University of Michigan doctoral student Geoffrey Hughes, supervised by Dr. Andrew Shryock, will undertake research on the contemporary construction and maintenance of kinship relationships in a world increasingly defined by ethnic and religious differences, bureaucratic social engineering, and material limitations, including the availability of suitable housing. Hughes will carry out his research in Jordan where social engineering projects seek to transform Jordanian families from far-flung juridical, economic and political bodies into more circumscribed and isolated units centered on spouses and their children. Hughes hypothesizes that projects designed to make Jordanian families "modern" are often co-opted by the very kin networks they are meant to break up and reorganize. This will make the underlying issues more visible for social science research.
Based in the village of 'Areesh, which is located between the city of Madaba and the capital of Amman, Hughes will study the diversity of marriage practices and the relationships surrounding them. He will collect data employing a range of social science research methods including archival research, semi-structured interviews, and participant observation in both the patrilocal settlement of 'Areesh and the urban institutions seeking to transform marriage in Jordan.
By studying the entanglement of kinship and bureaucracy and attempting to reconcile these putatively distinct domains through a simultaneiously material and semiotic approach, this study will contribute to the growing body of social science literature that seeks to understand the surprisingly persistant importance of kinship relations in the modern world. Funding this research also supports the education of a graduate student.
Geoffrey Hughes, under the supervision of Dr. Andrew Shryock at the University of Michigan, conducted 18 months of ethnographic research for a dissertation in anthropology (11 months supported by this grant). Research was conducted in Arabic. Thanks to contacts he had made over the course of two years as a Peace Corps volunteer, Hughes was invited to live in a rural family compound in Jordan. He conducted a multi-sited ethnographic research project focused on a series of social engineering projects attempting to change how Jordanians marry. Hughes developed the project in response to an emerging political controversy in Jordan over what the opposition Islamic movement has dubbed "the crisis of marriage." They argue that the increasing prevalence of spinsterhood is an indicator of the fundamental failures of the current economic and political order. One of their responses to this has been the creation of an Islamic NGO called The Chastity Society (al-‘afaaf), which seeks to help young people marry in various ways—the most famous of which is their annual mass wedding. However, Hughes first stumbled across the controversy in his capacity as a Peace Corps volunteer where he found that the young Bedouin tribesmen he worked with were constantly discussing the difficulty of getting married. There, the wedding was simply one of three major economic hurdles. The other two were bridewealth (a kind of divorce insurance for the bride) and the most important thing of all: housing. The project was designed to compare and contrast the ways in which various urban institutions went about structuring and formatting the process of getting married. By living in a rural family compound, Hughes was further able to compare the three different institutional approaches to marriage to the approach of a group of people who seek to avoid such institutional arrangements. Hughes focused on 1) the members of the tribe who he was living with 2) members and beneficiaries at The Chastity Society 3) the employees and clients at the Sharia Courts (the government agency responsible for drawing up, storing and enforcing marriage contracts) and 4) the employees and clients at the Housing and Urban Development Corporation (a public-private partnership tasked with meeting the housing needs of Jordan’s rapidly growing population). In each site, he relied on a combination of written records (family trees, land records, marriage contracts, development reports), interviews, and participant observation for data. He also conducted a statistical analysis of marriage contracts to learn how the court's knowledge practices have shifted over time along with the population it seeks to know. This research engages the social scientific research on bureaucracy and kinship. While these topics have generally been studied in isolation, recent research has shown that the line between public and private (bureaucratic and familial) varies cross-culturally—as does the tendency to use spatial metaphors to describe the distinction. The research found that such boundary work was often directly tied to conflicts over how power could be exercised by people depending on their gender, age, marital status, citizenship status, social class, or occupation. For social scientists seeking to understand the distribution of political power in a community, this becomes a methodological problem: people may see their lives as organized into distinctive spheres of activity like "work" and "home" and researchers may even find themselves in a situation where they have solid reasons to believe they can cut off their analyses—even if further study would reveal that it is in fact the symbolic resonances across domains in concert with wide-ranging flows of material goods which makes the individual’s experience of a coherent domain possible. This research is innovative in that it focuses on relationships of ritual exchange (many occurring in unexpected places) to understand how people make and break kin bonds and how they do or do not replace these with other kinds of relationships. This study provides a concrete examination of conflicts over issues of marriage and family in the contemporary Middle East with a special focus on the role of liberal, tribal and Islamic ideologies in these struggles. These sorts of ideological conflicts over what constitute legitimate and illegitimate familial relations impact everything from public perceptions of nepotism and corruption to the legitimacy of the monarchy to role of the state in providing a social safety net. Finally, whereas Americans tend to associate religious revival movements with "family values," this research points to a more complex relationship between the Islamic movement and preexisting family structures. Their pro-marriage stance is in tension with their attempts to pull people away from extended kin networks and reorient them towards new political, economic and moral configurations. This implies that family and personal status law (in concert with more classically 'economic' concerns about wages and housing) will remain a key site for political contestation in the region for the foreseeable future.
