Sites for Sustainable Development,” 2013, accessed 21 October 2013, http://www.unesco.org/new/en/natural-sciences/environment/ecological-sciences/biosphere-reserves/.

35 Jordan is a semirentier state, with foreign assistance constituting 20 to 50 percent of its overall budget; Peters, Anne Mariel and Moore, Pete W., “Beyond Boom and Bust: External Rents, Durable Authoritarianism, and Institutional Adaptation in the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan,” Studies in Comparative International Development 44 (2009): 256–85CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Zaina Steityeh, “First Aid,” Jordan Business, July 2011, accessed 8 December 2011, http://www.jordanbusinessmagazine.com/sites/default/files/Cover%20Storyjult.pdf.

36 Appadurai, “Housing and Hope.”

37 290 JD is roughly equivalent to $410 and 18,000 JD is roughly equivalent to $25,425 based on the 1.41 exchange rate on 30 October 2013.

38 Singerman, Diane and Amar, Paul, eds., Cairo Cosmopolitan: Politics, Culture, and Urban Space in the New Globalized Middle East (Cairo: American University in Cairo Press, 2006)Google Scholar.

39 Meneley, Tournaments of Value, 61.

40 One Jordanian dinar is divided into one hundred qirsh.

41 Shaykh Fulan al-Akh Sabah told me that his family had twenty sheep. Today each sheep is valued at 200 JD, or about $282 at the exchange rate of 1.41 on 20 July 2017.

42 Fehérváry, “The Materiality of the New Family House in Hungary,” 18; Meneley, Tournaments of Value, 62.

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48 Meneley, Tournaments of Value, 15; Shryock, “The New Jordanian Hospitality,” 41.

49 The plan also envisioned creating a protected area at Shobak, where the ruins of a Crusader castle were well preserved. Shobak was about forty-five minutes drive from Dana village. While the master plan linked Dana with Petra and Wadi Rum, it linked Shobak with Feynan, an award-winning ecolodge designed by Walid Munif in the valley below Dana's cliffs.

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51 Shryock, “The New Jordanian Hospitality.”

52 Though the RSCN is a Royal NGO, it receives only about 9 percent of its annual operating budget from the government. Almost half of its annual income derives from ecotourism and the accompanying socio-economic projects of its reserves; Annual Report (Amman, Jordan: Royal Society for the Conservation of Nature, 2011), 30. Under the Wild Jordan socio-economic plan—which features a green café just off of Amman's thriving Rainbow Street where agents of the British empire once made their home and where the British embassy is housed today—each of the reserves specializes in a particular trade, such as the profitable biscuit house at the Ajloun reserve which manufactures tasty “traditional” cookies packaged for sale both at the reserve and at the Wild Jordan center in Amman. USAID identified tourism as Jordan's fastest-growing and most promising economic sector.

53 The RSCN also exceeded its environmental mandate at Wadi Rum when it was tasked with implementing a comprehensive tourism plan for the site; Brand, “Development in Wadi Rum?”; Chatelard, “Conflicts of Interest.”

54 In this way Dana was quite similar to the Kan Zaman restaurant and heritage center Shryock describes outside of Amman. Shryock, “The New Jordanian Hospitality.”

55 Ibid.