Abstract
While being ‘old-established’ is usually seen as a product of the social negotiation of migration, there is little empirical research on how this category evolves and changes over time. To unravel this process, we focus in this article on the group formation processes which contribute to the making and unmaking of being ‘old-established’ as a pattern of interpretation, a we-image and a potential power chance in various figurations. A combination of figurational and biographical approaches with an extended chronological horizon provides a theoretical and methodological framework to focus on when, and in what circumstances, residents distinguish between ‘old-established’ and ‘newcomers’ in their we- and they-images. Attention is paid to the socio-historical transformations which increase or reduce material and immaterial power chances (such as ownership of land, length of association and internal cohesion) within dynamic processes of group formation in migration societies. A multigenerational case study of an extended family in Jordan shows the complex processuality of how long-time residents become ‘old-established’ as a group, which expands their power chances, and under what circumstances this status can become eroded.
Introduction
For how long does someone have to live somewhere to become ‘old-established’? In different regions and localities all over the world, we will certainly not always find the same answer to this question. Even more, we will find differences as to whether and how the question itself matters for figurations between ‘newcomers’ and ‘old-established residents’, ‘migrants’ and ‘non-migrants’, or ‘mobile’ and ‘sedentary’ groupings in particular socio-historical contexts. Nevertheless, the questions of who is ‘old-established’ and what it means to be ‘old-established’ point to a certain imbalance in migration sociology: theoretical and empirical insights into non-migration (as a social action) and its interrelations with the formation of social groups are less sophisticated when compared with studies on the very different forms of mobility – translocal, transnational, roamers, tourists. Despite many prominent calls for a more historical, relational and social-theory-oriented approach to migration research (Castles, 2003; Rosenthal, 2012; Wimmer and Glick Schiller, 2002), empirical insights into processes that make – and un-make – ‘old-established’ groups have tended to become lost from view. This is especially true in respect of research on ‘old established’ groupings in societies of the Global South, as the sociology of migration has – until now – a tendency to focus on migration-related phenomena in the ‘Global North’ (as has been criticized by Bakewell and De Haas, 2007; Nawyn, 2016).
In this article, we argue that it is useful to study the emergence and changing positions of ‘old-established’ groupings in migration contexts as a process of group formation and thus from a relational and extended socio-historical perspective. This is helpful for understanding what ‘old-established’ means in a certain context: how temporal and spatial aspects of residency, non-migration and the formation of we-groups who define themselves as ‘old established’ are interrelated. We believe that considering the effects of diachronic group formation, as proposed by Norbert Elias (1994) and researchers who have studied migration contexts from this perspective (e.g. Hüttermann, 2020; Rosenthal, 2016; Treibel, 1993), will help to reconstruct these interrelations. Using an empirical example, we will show that differences along the axis ‘old-established residents’–‘migrant newcomers’ are constructed interactively and change over time. However, an extended historical and figurational perspective also shows that forms of social differentiation between ‘old-established residents’ and ‘newcomers’ in everyday life cannot only be explained on the level of interactive relations between those who categorize themselves and others in this way. Our understanding of ‘old-established’ is in fact twofold: on the one hand, we see it as an interactively constructed we-image or pattern of interpretation, and on the other hand, as a component of a group formation process. Both dimensions can, but do not always, interact. Thus, we need to carefully analyse all the historical processes that contribute to the ‘making und unmaking’ of being old-established in the overall context of social change. For example, our analysis of social transformation in Jordan, presented below, shows that processes of group formation were interrelated with the co-optation strategies of the newly established Hashemite regime in a nascent Jordanian state in the first half of the 20th century. Those processes, which began before the arrival of Palestinian and other migrant groupings, had, and still have, an impact on images of being ‘old-established’ today. In the case of Jordan, as in other cases, past phases of intensified group formation linked to state building, armed conflict or rapid social change in general can lay the groundwork for present-day power balances, resource flows, and also the we- and they-images in group figurations.
We will therefore argue that the investigation of being ‘old-established’ as a pattern of interpretation and a component of a group formation process requires a processual, relational and chronologically extended perspective. We have found a combined biographical and figurational approach to be most helpful (Bogner and Rosenthal, 2017). As an interpretive bottom-up approach, biographical research starts from the experiences and perspectives of people living their everyday lives in migration contexts. We reconstruct the emergence and the consequences of figurations of various groupings of ‘old-established residents’ and ‘migrants’ from a long-term socio-historical perspective and in their entanglement with other social processes. As an empirical example to illustrate this, we will present a multigenerational study of an extended family in Jordan whose members define themselves as ‘Transjordanians’, as those who were the ‘original’ settlers in the area east of the river Jordan. We reconstruct a specific bundle of socio-historical mechanisms that have contributed to the increasing and decreasing significance of being old-established. These include processes of mutual differentiation between ‘migrants’ and ‘old-established residents’ in the narrow sense. But in the case of the ‘Transjordanians’, ‘“oldness” of association’ (Elias, 1994: xviii), or having ‘already been there’ as relatively integrated groups, did indeed play an important role in the process of forming the Jordanian state and in their position in appearing and disappearing urban milieus in Amman.
