Site of Resistance or Apparatus of Acquiescence? Tactics at the Bakery
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Authors
Martinez, JC
Publication Date
2018-10-03Journal Title
Middle East Law and Governance
ISSN
1876-3375
Publisher
Brill
Volume
10
Issue
2
Pages
160-184
Type
Article
This Version
VoR
Metadata
Show full item recordCitation
Martinez, J. (2018). Site of Resistance or Apparatus of Acquiescence? Tactics at the Bakery. Middle East Law and Governance, 10 (2), 160-184. https://doi.org/10.1163/18763375-01002002
Abstract
This article explores the importance and impact of a set of actions through which bakers manipulate laws and regulations that seek to organize and regulate how they do business. It builds on eighteen months of fieldwork conducted in Jordan, twelve of which were spent working in three different bakeries in the capital, Amman. Moving away from the idea that public policies are simply imposed, the article looks in detail at the social relations through which they are enacted. By honing in on the bakery, and examining arrangements between bakery owners, workers, consumers and ministerial employees, it illuminates modes of political agency that escape conventional binaries of domination/resistance, state/society and legality/illegality. I argue against seeing these practices as easily categorized forms of resistance or frivolous acts of corruption. Nor are they simply reinforcements of hegemonic control. Instead, ‘tactics’ at the bakery subvert the order of things to serve other ends. Foregrounding them in this analysis seeks not only to challenge views of power relations as strictly binary but to elucidate some of the ways in which citizens inhabit and engage with the neoliberal and authoritarian logics that pervade everyday life in Jordan.
Keywords
Jordan, tactics, resistance, subsidies, food politics, neoliberalism, comparative politics
Sponsorship
Gates Cambridge
Identifiers
External DOI: https://doi.org/10.1163/18763375-01002002
This record's URL: https://www.repository.cam.ac.uk/handle/1810/286596
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