One of the most basic and universal of human connections is that of bread and politics. Historical clichés, invocations, and collective demands have been virtually and literally wrapped in bread. José Ciro Martínez’s fascinating study of the politics of bread subsidies in Jordan pursues an understanding of politics beyond “clientelism, corruption, rent seeking” and questions of “regime maintenance” (p. 223). At the same time, Martínez is keenly interested in how a state operates at multiple levels through the daily lives of Jordanians. There is much to learn from this book, especially for those scholars who tend to limit their analyses to formal aspects of state power. The methods of interrogation that Martínez uses range from well-structured ethnographic observations in neighborhood bakeries to discussions with elites and their views of public welfare. The result is a coherent political narrative that challenges our understandings of states and welfare provision in the Middle East.
Conceptualizations of bread politics can fall easily into dichotomies of resistance or acquiescence, which as Martínez argues, tend to mirror similar bivariate conceptions of state and society. For decades, the Jordanian government subsidized flour to ensure local bakeries could produce daily bread at a stable and affordable price. Along with a handful of other welfare provisions, these policies are commonly interpreted as exercises of state power to purchase political acquiescence for the Hashemite monarchy. States of Subsistence adopts a Foucauldian- inspired perspective on political power to dispense with the assumption of clear lines and get at the multiple ways bread makers and consuming Jordanians encounter and reproduce state power. Through this lens, Martínez brings into focus a Jordanian state that operates less as a structured given, a politics that is less than an arena of domination, and a citizenry comprising more than simple subjects. The shifting politics of bread subsidies offers Martínez ample evidence to show how the state is “materially and discursively” rendered and how the extension and negotiation of welfare provisions structure the state within Jordanian societies. Bread politics comprises a range of compliance and resistance not just in times of crisis but also critically in everyday encounters and “performances” in which state power is made tangible and meaningful (p. 11).
The timeframe for States of Subsistence begins in the 1970s, a decade in which Jordanian leaders faced multiple crises ranging from the aftereffects of a civil war to mounting inflationary pressures. The standard historiography of this period sees the Hashemite monarchy and its allies reacting in purposeful and institutional ways to stave off political opposition. Martínez questions this linear construction by tracing the implementation of the bread subsidy program and how it is was adapted and implemented at the neighborhood level. On the one hand, state officials were tasked with ensuring that redirections of subsidized flour were minimized and that food safety regulations were upheld. Bakers and consumers, on the other hand, were concerned with the regular and timely provision of everyday bread and making every effort to avoid the ramifications of shutting down a local bakery for perceived violations. States of Subsistence effectively shows how this simple relationship spawns a complexity of politics that warrants close study.
The most rewarding chapters follow Martínez’s introduction to work in a Jordanian bakery and his travels with officials from the Ministry of Industry, Trade, and Supply on their visits to other bakeries. The humble bakery emerges as a site of critical political power in which the state is engineered, contested, and extended. Martínez sets the bakery, the neighborhood it serves, and what each means to the other into a provocative narrative of state power. To many comparative political observers of state building in the Middle East, violence, coercion, and cooptation are basic. But States of Subsistence pushes us to see state power implicated differently; that is, in the senses, tastes, and daily operation of feeding people.
In one way, work at the local bakery provides a venue of sorts for public collectives to achieve stability around the provision of food. In another way, bakeries are generating expectations and forms of “public accountability” (p. 149) that produce new collectives. Martínez argues that, as the assumed barriers between state and society fade, the state becomes concrete. His experience with ministry officials inspecting local bakeries extends the frame of a state’s making and remaking. Ministry inspectors tasked with overseeing the subsidy program adjudicate between “a detailed knowledge of the rules” and “an amorphous combination of cultural competency, social intuition, and pose” (p. 96). Inspectors are also generating socioeconomic data as they adjudicate between standardized ministry data on subsidized bread consumption and local subjective terrains that complicate neat applications of that data. For example, although inspectors possessed data on local bakeries and neighborhoods that could be used to shut down a store or approve/deny a permit to operate, rarely did the decision-making process rely solely on that data. Instead, Martínez observed inspectors surveying consumer sentiment (is this establishment viewed as only profit driven?), digging into who makes up the neighborhood (are there refugee groups?), sifting through applicants’ social positions (do they have political connections?), and tasting the finished product (how much subsidized flour was used?): thus, “discretion permeates their craft” (p. 97). This type of research into how Arab states generate and adjudicate the macro data that other social scientists rely on is rare and illuminating.
Pulling back from these immediate encounters, one comes to appreciate how diagnoses of state weakness and poor governance that are commonly applied to Jordan and other Arab states miss a great deal. As the workings of the bread subsidy program demonstrate, parts of the Jordanian state operate quite effectively in extracting information and resources and curating data to fit particular conditions—capacities and skills that are usually associated with the state’s security institutions. Although calls to disaggregate the state are not new, States of Subsistence brings persuasive ethnographic evidence to bear about what that means and how disaggregation operates at different levels.
In 2018, the Jordanian government, at the behest of its US patrons and international lenders, launched a policy to replace the bread subsidies with a targeted assistance program. Popular opposition emerged but has been ineffective in reversing the decision. Nevertheless, States of Subsistence cautions against simply interpreting these shifts as an authoritarian state victory over a supine society. Rather, as the evidence suggests, welfare and public goods provision are constantly in formation as the state is made and remade. The performance of a coherent state may emerge, but as Martínez concludes, this is a contingent and unfinished relationship.