We will first show how our suggestion for a twofold understanding of ‘being old-established’ resonates with the tradition of relational, process-oriented and transformation-oriented migration research. After this, we present the biographical research method on which the subsequent multigenerational study of people who define themselves as ‘old established’ in Amman is based. We will end with a conclusion in which we consider the results from the case study in the light of our theoretical perspective.
Processual and relational migration research
Why study ‘old-established groupings’ in migration studies?
With our conviction that old-established residents should be included in migration research, we follow those who have argued that migration studies could and should go beyond the sole study of migrants – or people labelled as migrants – in societies of the ‘Global North’. Proponents of such perspectives argue that it is important to analyse the complex ways migration has been shaped by, and has shaped, broader social transformation processes. Conceptualizations in this regard include the proposal ‘to move away from treating the migrant population as the unit of analysis’ (Dahinden, 2016: 2217), or to adopt a more historical and actor-based perspective in the tradition of the ‘Chicago School’(Rosenthal, 2012), and/or to overcome ‘methodological nationalism’ (Wimmer and Glick Schiller, 2002) and its (silent) assumption that the population of (nation) states is socially or culturally homogeneous.
These lines of thought suggest that migration studies should be concerned not just with ‘migrants’ alone, but with migration-related social processes and interrelationships in general. This means investigating the significance of migrations for the empirical reality of social collectives (e.g. families, neighbourhoods, urban societies, transnational spaces), the processes and constellations from which they emerge, and how various figurations are affected by the migrations. This also includes, as a kind of ‘reflexive turn’ (Nieswand and Drotbohm, 2014), reflecting on the emergence and the power of categorization processes defining what migration ‘is’ and who (and how) migrants ‘are’, for example on the level of official and discursive definitions (Amelina, 2020), or everyday interactions between migration-related actors (Hüttermann, 2020). Especially the discussion on the theoretical and empirical shortcomings of what Rogers Brubaker (2004) pointedly called ‘groupism’ has been increasingly picked up in migration-related research. This idea of not taking social units or ‘groups’ as a given, but instead making empirical studies of social processes of group formation and social differentiation has also been formative for approaches in the tradition of ‘social boundary making’ (e.g. Barth, 1969; Lamont and Molnár, 2002; Wimmer, 2013) and the tradition of social constructivism (Berger and Luckmann, 1966; Rosenthal and Bogner, 2009). One crucial aspect of the latter two research traditions is linking everyday practices and interactions with the level of broader socio-historical processes that produce, reproduce and change formations of group belonging.
We embrace the idea that processes of group formation must be understood as relational processes in which the boundaries between ‘inside’ and ‘outside’, ‘ourselves’ and ‘the others’ are constructed and maintained in interactive processes. But the interactive processes in a particular socio-spatial setting (e.g. the urban space in Amman) are embedded in complex socio-historical group formation processes. In our research, which combines a social-constructivist biographical perspective with a processual perspective borrowed from figurational sociology, as suggested by Bogner and Rosenthal (2017), it has proven to be particularly useful to empirically study the link between everyday practices/interactions and socio-historical processes. Thus, we also take up Elias’ important argument that the history – and thus the relative duration – of we-group processes follows relatively autonomous and unintended dynamics. These process dynamics can acquire importance for forms of interactive boundary making between ‘old-established’ groupings and ‘newcomers’. In their classic figurational study of a community, Elias/Scotson (1965) showed clearly that group boundaries are stabilized and power chances in favour of the ‘established’ are maintained by means of ascriptions and interactive practices (such as blame gossip in respect of the ‘outsiders’). Their study shows, however, that there is a possibility that long-time residency in itself comes along with advantages in terms of power. Figurational properties such as the degree of internal cohesion or contact intensity within a group may allow the effective realization of social boundaries. Through their ‘“oldness” of association’, the power and the status of long-time residents is raised over that of newcomers who arrive later (Elias, 1994: xviii). The model proposed by Elias and Scotson and their argument concerning social age have been taken up and intensively discussed in migration studies (e.g. Loyal, 2011; Petintseva, 2015; Treibel, 1993). It has also been pointed out that the social age of a group does not necessarily contribute to its power and status (Bauböck, 1993; Rosenthal, 2016). Rather, the important question here is if and how group formation has taken place over time, in connection with which processes, and how far it translates into different power chances, we-images and they-images. This means empirically addressing questions like: what does it mean in a particular historical constellation to have ‘been there already’ as a relatively integrated group which has not only been formed by distinction from migrant newcomers? To what extent do the power chances and the we- and they-images of residents depend on having participated in the unfolding of certain social processes, such as the setting up of state institutions or the creation of an urban centre? This means that studying ‘old-established groups’ needs to address two aspects: (a) whether and how the experiences and power chances of certain ‘groups’ or segments of society are related to their long-time residency (in the sense of ‘oldness’ or duration) and (b) how this is interrelated with the construction of we- and they-images vis-à-vis migrant newcomers. In the following section, we will explain how we tackled these questions empirically using a biographical approach in combination with figurational sociology.
