This splendid ethnographic study addresses one of political science's most glaring lacunae. Few things weigh more heavily than food upon both citizens and governments alike. Yet few other concepts are as understudied as this one, particularly by political scientists working on the Middle East. When analyzing authoritarian countries like Jordan, scholars tend to see political life through institutional forces, such as constrained elections, controlled repression, patronage networks, and Western support—or large-scale episodes of protest and revolt, as in the Arab uprisings. Food is relevant only as either a material precursor to crisis, such as when rising prices instigate riots, or an indicator of public welfare. When rulers can no longer provide cheap calories to the masses through basic consumables like wheat or rice, then the authoritarian state is failing.
José Ciro Martínez offers a radically different take in Jordan. He deploys the optic of food to dissect how political institutions, authoritarian order, and social life intersect in the unassuming form of bread (khubz ʿarabī). Among a population stalked by unemployment and poverty, bread is the great equalizer, a universally available item that satisfies mass nutritional needs. Politics enters the picture because bread and the Jordanian state have been intertwined since 1974, when the government began subsidizing this staple to meet popular demand. Although those subsidies have phased out in recent years, they enmeshed generations of Jordanians across a half-century with an appetizing promise: the Hashemite monarchy would provide affordable, healthy bread as part of its ruling bargain with society. Subsidized bread became “a living and lively thing” (p. 8).
Herein lays Martínez's overarching point. Autocratic rule is not simply crafted by violence or foisted by ideology. It is performed through rituals and rules, such as the governmental process of regulating and subsidizing bread, which embed the practice of power into the most ordinary of experiences, and convey politics through quotidian life routines. When Jordanians visit bakeries, attend meals, schedule work, watch prices, or talk about their state, they do so at this flashpoint—because what they eat requires the imbrication of the state. Bread in Jordan is therefore not only the industrial result of a complex system of grain trade, food regulation, and private production, it is the raw material of social life. It is through bread that the Jordanian state becomes a legible political context for everyone living within it.
To drive home this thesis, Martínez presents six chapters, drawing upon ethnographic research undertaken in the mid-2010s. The first chapter locates the origins of the bread subsidy in the early 1970s, when Jordan experienced a small army mutiny amid rampant inflation. The introduction of that subsidy not only spearheaded a massive expansion of the bureaucratic state at the behest of the monarchy, it also transformed agronomic and dietary patterns across the kingdom. The next two chapters showcase the author's immersion in working within bakeries, mostly in Amman, and reveal the innards of how state imperatives and food production come together. His observations are often rich and sometimes sly but always signal an anthropological instinct for nuance. For instance, not just “the taste of bread,” but also its smells and sounds emanating from “loud, fragrant ovens releasing aromas” every morning signal a political fact (p. 59): The state is here, for it not only controls prices but also shapes, by virtue of promoting its subsidized products, the cultural “sensation” of buying, touching, and consuming bread. The photographs of bakery life are illuminating as well.
The last three chapters invert the argument about food reifying the state by showing how citizens themselves react and respond to the political economy of bread production. For instance, the author explores economic conditions and social relationships around bakeries beyond the urban metropole of Amman, demonstrating how space and hardship can warp perceptions of power. He also details, in a very illuminating Chapter 5, the strategies undertaken by bakeries in sidestepping regulations to satisfy local demands. Utilizing mini–case studies of three Amman bakeries, Martínez deftly shows that the sinews of authoritarian power run deep but contentiously. A baker can simultaneously reject ministerial directives (for instance, bribing a bureaucrat to secure black-market flour in violation of the official quota) and preserve royal expectations to provide a bountiful source of cheap nutrition for loyal, hungry citizens. As much as subsidizing bread enabled the Jordanian state to perform a claimed sense of power, so too have these liminal tactics enabled citizens to perform new creative roles and redefine their own identities.
In total, this is a splendid work. It demands the attention of political scientists, even if it more resembles political anthropology. Its main drawback is, excuse the pun, baked into the research. This is a dense study steeped in critical social theory, and the terminology of that field punctuates most chapters. Readers unfamiliar with Michel Foucault or Henri Lefebvre, or contemporaries like Timothy Mitchell, may stumble; hefty terms like “biopolitical discourse” and “corporeal knowledge” might require some frenetic Google searches. But a little bit of struggle will pay dividends for the reader. Martínez's study is the rare monograph that shows how food in Jordan encapsulates all the broader puzzles that animate modern political analysis: when governments regulate, what institutions do, why people obey (or resist), and how order can coalesce from the cacophony of these overlapping actions.
Notably, Jordan's political economy of food production has changed since Martínez conducted his research, but this makes the work even more relevant. In 2018, the Jordanian government began phasing out most bread subsidies in favor of direct cash payments to lower-income families. American technocrats have helped create a local version of the US Department of Agriculture's Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP, colloquially known in the US as “food stamps”) in hopes of cutting public spending. This has exposed more families to poverty, but such are the relentless demands of neoliberal economics. The upshot is that although bread will remain the staple for most Jordanians’ diet, it will symbolize new meanings and obligations. To make sense of this uncertain future, observers of Jordan should consider how politics and food became wedded to one another in the first place. States of Subsistence is a magnificent place to start.
