Jordan

Two words getting ample use in my life here in Irbid are “haraam” and “mamnuah,” which in English are roughly approximated to mean “flagrant violation of social norms” and “forbidden.”

The reasons behind the application of such labels all feel incomplete. If the prevailing norm is that the young men construct blatant lies about their relations with girls*, wouldn’t the accompanying norm be that people disregard stories of conquest authored by them? (*this coming from the report from one of the Jordanian language partners that 1) young women here don’t put pictures of themselves on their facebooks because the young men will download the pictures and use them as proof of intimacy between themselves and the girls, and 2) saying hello to a young man in public is to open the door to similar opportunities for lewd fabrication).

It could be that in our quest to glean “understanding” from the Jordanians we get presented with the generalization, given anecdotes such as the parenthesized one above.  Their experiences are most likely far more subtle and multi-layered than they can or even want to convey to a student who can neither claim Arabic as a first language, or Jordan as a home country.

My unease comes from my feeling that a lot of the assessments of the “haraam” come from us Americans. This past weekend, as a Bedouin tour guide danced closely with the Italian women he had hand-picked from the haphazardly assembled tent audience, we Americans were the ones watching with eyebrow raised and disapproval written on our faces. And as I got up to do the Macarena in what I assessed to be a more PC version of game-faced participation, it was judgment from my American peers that I feared the most.

So the question I keep coming to is, are we off in our collective assessments of the forbidden? Has the cultural handbook we’ve all been presented with missed the mark in it’s evaluation of the required local sensitivities? I can’t help but feel frustrated, having come to Jordan to gain real knowledge, and yet feeling like I’m still being asked to operate under generalizations and stereotypes. I feel disempowered to discover people and things for myself, as the city seems to be littered with red tape, and I’m not confident as to who put it up.

This picture illustrates the point. Taken midway in our tour of the desert castles of Jordan, this was the second of two Bedouin tents we entered, custom being that the castles have makeshift outposts to house the guardians of the various isolated monuments. The first of the tents was the stage to the scene of the “flagrant violation of social norms”  described above. At the second site, having expended the potential wonders of the centuries-old castle and begun our trek back to the bus, we entered the second tent stationed along the way with a degree of caution, memories from the first tent still fresh on our minds. Here we were met by the gracious keeper of the outpost, supplanted with tea infused with sage and pleasant conversation, with the two men pictured playing bemused witnesses to our exchange.

Were we to have assumed we knew the contents of this identical-looking second tent, and to have assigned a uniform sleaziness to it’s keepers, we would have missed the unique individuals within this unique tent. That is my fear—that in adhering to the pre-labelled forbidden and inappropriate, and abiding by the red tape, I will miss the subtle degrees of difference one hopes to get out of immersion. To not let the individuals in a country speak for themselves seems antithetical to going to a country—I can make generalizations from my couch in New Jersey.

The difficulty is when religion and culture become conflated. And I think that is the obstacle I’m butting my head up against, but haven’t even named for myself.