A biographical approach to the sociology of migration
Since the 1980s, biographical approaches have increasingly been used to analyse the experiences and patterns of action and interpretation of members of different migrant groupings. This has enabled the authors concerned to provide a counterweight to simplifying explanations of migration and purely problematizing views of the everyday realities of migrants in immigration contexts (for a discussion of current research, see Siouti, 2018). Biographical research uses various methods, but with a focus on autobiographical materials and biographical interviews based on life stories, to reveal how migration processes are experienced and how they are interwoven with individual, family and collective histories. In the tradition of the sociology of knowledge (Berger and Luckmann, 1966; Schuetz, 1953), a biographical approach enables us to reconstruct the interrelationship between individual life courses and the social and historical processes of which they are part (Kohli, 1986).
With regard to methodology, we collected our data using a combination of various methods that focus on the interpretations and (inter-)actions of ‘individuals’ in their present and past lives (e.g. biographical-narrative interviews, follow-up-interviews, participant observation, group discussions). The data from the narrative interviews were analysed according to the ‘biographical case reconstruction’ method (Rosenthal, 2018: 166–189). The aim of this method is to place the biography in its past and present social contexts with the aid of historical research and other materials (e.g. archive materials). The individual case can thus be used to reconstruct general process structures showing the multiple processes and constellations that have led to a life history taking a specific trajectory. Finally, the reconstruction makes it possible to construct types which tell us something about the way different mechanisms interact and also their range of effectiveness, that is, when these mechanisms come into play and when they do not. 1
Combining biographical research with a figurational perspective, as proposed by Bogner and Rosenthal (2017), makes it possible to see the processuality of biographies as changing figurations – which always means changing power balances. The process sociology developed by Norbert Elias brings two aspects of biographical research more sharply into focus: long-term socio-historical processes and tendencies, and the ‘individual biography’ in terms of power analysis. Consistently embedding the individual case in all its changing figurations with other social actors raises awareness of the ‘power ratios’ (Elias, 1978 [1970]: 74) within concrete socio-historical processes which influence the actions of individuals and collectives and which are influenced by them.
Thus, migration research based on an interpretive, processual and biographical approach goes beyond a study of ‘migrants’. It investigates the emergence and transformation of figurations which are shaped by migration. Using this approach in immigration contexts means taking into account not just single groupings, but all related groups of actors. We also adopted this relational, processual perspective in our research project ‘Dynamic figurations of refugees, migrants, and longtime residents in Jordan since 1946’, from which the analyses presented here of the making and unmaking of being old-established are taken. As in a previous research project in this region in which the authors participated (Rosenthal, 2016), we asked how far power chances and we-images associated with long-term residency in a context strongly shaped by migration are empirically observable or not observable. 2
Old-established residents in Amman and Jordan
Jordan as a migration society
Some rough figures may serve to show how common experiences of migration in Jordan are. More than two thirds of the inhabitants of Jordan belong to families that came as refugees within the last three generations. After formal independence in 1946, Jordan took in huge numbers of refugees in different historical phases. The population increased from about 375,000 to about 10 million, and in Amman the number of inhabitants rose from 30,000 to over 4 million.
The history of immigration to Jordan, especially to Amman, after 1948 is complex and has involved many different groupings, but three groupings in particular. First, the Palestinians, who came from Palestine in the context of the Arab-Israeli wars of 1947/1948 and 1967, and from Kuwait during the second Gulf War in 1990/1991 (today this grouping makes up about 40%–65% of the population, El-Abed, 2014: 86). In contrast to Palestinian refugees in other Arab countries, they were given full citizenship in Jordan, with few exceptions. The early 1990s also saw the beginning of immigration from Iraq. Up to 1 million Iraqis arrived following the 1990/1991 Gulf War, the US invasion of Iraq in 2003, and conquests by ISIS. Finally, from 2011 onwards, there has been an increasing flow of refugees from Syria. In August 2015, over 650,000 Syrian refugees were registered with the UNHCR in Jordan. According to the Jordanian government, the number is about 1.3 million (Lenner, 2016). 3
At first it may seem arbitrary or artificial that, usually in distinction to these migrant groupings, the term ‘old-established’ is used to refer to anyone whose family was present in Transjordan before 1948. Before 1918, most of the geographical territory of present-day Jordan was part of the Ottoman Empire. Up to the 1930s, it was relatively common for people to migrate there from other parts of the (former) Ottoman Empire, especially from Syria or Palestine (for a discussion, see, for example, Schayegh, 2017). Moreover, old-established groupings and groupings of newcomers share some institutionalized we-images. These include speaking Arabic. Many, if not all, are Sunni Arabs. And there are options for common we-images in the ideals of pan-Arabism, in acknowledging the existence of a historical region called Bilad ash-Sham (or Greater Syria), which became subdivided only in the colonial period, or in being members of the Muslim community or Ummah. These we-images cropped up in the conversations and interviews we conducted during our fieldwork.
