Affection and Mercy: Kinship, State, and the Management of Marriage in Jordan.

Abstract

This dissertation uses a series of institutional initiatives around marriage to understand how Jordanian kinship systems are changing, bringing with them new relationships to property, labor, and political authority. The dissertation is structured around the three major prestations of Jordanian marriage exchanges: the house, the bridewealth, and the wedding. I focus on institutions that help young people fulfill these prerequisites to marriage without having to rely on their families for assistance, like Jordan’s Housing Corporation, its government-run Sharia Courts, and an Islamic charity called the Chastity Society.

By basing myself in a rural, patrilocal family compound, I was able to contrast these institutional initiatives with the marital practices of people who rely heavily on their extended kin ties to facilitate their marriages. Drawing on archival evidence, participant observation, and oral history, I show how even the well-financed and self-consciously modern institutional initiatives that I studied have been repeatedly forced to accede to the prerogatives of extended kin groups. Whether through the implementation of squatter settlement standardization programs, official form marriage contracts, or Islamic mass weddings, the institutions I studied have repeatedly struggled with legitimizing the extended kin group’s authority over the property, labor, and sexual relations of its members.

This dissertation also analyzes how these institutional initiatives attempt to partition the social world to create new forms of order and discipline—as well as novel escape hatches. It contributes to a growing body of scholarship exploring how various domains of modern social life like religion, the family, the state, and the market are constituted through practice and how social actors experience such domains phenomenologically. This study demonstrates the persistent and indispensible role that kinship plays in the functioning of modern institutions. It also highlights an emerging Islamic ideal of companionate marriage that challenges the primacy of the extended kin group, which I term (following a popular Quranic verse) “affection and mercy.”