$PPDQ&RVPRSROLWDQ6SDFHVDQG3UDFWLFHVRI$VSLUDWLRQ

DQG&RQVXPSWLRQ
-LOOLDQ6FKZHGOHU

Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East, Volume
30, Number 3, 2010, pp. 547-562 (Article)
3XEOLVKHGE\'XNH8QLYHUVLW\3UHVV

For additional information about this article

http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/cst/summary/v030/30.3.schwedler.html

Access provided by Newcastle University (9 Oct 2015 12:00 GMT)

V A R o r i u m

Amman Cosmopolitan:
Spaces and Practices of Aspiration
andConsumption
Jillian Schwedler

Introduction

ike many cities in the Middle East, Amman today is hardly recognizable to the visitor
who has been away for even just a few years. The formerly barren land adjacent to the
Airport Road leading into the city is now crowded with gated villas, thick tracts of
western-style condos, and rows of recently planted saplings. Cell phone towers now clutter the
vistas in much the way that satellite dishes did a decade ago. Newly installed sculptures adorn
many intersections, construction sites seem to crowd every street, and high-speed underpasses
have replaced the clogged traffic circles that once also served as social spaces in which pedestrians gathered, particularly on weekend evenings. Amman is emerging as a world-class
neoliberal cityor so the development projects, free trade zones, skyscrapers, and amenities
for the wealthy would suggest.1 A new logo for the city was launched in 2009, part of a project to rebrand the city.2 But Amman today is not so much a different city from what it was a
decade ago, as it is two cities: cosmopolitan West Amman, where development is unfolding
at breakneck speed and foreign investment has skyrocketed, and East Amman, the bustling,
o f
dusty home to a majority of the citys poor and working-class residents.
ies
d
u
t
For Jordanians, too, Amman has become a very different place, and how they experieS
ti v
d
a
r
an
a
ence the city remains as varied as ever: communities in all parts of the metropolis structure
a
p
c
i
m
fr
Co
,A
their quotidian practices around the spatial dimensions of their neighborhoods, from where

si a

A
groceries are bought and how workplaces are reached, to which roads can be crossed safely,
u th
st

So
Ea

le
at what times of the day, and how long it takes to move from place to place. Most parts
of

d
d
Mi
East Amman are much the same as they were ten and even twenty years ago. True, its neighth e
10

3
20
borhoods have expanded to the north, east, and south, and some parks have been refur- 03
. 3,
10
o
0
N
2
,
1x30
bished so that lawns are green and fountains (sometimes) provide welcome respite from
the
s s
20
ol.
89
Pre
V
0
y
1
t
i
dusty city for children to splash and tired feet to relax, particularly during the hotter summer
5/
er s
121
Earlier versions of this article were presented on four occasions,
and I am deeply indebted to the participants in each: the conference Crossing Borders: Unusual Negotiations of the Secular,
Public, and Private, at Amherst College, January 2009; the Middle East Studies Workshop at Harvard University, April 2009;
the Ambiguities of Democracy Workshop at the University of
Massachusetts Amherst, September 2009; and the Near East
Political Science Workshop at Harvard University, March 2010.
I am particularly grateful to Laryssa Chomiak, Rodney Collins,
Barbara Cruikshank, Jill Goldenziel, Pete W. Moore, Srirupa Roy,

Michael Stein, Berna Turam, and Lisa Wedeen for their insightful and thoughtful comments. All failings are my responsibility alone.
1. Christopher Parker, Tunnel-Bypasses and Minarets of Capitalism: Amman as Neoliberal Assemblage, Political Geography
28 (2009): 11020.

2. Greater Amman Municipality, The Story of Amman, www

.ammancity100.gov.jo/en/content/story-amman/2000s-1 (accessed 16 April 2010).

.
iv
i 10
Un
do
ke
u

yD

11 b
20

547

548

Co

ra
pa

ie
tu d

So

so

A
u th

ti v

si a

t
nd

he

a
frica
A
st
Ea

le
d
d
Mi

months. The formerly outlying town of Zarqa

to the northeast is now a suburb, and the sprawl
shows no signs of slowing. But on the whole, the
basic layout and infrastructures of most parts
of East Amman have remained unchanged for
many of its residents, as have the daily patterns
of movement across time and space.3 Parts of
West Amman, by comparison, have become very
different placesspatially, temporally, culturally, economically, and politically. Thus for the
third of all Jordanians who reside in the greater
Amman metropolitan area, those living, working, and spending leisure time in West Amman
have experienced far greater changes to their
daily lives in recent years than have those whose
quotidian routines remain largely confined to
neighborhoods in East Amman.
Unsurprisingly, the impetus for many of
these changes to the physical layout of parts of
West Amman stems from government efforts
aimed at attracting foreign capital to Jordan.
Scholars have examined the countrys recent
economic reforms,4 including the introduction
and expansion of free trade zones and qualified
industrial zones, 5 the effects of privatization
and market liberalization,6 and shifting sites
and practices of patronage.7 But seldom explicitly acknowledged is the extent to which these
changes in the economic and cultural spaces
in Amman have created new sites of engagement among Jordans citizens of diverse economic means: spatially, new patterns of work