It is exactly this that makes Jordan an interesting case for a study of becoming old-established. For, despite everything, being old-established is a socially powerful category in Jordan. During our fieldwork, we observed that we-images of being old-established played a role in everyday interactions and were preserved in family memories. Moreover, our reconstructions of the family histories and individual life courses of old-established Jordanians indicate that certain experiences, resource flows and power chances are specifically dependent upon being regarded as old-established, and thus on one’s social age.
Among the old-established residents who lived in Jordan before 1948 we can distinguish those who regard themselves as ‘Transjordanians’. These are people who regard themselves as the ‘original’ inhabitants of the country because their families belong to ‘tribes’, for which the Arabic word ashira (pl. ashair) is used (see Alon, 2016; Layne, 1994). Thus, this is a matter of ‘national origin or lineage, not current citizenship’ (Baylouny, 2008: 278, n.4). We are aware that these tribal and ethno-national categorizations are only one level of the diverse, interlaced belongings and social positions in Jordan and Amman. But belonging to the ashair is of significance in political and social contexts to this day. However, people are also considered as old-established if they belong to those groupings that arrived in the territory of present-day Jordan in the first half of the 20th century and played important roles as administrative officers or businessmen, especially in Amman. They trace their origin back to what is today Syria, the Caucasus, Kurdistan, Palestine, Egypt or Libya.
In this article, we will focus in particular on the grouping known as Transjordanians. In Jordan, they are also called ‘Urduni Urduni’, or ‘Jordanian Jordanians’ and attribute their status as old-established residents to the fact that their families belonged to the ashair.
What makes the Transjordanians ‘old-established’?
The old-established we-groups, but especially the Transjordanians, have specific power chances and opportunities which go back to the process of group formation (including competition and cohesion building) in relation to the newly defined territory of Transjordan (1921) and the newly established Hashemite regime prior to the arrival of Palestinian and other migrant groupings. As in ‘classical’ figurational sociology, these processes laid the foundation for the Transjordanians’ generally higher power chances and more secure resource flows in later phases of the country’s history (Elias, 1994).
In the first phase of state building after the First World War, in which creating a monopoly on violence and taxation and acceptance of the state and the government were in the foreground, the loyalty of various ashair and other social groups to the Hashemite royal house was assured by giving them official posts and other privileges. Especially the armed forces (first named ‘Arab Legion’, later ‘Jordanian Army’) were ‘largely composed of tribesmen in uniform’ (Tall, 2000: 95; cf. Massad, 2001). For long periods of the country’s history, ashair had access to the Jordanian royal house through outstanding leading figures. Within the framework of an elite rotation system, elites who have been locally or regionally resident for several generations function as mediators and bringers of power chances and resources for their respective tribal base (Alon, 2016: 15–16; Shryock and Howell, 2001: 266). However, one should not imagine this base as a permanent fixture but as volatile political capital.
The preferment of Transjordanians in the armed forces and in the public sector increased in Jordan’s heyday as a rentier state, especially in the phase from the 1950s to the 1980s. At the end of the 1980s, almost one fifth of the labour force was employed by the police or the army – and the great majority of these were Transjordanians (Brynen, 1992: 82). These workers enjoyed comprehensive social security benefits. Up until the loss of the West Bank in 1967, the preferment of Transjordanians was also reflected in more economic support for the East Bank and direct financial subsidies for the tribal leaders. It is also inscribed in the election and parliamentary system (Ryan, 2011). Another factor that affects the power chances and opportunities of Transjordanians is their ownership of land.
The preferment increased after the civil war of 1970/1971, in which the Jordanian Army fought against the parties and militias of the PLO (Palestine Liberation Organization) in Jordan. After the 1967 war, the Palestinian organizations had tried, with increasing use of violence, to extend their power in Jordan. These clashes culminated in a civil war which left thousands dead. Palestinian refugee camps came under fire, and finally, the Palestinian combatants were driven out of the country. Subsequently, the Jordanian government carried out extensive ‘cleansingsʼ. The Palestinians tended to be regarded as being collectively responsible for the uprising. The number of Jordanian Palestinians employed in the security apparatus and in the public sector generally was reduced, because they were considered to be untrustworthy (Massad, 2001: 213, 218). This reinforced the domination of old-established residents in these sectors (‘East Bankers first’, see Baylouny, 2008: 289; Brand, 2007: 2). We will discuss below the increased feelings of resentment against Palestinian refugees which resulted from these developments.
