Home and Homeland: The Dialogics of Tribal and National Identities in Jordan - Linda L. Layne - Hardcover

In this provocative examination of collective identity in Jordan, Linda Layne challenges long-held Western assumptions that Arabs belong to easily recognizable corporate social groups. Who is a "true" Jordanian? Who is a "true" Bedouin? These questions, according to Layne, are examples of a kind of pigeonholing that has distorted the reality of Jordanian national politics. In developing an alternate approach, she shows that the fluid social identities of Jordan emerge from an ongoing dialogue among tribespeople, members of the intelligentsia, Hashemite rulers, and Western social scientists.Many commentators on social identity in the Middle East limit their studies to the village level, but Layne's goal is to discover how the identity-building processes of the locality and of the nation condition each other. She finds that the tribes create their own cultural "homes" through a dialogue with official nationalist rhetoric and Jordanian urbanites, while King Hussein, in turn, maintains the ideaof the "homeland" in ways that are powerfully influenced by the tribespeople. The identities so formed resemble the shifting, irregular shapes oLayne, Linda L. is the author of 'Home and Homeland: The Dialogics of Tribal and National Identities in Jordan - Linda L. Layne - Hardcover' with ISBN 9780691094786 and ISBN 0691094780.