3. As Parker illustrates, the government does have

plans to incorporate portions of East Amman into its
broader vision of expanding and deepening Ammans
global and market capitalism, but it intends to do so
largely by opening corridors for the flow of goods and
services that will require the relocation and displacement of portions of East Ammans working-class population. Christopher Parker, Tunnel-Bypasses, 117.
4. Anne Mariel Peters and Pete W. Moore, Beyond
Boom and Bust: External Rents, Durable Authoritarianism, and Institutional Adaptation in the Hashemite
Kingdom of Jordan, Studies in Comparative International Development 44 (2009): 25685.
5. Pete Moore, QIZs, FTAs, USAID and the MEFTA: A
Political Economy of Acronyms, Middle East Report,
no. 234 (2005).
6. Rex Brynen, Economic Crisis and Post-Rentier Democratization in the Arab World: The Case of Jordan,
Canadian Journal of Political Science 25 (1992): 6979;
Lamis Andoni and Jillian Schwedler, Bread Riots in
Jordan, Middle East Report 201 (1996); Timothy Piro,
Political Economy of Market Reform in Jordan (Landham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 1998).

and leisure activities are bringing increasing

numbers of Jordanians from East Amman into
West Amman (as well as creating new patterns
of movement within West Amman); and culturally, notions of class and social status are being
complicated and reimagined as middle-class
workers both inhabit and imitate the spaces of
leisure that are largely exclusive to the wealthy
cosmopolitan elite.
Shifting practices of work and leisure
have also allowed a segment of Jordanians to
reimagine their relation to the more desirable
dimensions of economic liberalization, that is,
by providing them access to the new spaces of
glittering global capital, cosmopolitanism, and
consumption. These include access to private
commercial spaces, such as malls and other locations where elite establishments are concentrated, and to employment in a dramatically
expanding sector of the service economy: West
Ammans high-end restaurants, bars, and exclusive nightclubs.8 I call the Jordanians who
traverse these spaces formerly accessible only to
the elite aspiring cosmopolitans, and I argue
that their experiences of negotiating social status and cultural codes in multiple locales are
exemplary rather than exceptional.9 New sites
of leisure have allowed some middle-and lowerm iddle-class Jordanians to insert themselves
into Jordans (relatively) new cosmopolitan leisure economyphysically and sometimes also
economicallyin ways that entail self-conscious

7. Laurie Brand, Liberalization and Changing Political

Coalitions: The Bases of Jordans 199091 Gulf Crisis
Policy, Jerusalem Journal of International Relations
13 (1991): 146; Markus Lowe, Jonas Blume, and Johanna Speer, How Favoritism Affects the Business
Climate: Empirical Evidence from Jordan, The Middle
East Journal 62 (2008): 25976; Anne Marie Baylouny,
Creating Kin: New Family Associations as Welfare
Providers in Liberalizing Jordan, International Journal of Middle East Studies 38 (2006); and Anne Marie
Baylouny, Militarizing Welfare: Neo-liberalism and
Jordanian Policy, The Middle East Journal 62 (2008):
277303.
8. These new leisure spaces are attracting international attention, particularly aimed at tourists. See,
for example, Andrew Ferren, Next Stop: A New Stylish Amman Asserts Itself, New York Times, 22 November 2009, www.travel.nytimes.com/2009/11/22/
travel/22next.html?emc= eta1 (accessed 16 April
2010).

9. I am aware that my notion of aspiring cosmopolitans suggests a category of actually existing cosmopolitans. While such a distinction is obviously problematicto the extent that cosmopolitanism entails
not only economic resources but also a recognizable
aesthetic and a multicultural worldview, the boundaries of membership in such a group are necessarily fluid and contestableI mean here to distinguish
between those Jordanians of considerable economic
means and those who might be more appropriately
characterized as middle class. The cosmopolitan elite
and the aspiring cosmopolitans may frequent the
same stores and wear the same jeans, but the former
do so in greater abundance, while driving expensive
cars (often several), traveling internationally with
great frequency, and running up tabs in nightclubs
that exceed what an aspiring cosmopolitan earns (let
alone spends) in a month or more.