From the early 1970s, many Palestinians went to work in the booming Gulf region, which led to a constant flow of remittances and growth of the ‘middle class’ in Jordan. Since the economic crisis which began in the 1980s, and the succession of Abdullah II to the throne following the death of King Hussein in 1999, the economic and social situation in Jordan has changed in a manner which is usually described as neoliberal restructuring. There was a reduction in remittances from the Gulf region. The difficult economic situation led to austerity measures and marketization. There were cuts in subsidies and public services and the cost of living rose sharply. The privatization of state-owned enterprises and a reduction in the number of employees in the public sector were a blow to Transjordanians. Only the army and the security sector were less affected by the cuts and continued to be dominated by old-established residents (Baylouny, 2008: 301). Rural areas, mostly inhabited by Transjordanian groupings, became increasingly marginalized. There have been repeated public protests, the last in 2018, against the withdrawal of the state and the high cost of living in relation to income. In some cases, Transjordanians who were formerly considered as loyal have participated in these protests (Yom, 2014).
The Zayyat family: ‘old-established’ residents in the social transformation process
We have reconstructed the history of the Zayyat family over a period of at least 80 years and 4 generations. 4 Here, we will first show how the concepts of ‘being old-established’ and ‘migration’ are negotiated in we- and they-images in the biographical self-presentations of members of different generations. After this, on the basis of our reconstruction of the family and collective history, we will link the we- and they-images to the forming, reshaping and melting of old-established groups in figurations with different groupings of newcomers and to other related social processes. The transformation process can be roughly divided into two phases. The first phase escalates into a polarizing differentiation dynamic between Transjordanians and Palestinians, in which ‘being old-established’ is strongly contoured as a social boundary between long-term residents and Palestinian migrant ‘newcomers’. This phase is succeeded by a fragmenting dynamic in which the boundary becomes more blurred and is also modified by the arrival of other migrant groupings.
Intergenerational negotiation of ‘old-established’ we-images and migrant they-images
All the members of the family that we interviewed emphasized that their family had lived in the region long before the founding of the state. They frame themselves and their own close family in a tribal we-image. A striking example is the beginning of the self-presentation of Ibrahim, born 1990, in a group discussion
5
with inhabitants of Amman with different belongings: My father is from the deep deep roots of Jordan we are here from 3000 year ago-3000 years so my-my tribe is one of the biggest tribes in Am- in Jordan. (Group discussion, 18 March 2018, English/Arabic)
In this we-image, the members of the family classify themselves as the ‘original’ or ‘real’ inhabitants of the country. This we-image is opposed to they-images of various groupings of migrants. These are given the status of strangers or guests (for the concept of ‘guesthood’ in Jordan, see El-Abed, 2014). This involves the obligation of providing hospitality. However, it also goes together with the expectation that the guests will return home after some time. The family members also lay emphasis on what they see as anomic aspects of the way migrants live, such as alleged drug use and criminal activities, or marriage at a very young age. Here, the family members reproduce anomic components of migrant they-images which are frequently applied in today’s Amman to migrants from Syria and Iraq, but sometimes also target the inhabitants of the impoverished Palestinian refugee camps of East Amman.
However, it is remarkable and telling that the family’s they-image of the Palestinians, who in part have lived in the country for over 70 years and who largely enjoy the same civil rights as old-established residents, also represents them as strangers and guests. This they-image is expressed particularly clearly in the interviews and contributions of the parents (Ahmad born about 1940; Nur born 1945) and their older children (Hamed, born 1967; Safa born in the late 1970s). They argued that the Palestinians should never have been granted citizenship, and that they shouldn’t be represented in Parliament or in the government, because otherwise they would forget ‘their’ country and lose any desire to return to it. This attitude also transports feelings of resentment against ‘the ungrateful Palestinians’ who had been welcomed by Jordan but had supposedly made an attempt to seize power in the Jordanian civil war. When asked whether it would be better if all refugees, including the Palestinians, left Jordan, the son Hamed said, ‘Yes, yes, including Palestinians, who is coming after 1948, it is better for them’. This implies that those who came before 1948 are excluded from the ‘guest’ construction.
