This article reads the emergence of a Romani political space in Jordan, and its containment in the private sphere in Palestine, through Hannah Arendt's classic The Human Condition. In modernity, Arendt argues, political potential has been stifled by a kind of despotism best characterized by a masculine domination associated with the private sphere of the family. Given that such a position is to a great extent based on Arendt's reading of Classical Greek, Roman, early Christian, and Enlightenment thought, what variations to such a neat division can be found in the case of Romani groups in Arab/Islamic contexts that are beyond Arendt's geographic and epistemological scope? This article puts Arendt's idealized notion of the public/private into conversation with the longue durée of settlement and politics of Romani groups in Palestine and Jordan. Working with Arendt and alternate but related notions of the public/private in the Middle East, this article aims to offer a nuanced understanding of kinship and politics in a context in which the political is incomplete without the private.
Abu-LughodL (1985) Honor and the sentiments of loss in a Bedouin society. American Ethnologist12(2): 245–261.
2.
AgarwalB (2014) A Field of One's Own: Gender and Land Rights in South Asia. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
3.
Al OudatMAAlshboulA (2010) ‘Jordan first’: Tribalism, nationalism and legitimacy of power in Jordan. Intellectual Discourse18(1): 65–96.
4.
AlshechE (2004) Do not enter houses other than your own: The evolution of the notion of a private domestic sphere in early Sunni Islamic thought. Islamic Law and Society11(3): 291–332.
5.
ArendtH (1958) The Human Condition. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
6.
ArendtH ([1943] 2017 ) We refugees. In: LambertH (ed.) International Refugee Law. London: Routledge, 3–12.
7.
AsadT (1970) The Kababish Arabs: Power, Authority and Consent in a Nomadic Tribe. London: C. Hurst.
8.
AsadT (2009) The idea of an anthropology of Islam. Qui Parle17(2): 1–30.
9.
BenhabibS (1993) Feminist theory and Hannah Arendt’s concept of public space. History of the Human Sciences6(2): 97–114.
10.
BornemanJ (2007) Syrian Episodes: Sons, Fathers, and an Anthropologist in Aleppo. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
11.
BourdieuP (1977) Outline of a Theory of Practice. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
12.
BourdieuP (1979) Algeria 1960. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
13.
BourdieuP (1990) Logic of Practice. Stanford: Stanford University Press.
14.
CookM (2000) Commanding Right and Forbidding Wrong in Islamic Thought. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
15.
DaySPapataxiarchisEStewartE (eds) (1999) Lilies of the Field: Marginal People Who Live for the Moment. Boulder: Westview Press.
16.
DeleuzeGGuattariF (1994) What is Philosophy?New York: Columbia University Press.
17.
El-RouayhebK (2005) Before Homosexuality in the Arab-Islamic World, 1500–1800. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
18.
FleischerC (1986) Royal authority, dynastic cyclism, and ‘Ibn Khaldûnism’ in sixteenth-century Ottoman letters. In: LawrenceB (ed.) Ibn Khaldun and Islamic Ideology. Leiden: Brill, 46–68.
19.
FuraniKRabinowitzD (2011) The ethnographic arriving of Palestine. Annual Review of Anthropology40: 475–491.
20.
GavisonR (1992) Feminism and the private–public distinction. Stanford Law Review45(1): 1–45.
21.
GilsenanM (1996) Lords of the Lebanese Marches: Violence and Narrative in an Arab Society. Berkeley: University of California Press.
22.
GutasD (1998) Greek Thought, Arabic Culture: The Graeco-Arabic Translation Movement in Baghdad and Early ‘Abbasid Society (2nd–4th/5th–10th c.). London: Routledge.
23.
HammamiR (1990) Women, the Hijab and the Intifada. Middle East Report164/165: 24–28.
24.
HilalJ (1976) Class transformation in the West Bank and Gaza. Middle East Report53: 9–15.
25.
HoffmanR (1967) Marx and Proudhon: A reappraisal of their relationship. The Historian29(3): 409–430.
26.
Ibn Khaldun ([1377] 1989) The Muqaddimah: An Introduction to History. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
27.
KarataniK (2017) Isonomia and the Origins of Philosophy. Durham: Duke University Press.
28.
KhalilE (2007) Ibn Khaldun on property rights, the muqaddimah: An introduction to history. Journal of Institutional Economics3(2): 227–238.
29.
KristevaJ (1991) Strangers to Ourselves. New York: Columbia University Press.
30.
LayneL (1987) ‘Tribalism': National representations of tribal life in Jordan. Urban Anthropology and Studies of Cultural Systems and World Economic Development16(2): 183–203.
31.
Lévi-StraussC (1982) The Way of the Masks. Seattle: University of Washington Press.
32.
Lévi-StraussC (1991) Maison. In: Dictionnaire de l’Ethnologie et de l’Anthropologie. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 434–436.
33.
MarxE (1967) Bedouin of the Negev. Manchester: Manchester University Press.
34.
MarxK (1975) The Collected Works of Marx and Engels, Volume Four: 1844–1845. New York: International Publishers.
35.
MassadJ (2001) Colonial Effects: The Making of National Identity in Jordan. New York: Columbia University Press.
36.
MassadJ (2007) Desiring Arabs. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
37.
MenoretP (2014) Joyriding in Riyadh: Oil, Urbanism, and Road Revolt. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
38.
NelsonC (1974) Public and private politics: Women in the Middle Eastern world. American Ethnologist1(3): 551–563.
39.
PataiR (1949) Musha’a tenure and co-operation in Palestine. American Anthropologist51(3): 436–445.
40.
PatemanC (1989) The Disorder of Women: Democracy, Feminism and Political Theory. Stanford: Stanford University Press.
41.
PitkinH (1981) Justice. On relating private and public. Political Theory9(3): 327–352.
42.
PotterRBDarmameKBarhamN, et al. (2009) “Ever-growing Amman”, Jordan: Urban expansion, social polarisation and contemporary urban planning issues. Habitat International33(1): 81–92.
43.
RichardsonK (2017) Tracing a gypsy mixed language through medieval and early modern Arabic and Persian literature. Der Islam94(1): 115–157.
44.
RichardsonK (2020) Invisible strangers, or Romani history reconsidered. History of the Present10(2): 187–207.
45.
RichardsonK (2021) Roma in the Medieval Islamic World: Literacy, Culture, and Migration. London: Bloomsbury.
46.
RothbergM (2020) Multidirectional Memory: Remembering the Holocaust in the Age of Decolonization. Stanford: Stanford University Press.
47.
RoyA (Forthcoming-a) A people without a land: Scarcity, biopolitics, and Romani people in the Middle East. In: PipyrouSJiménezAMarinelliC (eds) Minorities in Times of Scarcity and Conflict. London: Routledge.
48.
RoyA (Forthcoming-b) Relative Strangers: Romani Kinship and Palestinian Difference. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.
49.
SalzmanPC (ed.) (1980) When Nomads Settle: Processes of Sedentarization as Adaptation and Response. New York: Praeger.
50.
ShryockA (1997) Nationalism and the Genealogical Imagination: Oral History and Textual Authority in Tribal Jordan. Berkeley: University of California Press.
51.
ShryockA (2000) Dynastic modernism and its contradictions: Testing the limits of pluralism, tribalism, and King Hussein’s example in Hashemite Jordan. Arab Studies Quarterly22(3): 57–79.
52.
WalzerR (1962) Greek into Arabic: Essays on Islamic Philosophy. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
53.
WilliamsR (1973) The Country and the City. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