10. For the record, I am highly critical of neoliberal

economic reforms, having witnessed firsthand its
destructive consequences for communities as well
as individuals. In this article, I am aiming not to reject
critiques, but to recover the agency of those who are
often (correctly) portrayed in the literature critical of
neoliberalism as victims.

11. This project is undertaken in the spirit of David

Harveys appeal to overcome the disciplinary divide
between anthropology and geography that has led
to the tendency to examine narratives and spatial orderings in isolation of each other. David Harvey, Cosmopolitanism and the Banality of Geographical Evils
(unpublished manuscript, 2009).

Spaces and Practices of Aspiration and Consumption

5 49

Amman Cosmopolitan:

of the population. In part 2, I discuss notions

of cosmopolitanism generally as well as the
ways the term is used by segments of Jordanians, with particular attention to whether cosmopolitanism is as inclusive in practice as its
component notion of celebrating multiculturalism purports. I then examine the notion that
neoliberal policies create sites of inclusion and
exclusion, effectively creating different sets of
rights and opportunities for different segments
of the population. Focusing on cosmopolitan
sites of leisure in Amman, I examine the subjectivities that these sites invoke and evoke, and
particularly the ways in which those who have
sought entry into these spaces have engaged
in their own self-presentation and adaption of
a cosmopolitan representational code. That is,
these albeit diverse aspiring cosmopolitans are
immediately engaged in the negotiation of their
class position, in their location in the social hierarchy as they understand it; and as we shall
see, these negotiations are as contingent on
movement from one part of the city to another
as they are on self-presentation. These Jordanians not only aspire to be part of Amman cosmopolitan, but to be recognized by others as such.
They create new notions of self that effectively
challenge certain narratives (for example, by
downgrading the centrality of local and familial
attachment to social standing) while bolstering
others (such as cosmopolitanism and western
consumerist fantasies), at least while they inhabit certain spaces and not others. By focusing
on these highly local practices, we can begin to
gain a better understanding of the full implications of neoliberal economic reforms, in ways
that recognize local creativity and the ability for
individuals to self-consciously locate themselves
within shifting social and economic fields. By
linking the construction of narratives with shifting spatial orderings, we can develop a far more
nuanced understanding of the exclusionary
dimensions of economic reforms, as well as the
innovations and creativity of those aspiring to
be included.11 I conclude that while cosmopoli-

Jillian Schwedler

negotiations with sites of cultural production

and cultural capital. For example, the young
men who reside in East Amman (as well as more
working-class neighborhoods of West Amman)
who find employment in high-end establishments gain access and thus opportunities that
are not only economic in nature: they also gain
the knowledge of new representational codes
that allow them to present themselves as, and
sometimes be recognized as, members of Ammans cosmopolitan elite. These practices of
representation can be described as crossings in
spatial terms (from working-class to elite neighborhoods), in economic terms (from a lower to a
higher social class), and in cultural terms (from
working- and middle-class citizens to aspiring
cosmopolitans). While much of the literature
on the cultural effects of neoliberal economic
reforms has emphasized exclusions and disenfranchisement, my aim is rather to illuminate
the ways in which lines of exclusion are being
crossed, creating opportunities (as well as new
forms of exclusions) for those who might seem
to initially find themselves on the losing side
of neoliberal promises. The emergence of aspiring cosmopolitans in Jordan illustrates that
new sites of participation and engagement may
emerge as a consequence of economic reforms
that are otherwise largely devastating for all but
the wealthiest. Whether these sites and forms
of engagement are ultimately emancipatory or
destructive remains an open question, with the
answer likely contingent upon ones own perspective of the liberatory possibilities of capitalism. Rather than taking a normative stand on
neoliberal economic reforms,10 I aim instead to
identify some of the shifting practices of those
most often treated as victims: practices of survival, creativity, and reimagination that have received little attention to date.
My argument unfolds in two parts. In
part1, I examine the spatial and cultural effects of Jordans neoliberal economic reforms,
with particular attention to the reach of these
reforms and their effects on different segments

550

Co

ra
pa

ie
tu d

So

tanism is not necessarily as inclusive and tolerant as its advocates like to imagine, neither is
neoliberalism necessarily as exclusionary as its
own critics suggest. Shifting local practices of
self and belonging suggest that geography and
identity are complexly interconnected.