Our reconstructions of the life stories of the different generations of this family show that these anti-Palestinian feelings can be activated by family members of different generations, including younger family members. But at the same time the younger family members (son Hashim, born 1982; granddaughters Amira, born about 1997, and Leila, born 1999, and Ibrahim) show more ambivalences and frictions in their group-related feelings and we- and they-images. As we will show in sections ‘Transjordanians and increased polarization’ and ‘From polarization to fragmentation among Transjordanians’, these generational differences depend on which historical phase the different family members grew up in and reflect the corresponding stage in the transformation of the figurations. In the figuration with immigrants from Iraq and Syria, Amira locates herself, at least to some extent, in a we-group that includes both the Transjordanians and the Palestinians: 46 years ago we used to have discussions whether you are Jordanian Jordanian are you Palestinian Jordanian who is more Jordanian but after the Syrian after the refugees came in we sided more we united more as one ah ah ah people or as represent as representing of the Jordanian community. (Interview, 15 January 2019, English/Arabic)
Our reconstruction of this family also reveals another generational difference in respect of its we-image: members of the younger generation increasingly define the relationship between the newcomers and themselves as a competitive relationship over cultural capital. This is based on the assumption that their own rural, Bedouin origin and closeness to the state shows their ‘cultural backwardness’ as compared to the cultivated migrant groupings in the urban middle class. In other words, their we-image of themselves as Transjordanians is opposed to their they-image of cultivated migrants. In addition to urban old-established groupings, this ‘they-group’ also includes certain Palestinian refugees who came to Amman in 1948 and who are regarded as being on average better educated and as attaching more value to education than their (Bedouin) we-group. In this they-image, the migration experiences of the Palestinians are even interpreted as a kind of educational resource, as Hashim makes clear: Palestinian people have much better educated have tolerance than Jordanian people [. . . ] because why those people travelling from different places those people they have the struggling over their own life they further appreciate their value of learning and schooling. (Interview, 21 November 2018, English)
This construction is used by most members of the family, for instance when the daughter Safa says that Palestinians who have lived in Kuwait or the United States have experienced prosperity in the private sector. But the younger family members also express indirect criticism of the former ‘simple’ opportunities open to Transjordanians. Referring implicitly to their older relatives, they argue that they could get simple jobs without any great effort. They didn’t need to invest in education in order to succeed – as the Palestinians had to, which benefited their children. Hashim again, The vast majority of our parents either they have a low job profile very low class jobs or for the military sector while the vast majority of their [the Palestinians’] own parents coming from private sector banks education learning doctors this will reflect in their way of thinking. (Interview, 21 November 2018, English)
The younger members of the family distance themselves here from members of their own we-group of old-established Transjordanians. They display a tendency to divide the tribal we-group into two parts: on the one hand, those whom they latently characterize as passive and somewhat simple-minded Transjordanians who still put their trust in employment in the public sector and show an uncritical loyalty to the regime, and on the other hand, themselves who they see as ambitious Transjordanians who are trying to catch up with the successful migrants. One may even say that they to some extent accept or copy the Palestinian they-image which accuses Transjordanians of ‘backwardness, poverty, and anti-Palestinian sentiment’ (Shryock, 1997: 50).
In the following section, we will show how various process dynamics have affected the formation of these we- and they-images. Based on our reconstruction of the family history, we will trace the processes of group formation embedded in the changes in the figurations of various groupings and thus changes in the opportunities and power chances of the different members of the family.
Transjordanians and increased polarization
The members of this family all belong to one branch of a large tribal confederation from the Balqa region which lies to the northwest of Amman. Although pastoral nomadism was certainly practised, control over land, related to long-time residency, was an important resource; with the foundation of the Jordanian state, the transition to private ownership was accelerated (Layne, 1994: 42; Shryock, 1997: 42–43). In the early 1950s, the family set up a large, prosperous farm in the Jordan Valley and lived there. Two sons joined the army, like many other members of their tribe. In the first half of the 1960s, the grandfather, who had an important position in his home village, purchased land on the edge of Amman, on which several members of the extended family settled. In the 1960s, the movement of members of village communities to Amman contributed significantly to the fast urban growth of this city as Jordan’s political and commercial centre (Dejong, 1996: 268).
During the war of 1967, the family left the Jordan Valley. They settled on the land in Amman purchased by the grandfather. They were followed by up to 60 other families from the same ashira. Since the land was not big enough, this group of families also occupied neighbouring land that belonged to the Jordanian army. Many found employment in the army and in the public sector, and this encouraged others to give up farming as their main economic activity. However, those living in Amman were initially poor and lived in overcrowded houses. There was no infrastructure in the area and things like electricity, water supply and schools came only gradually. The people in this neighbourhood had close ties and the family we have described here occupied an important position: first the grandfather, and later the father, was the leader of the local community. But at the same time the father, a former soldier, had a simple job as a bus driver in Amman.
From 1968 onwards, the parties and militias of the PLO controlled parts of Amman where Palestinians had settled. This strategically well-placed neighbourhood was repeatedly targeted by the militias, who laid mines there. During the civil war, the inhabitants were armed by the Jordanian government, but many fled from the area, and others were killed or wounded. This process deepened lines of difference and conflict which remained (or became) a part of everyday life. After the civil war, the parents, who had hardly any private relations with Palestinians, developed a general mistrust of Palestinians. The son Hashim tells how his parents advised him against having any close contact with them during his childhood in the 1980s and 1990s: ‘Our families keep discouraging us please don’t interact don’t engage don’t trust in those people [. . .] this generation conveys their experience to us as well’ (Interview, 21 November 2018, English). The they-images of Palestinians as ungrateful foreigners, which have been discussed above and which are typically expressed by Hashim’s parents and older siblings, must be interpreted before the backdrop of this primarily political conflict.
In the subsequent decade, the family profited from the privileges granted to Transjordanians after the civil war. They achieved legalization of their settlement on army land, which in preceding years had repeatedly been cleared, by using their connections with members of the old-established social elite. The settlement was not far from a property belonging to the king, and the father Ahmad says in the interview that the king preferred to have Transjordanians as his neighbours.
