[Oct 31, 2024] Book Talk: States of Subsistence: The Politics of Bread in Contemporary Jordan (José Ciro Martínez)
Description:
On any given day in Jordan, more than nine million residents eat approximately ten million loaves of khubz ‘arabi—the slightly leavened flatbread known to many as pita. Some rely on this bread to avoid starvation; for others it is a customary pleasure. Yet despite its ubiquity in accounts of Middle East politics and society, rarely do we consider how bread is prepared, consumed, discussed, and circulated—and what this all represents. With this book, José Ciro Martínez examines khubz ‘arabi to unpack the effects of the welfare program that ensures its widespread availability.
Drawing on more than a year working as a baker in Amman, Martínez probes the practices that underpin subsidized bread. Following bakers and bureaucrats, he offers an immersive examination of social welfare provision. Martínez argues that the state is best understood as the product of routine practices and actions, through which it becomes a stable truth in the lives of citizens. States of Subsistence not only describes logics of rule in contemporary Jordan—and the place of bread within them—but also unpacks how the state endures through forms, sensations, and practices amid the seemingly unglamorous and unspectacular day-to-day.
Bio:
José Ciro Martínez is Senior Lecturer in Politics at the University of York and François Chevalier Research Fellow at the Madrid Institute for Advanced Study. His research explores the politics of food, welfare, drugs and political authority in the Middle East and North Africa, drawing on archival and ethnographic methods. His first monograph, States of Subsistence, was awarded the Middle East Studies Association’s Roger Owen Book Prize. He is currently at work on his next book provisionally entitled, Sovereign Haze: Hashish, Trafficking and the Illicit in the Western Mediterranean. The project explores practices of government and the exercise of authority in southern Spain and northern Morocco by way of the production and trafficking of hashish.