so

A
u th

ti v

Part I: Ammans New Cosmopolitan Playland

si a

t
nd

he

a
frica
A
st
Ea

le
d
d
Mi

Since Jordan entered into its first agreement

with the International Monetary Fund in 1988,
the country has systematically lifted (and sometimes reinstated) subsidies for basic foodstuffs
and petroleum products. Those least well off
economically have felt the effects more deeply
and acutely and have participated in various
forms of protest, from bread riots to trucker
strikes.12 At least since King Abdullahs assumption of the throne in 1999, however, Jordans
economic reforms have taken a decidedly neoliberal turn. That is, the Jordanian government
has accelerated legal reforms that facilitate foreign investment and free trade and has actively
sought to attract multinational corporations
and foreign investment. In 2003, Jordan hosted
the World Economic Forum at the Dead Sea,
marking the regimes commitment to reimagine
Jordans role in the global economy.13 The flood
of economic reforms beginning in 2000many
of which were passed as temporary laws while
parliament was out of session for more than two
years (from May 2001 until August 2003)were
intended to rapidly liberalize the economy and
make it hospitable for foreign investment while
minimizing overt expressions of political dissent.14 As with most neoliberal projects, the state
ostensibly withdrew control of certain spheres
of economic activity, but in practice it extended
its control far more deeply into Jordanian society through legal reforms, the adoption of
highly securitized means of social control, and
privileges for the entrepreneurial citizens both
imagined by neoliberalism and required to put

12. Andoni and Schwedler, Bread Riots in Jordan;

Jillian Schwedler, Dont Blink: Jordans Democratic
Opening and Closing, Middle East Report Online,
www.merip.org/mero/mero070302.html (2 June
2002).
13. Pete Moore, The Newest Jordan: Free Trade,
Peace, and an Ace in the Hole, Middle East Report
Online, www.merip.org/mero/mero062603.html
(26 June 2003).

it into local practice. But neoliberalism, as much

as it can reflect a specific outlook toward economic development, should not be understood
as a single process or set of policies; rather, it
shares a common set of goals and beliefs about
the effects of those goals, but the real meat lies
in the details of execution: a set of ideas that
can only be implemented through concrete,
specific, and local policies and reforms. As
Aihwa Ong notes, Neoliberalism is often discussed as an economic doctrine with a negative
relation to state power, a market ideology that
seeks to limit the scope and activity of governing. But neoliberalism can also be conceptualized as a new relationship between government
and knowledge through which governing activities are recast as nonpolitical and nonideological problems that need technical solutions.15

Ong focuses on the active, interventionist aspect of neoliberalism in non-Western contexts,

where neoliberalism as exception articulates sovereign rule and regimes of citizenship.16 This
conceptualization provides a useful starting
point for understanding the rapid pace and
form of economic reforms in countries like
Jordan, where economic reform policies are
selectively applied, not only to specific fields of
economic activity, but also spatially, through the
creation of new sites of economic activity and
consumption. These spaces are most dramatically illustrated by free trade zones and qualified industrial zones, where certain economic
activities are concentrated and delineated
spatially with explicit boundaries. But certain
neighborhoods are also being reconfigured
into concentrated spaces of particular kinds
of economic activityw ith other forms of economic activity explicitly excludedof the sort
that might be aptly described as cosmopolitan
consumer dreamlands.17

14. Schwedler, Dont Blink.

15. Aihwa Ong, Neoliberalism as Exception: Mutations
in Citizenship and Sovereignty (Durham, NC, and London: Duke University Press, 2006), 3.
16. Ibid. Italics in original.
17. I borrow the term dreamland from Timothy Mitchell, who uses it in reference to a neoliberal vision of
Cairo as the worlds first electronic city, complete

with lush villas, fiber optics, golf courses, and all the
other cosmopolitan amenities one could desire. One
development promised that the buyer would find
The Egypt of My Desires. Timothy Mitchell, Rule of
Experts: Egypt, Techno-Politics, Modernity (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 2002), 273. See also
Diane Singerman and Paul Amar, eds., Cairo Cosmopolitanism (Cairo and New York: American University
of Cairo Press, 2005).

18. The majority of jobs in the QIZs often go to foreign

nationals, who come to Jordan for the sole purpose
of taking up these positions and reside in housing
camps adjacent to the QIZs without engaging with
Jordanian society on any broader level.

19. European Training Foundation, Unemployment in

Jordan (Luxembourg: Office for the Official Publications of the European Communities, 2005), 24.
20. David Harvey, New Imperialism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005), 99106.