The life of the family became more stable in the course of the 1970s and 1980s. As the mother Nur (born 1945) puts it, that was when ‘life began’. They continued to live in an almost entirely Transjordanian environment. The members of the family, including the extended family, did not join the wave of migrants leaving Jordan to seek work in the Gulf region. They continued to have employment and career options in the public sector, on which they initially concentrated. Thus, in the 1990s, the eldest son Hamed obtained a leading position in the police force.
A process of increased differentiation into an ‘old-established’ we-group and a Palestinian they-group can be reconstructed for this phase. This differentiation dynamic led to greater inequality in respect of privileges and mutual feelings of resentment. At the same time, it was based on ‘“oldness” of association’ in terms of long-term residency – in other words on historical internal integration or the network of the Transjordanian we-group. The differentiation dynamic was also interwoven with other social processes. For example, the tribal network and its historical links with the state facilitated the process of informal urban settling, which in the region is often a very precarious endeavour (Bayat, 1997). For this phase, one can speak generally of a highly polarizing differentiation dynamic that makes Transjordanians become more ‘old-established’ in respect of their internal integration, power chances and we-image.
From polarization to fragmentation among Transjordanians
Not all the family members are affected to the same degree by the polarizing dynamic described above. While it has strongly influenced those who were born before 1980, those born after this date are caught up in a dynamic in which being old-established is losing its importance.
On settling in Amman, the members of this family became part of a figuration with the different urban groupings, many of them migrants. In the 1960s, Amman had existed for less than 100 years. The urban middle and upper classes were not long-term residents, as in the case of Damascus or other cities, but consisted of various migrant groupings (see above). The arrival of Palestinian refugees in 1948 brought about a huge expansion of the middle and upper classes in Amman (Hanania, 2014: 470).
When the Zayyat family moved to Amman, its members increasingly saw themselves in opposition to these urban classes. Despite their network and the opportunities offered to them by the government of Jordan, they felt themselves to be ‘inferior’ in respect of cultural capital, education, ‘style’ and the dialect they spoke, together with openly stigmatizing they-images. But while there was certainly a line of separation between the urban upper and middle classes and people moving into the city from rural areas, the members of this family experienced this inferiority as a comparison with migrant groupings. As we have shown above (section ‘Intergenerational negotiation of ‘old-established’ we-images and migrant they-images’), the migration histories of these groupings were mainly understood as a resource. Against this backdrop, in the course of the 1970s and 1980s, there was a growing conviction among members of the family that they should, and could, catch up with these groupings. They invested increasingly in education.
In the 1970s and 1980s, the inhabitants of the neighbourhood were mainly farmers or soldiers, so that secondary schools were the place where there was interaction with urban migrants. The uncle Munir (born 1958) and the sons Hamed and Hashim were made very aware of their status when they attended secondary schools in an old district of Amman in the period between the 1970s and the 1990s. This is an extract from the interview with Munir, during which his son Masud was present:
When I went to Jabal A I felt the difference. [In our neighbourhood] I lived like a king over the others. But when I went to Jabal A, not any more.
They were civilized people when they came here from Palestine or from civilized societies, I mean for instance they weren’t from villages or Bedouin societies.
[. . . We wanted] to show these people in Jabal A that we are just like them and even better. We made a terrific effort. We started doing extra work so that we could be better than them in school, so that we could compensate ((our deficiencies)). (Interview, 8 December 2018, Arabic)
From the 1980s onwards, the family used its resources to invest in the education of the younger children. The parents made it possible for their two sons and six daughters to go to university. The parents worked hard to achieve this. They had an income, albeit a small one, from their employment in the public sector, and supplemented this for instance with the sale of land and their social connections. In addition, it is easier for relatives of members of the armed forces to obtain a university place and a grant to help pay the costs.
The figurational position of the family as Transjordanians in opposition to the upper middle class composed of migrants is still felt today. This is shown by the experiences of two granddaughters who took master’s degrees in arts at the same university in 2018:
In the beginning of this year the teacher would like ‘really? that’s your last name? you come from there?’ [. . .] once they believe I am from tribe A they would ask ‘where is your mum from’
And what would they expect?
A Syrian, a Palestinian
An outsider [. . .]
Not tribe A, I would tell ‘tribe A’ and there would be another shock [. . .], ‘like Jordanian Bedouin’. (Interview, 15 January 2018, English/Arabic)
The sons Hashim and Hamed both decided to go for higher degrees. Hashim obtained a scholarship to do a PhD in the United States. Hamed left the police force after 25 years in a leading position and studied for a PhD in Beirut.
This investment in education must also be seen from the perspective of the economic crisis that started in the late 1980s, neoliberal restructuring, and distancing in the tribal base (see section ‘Old-established residents in Amman and Jordan’). At the same time, from 1990 onwards, Iraqi and Palestinian refugees from Kuwait came to Amman. The city expanded and the urban middle classes became bigger and more heterogeneous.
