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Site of Resistance or Apparatus of Acquiescence? Tactics at the Bakery

Published version
Peer-reviewed

Type

Article

Change log

Authors

Martinez, JC 

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.

Description

Keywords

Jordan, tactics, resistance, subsidies, food politics, neoliberalism, comparative politics

Journal Title

Middle East Law and Governance

Conference Name

Journal ISSN

1876-3375
1876-3375

Volume Title

10

Publisher

Brill
Sponsorship
Gates Cambridge