History and historiography among the Belqa tribes of Jordan.

The Bedouin of central Jordan began, in the 1970s, to produce written accounts of their own tribal past. This transition from oral to textual history proved difficult from the start. Writing oral histories demands that a parochial and highly antagonistic discourse--one composed of contested genealogies, tales of war and migration, and heroic poetry--be adapted to a print culture that is public, nationalistic, and committed to themes of Arab unity. To better comprehend the shift from oral to textual history-making, I study the character of the spoken tradition: its form and content, its modes of transmission, and the methods by which authoritative historical speech is created and preserved. I then analyze the career of two Bedouin historians: Muhammad Hamdan al-'Adwan and Dr. Ahmad 'Uwaydi al-'Abbadi. The successes and failures of these authors serve as a lens through which popular conceptions of national identity, power, and historical knowledge in Hashemite Jordan can be clearly seen. I conclude by arguing that genealogical and nationalist images of community are merging to form new modes of identity which, among Jordan's tribal population, give the modern nation-state a familiar, patriarchal shape. At the same time, these new forms of identity encourage tribesmen to ask, "Who are the true sons of this country?" Insofar as the answer to this question does not include the Palestinian majority or the Hashemite elite, both of whom come originally from outside Jordan, this striving after essential identities stands to undermine the ideology of national unity that inspired it.PhDAnthropologyUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/103669/1/9332166.pdfDescription of 9332166.pdf : Restricted to UM users only