In this socio-historical context, it became more important for individual members of the family to contribute to its prestige. Many of the younger members moved out of the neighbourhood to study or work elsewhere. An indirect effect of this was that more and more impoverished refugee families from Iraq or Syria came to live in the neighbourhood, which affected its reputation. The younger members of the family tended to become part of a newly forming urban milieu ‘made up of the Amman middle and upper classes [. . .] and encompassing both Palestinians and East Bankers’ (Yom, 2014: 241). With their orientation towards a changing migrant urban middle class, many family members began to distance themselves from the royal house. We can describe this as ideological distancing, an internal end to their alliance with the regime. Thus, when he was at university, the son Hashim took part in pro-Palestinian demonstrations, although they were considered as being organized by regime-critical Palestinian groupings. And Amira and Ibrahim want to work for a liberal group at university which does not fit into the tribal spectrum. These and other cases have led to controversies in the family, out of concern for the family’s reputation.
This new trajectory can be related to changes in the we- and they-images of the family members, especially those who were born after 1980, as discussed in section ‘Intergenerational negotiation of “old-established” we-images and migrant they-images’. The younger family members describe themselves as old-established Transjordanians, like the older ones. But they now join the heterogeneous migrant urban middle classes in their longings and their we- and they-images. When speaking about migrants, they make a connection between their migration history and their higher status. They express anti-Palestinian views to a much lesser extent than the older members of their family. And the younger members set themselves apart from other Transjordanians by making a distinction between those they consider as passive and simple-minded and those who have higher ambitions.
In respect of family members born after 1980, a process can be reconstructed in which an old-established we-group experiences less internal integration, fewer power chances and an increasingly fragile we-image. Here, we see a reduction or loss of advantages which arose from the ‘“oldness” of association’ of old-established residents. Privileges and feelings of resentment are linked to a lesser degree with the polarizing dynamic of the 1970s and 1980s. It is clear that the differentiation dynamic is entangled with other social processes. Before the backdrop of immigration and a new political economy in Jordan, there are deep changes in the composition and the significance of previously homogeneous urban neighbourhoods. New urban milieus emerge. For this phase, one can speak of a fragmenting differentiation dynamic in which the Transjordanians become less ‘old-established’ in respect of their internal integration, power chances and shared we-image. The social field is opened up for the formation of new we-groups and new alliances. 6
Conclusion
In this article, we have argued that in sociological migration studies it is important to study processes of group formation on the level of ‘old-established’ residents in a context shaped by migration. We believe that a stronger focus on the long-term ‘making und unmaking’ of being old-established can help to take the sociology of migration beyond a study of the motives and characteristics of people moving across state borders, and to ‘demigrantisize’ migration research (Dahinden, 2016). With this aim in mind, we have presented a biographical and figurational approach. On the one hand, this enables us to focus on when, how, and in what circumstances residents distinguish between old-established and migrant newcomers in their we- and they-images. On the other hand, we can show how social boundaries drawn by these kinds of we- and they-images are embedded in long-term processes of group formation and social transformation.
We have used the case of a family in Jordan as an example to show that ‘“oldness” of association’ of a group can play a role in determining the power chances of its members, including successfully establishing a we-image as ‘old established’ in Amman in the first place. Our reconstruction also indicates under what circumstances this status can become eroded. In the concrete context of Jordan, it is clear that this transformation process involves two contrasting differentiation dynamics which have affected the opportunities and power chances, and the we- and they-images, of the members of the Zayyat family:
The polarizing differentiation dynamic from the 1960s to the 1980s, which meant that the difference in power chances between Transjordanians and Palestinian groupings became greater. However, this polarization also built on the processes of group formation of the Transjordanians in the nascent Jordanian state and therefore on their ‘“oldness” of association’ as defined by Elias.
The fragmenting differentiation dynamic from the end of the 1980s to the present, in which ‘“oldness” of association’ became less significant. Privileges arising from early group formation were eroded, as well as internal integration as a we-group. They-images expressing resentment of migrants became more fragile. To some extent, new types of resentment emerged within the ‘old-established’ we-group.
In the case of Jordan, a study of the differentiation dynamics clearly shows how the status of being ‘old-established’ is contoured and changes in long-term processes and within various figurations. Here, group formation has been significantly moderated by urban change and by the transformation of the Jordanian rentier state.
On a more general level, our example shows that a processual perspective with an extended chronological horizon and a socio-historical analysis is required if we are to understand the processes of group formation in general, and in particular the processes which increase or reduce the significance of ‘being’ a member of an old-established group in a migration society. In other words, in order to understand present-day figurations of old-established groupings and immigrant groupings in a specific social context, we need to look at both the interactive forms of social boundary making in the present and the socio-historical processes which contribute to the making and unmaking of being ‘old-established’. Specifically, a combination of figurational and biographical approaches provides a theoretical and methodological framework which can do justice to the need for a processual perspective on forming and changing figurations of migrants and old-established residents.
Footnotes
Funding
The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: This work was supported by the German Research Foundation [grant numbers RO 827/20-1, RO 827/21-1; 2].