Spaces and Practices of Aspiration and Consumption

551

Amman Cosmopolitan:

need for the sorts of services demanded by the

managers and executives of these firms: worldclass hotels, restaurants, nightclubs, spas, and
golf courses. Of course, these services are not
utilized only by cosmopolitan foreignersthose
who travel frequently and have become accustomed to a high-speed, global, luxury lifestyle.
These sites of elite cosmopolitanism are also locales for the production and self-presentation of
a cosmopolitan elite within Jordanthe ability
for certain Jordanians to claim cultural capital
as cosmopolitan in the sense of being worldw ise and well-t raveled, multilingual, hip or
cutting-edge, and comfortable and fluent in the
cultural codes of the worlds major urban centers. This self-presentation stands in distinction
to that of other Jordanians who might also be
wealthy and powerful, but whom the cosmopolitans view as less sophisticated or worldly. That
is, cosmopolitans view themselves as distinct
from tribal elites, merchants and traders, and
others who may possess wealth but none of the
characteristics necessary to signal membership
in even the local cosmopolitan community, let
alone the cosmopolitan international.
Tribal leaders, for example, long a key constituency for the regimes stability, are largely
viewed by Jordans jet-set cosmopolitans through
an orientalist lens: as backward, out of pace
with modernity, possessing little understanding of world(s) beyond their local authority, and
engaging in outdated traditional practices
such as arranged marriages, gender segregation, and honor killings. The notion of tribes
hold various meanings for Jordans cosmopolitan elite, only some of which echo notions of
tribe as frequently used in the West. The term
might refer to prominent families with deep ties
to political and economic poweran equivalent
in the United States would be the Kennedys or
the Rockefellersor it might refer to tight-k nit
extended families, where the employment and
marital decisions of any individual have impact
on the broader familial network. At times, it has
much to do with extended real estate holdings
and business monopolies. Of course, many of

Jillian Schwedler

In this sense, King Abdullah has sought

to create a new Jordan through neoliberal reforms concentrated in parts of West Amman,
the Aqaba Free Trade Zone, and various other
qualified industrial zones (QIZs) scattered
throughout the country. While QIZs have been
largely established in rural areas, often through
negotiations with tribal elites who demand that
a certain number of jobs be promised to locals,18
the Aqaba Free Trade Zone and the large-scale
capital investment in Amman have unfolded
on a landscape already densely populated by
Jordanians. In this sense, these economic reforms require not only legal reforms and basic
infrastructure, but also new forms of repression,
surveillance, and policing to offset the seismic
effects felt by the vast majority of the population. Official rates of unemployment were 13.5
percent and 12.6 percent in 2007 and 2008,
respectively; unofficial estimates routinely put
the figure at around 30 percent. Employment
in agriculture and construction has declined by
almost 50 percent between 1987 and 2003, with
fewer than half of those jobs now held by Jordanian nationals.19 The government is thus counting on foreign investment and trade liberalization to improve Jordans economic outlook.
Neoliberal economic reforms also require
a reformed legal system to support free trade
and facilitate foreign investment, as well as
considerable government investment in infrastructure at the sites of the imagined neoliberal spaces: roads, ports, transportation, office
space, and advanced telecommunications, to
name just a few. The government must create
not only the necessary regulations (through
laws) to facilitate capitalistic investments (domestic and foreign), but it must also invest in
infrastructural projects, including roads, port
facilities, railroads, and telecommunications,20
as well as advanced surveillance methods to secure and police these spaces. The physical location of these projects and the state-led reforms
that support the creation of economic zones are
thus spatial and legal as well as social. With the
increased presence of foreign firms comes the

552

Co

ra
pa

ie
tu d

So

so

A
u th

ti v

si a

t
nd

he

a
frica
A
st
Ea

le
d
d
Mi

Jordans cosmopolitan elite have familial connections of this sort. But in my interviews and
conversations with dozens of these elite, I have
been struck by how often I heard tribal21 juxtaposed to modern and to cosmopolitan,
in ways that suggest in tribal a parochial,
backward, and almost buffoonlike mentality that preserves barbaric practices (such as
honor killings)22 while rejecting elements of
modernity (such as gender equality).23 This is
not to imply that the categories of tribal elites
and cosmopolitan elites are mutually exclusive;
to be sure, there are prominent members of
tribesused here in its broadest sense to refer
to powerful extended families in the kingdom
with long-standing and close patronage ties to
the regimewho move among the circles I am
describing as urban and cosmopolitan. I raise
the notion of tribal elites as distinct from cosmopolitan elites to signify the recognition by
Jordanians of the existence of multiple nodes of
social power, and to capture the fact that there
are competing images of social hierarchy and
diverse spaces that signify as well as reify these
distinctions. The sorts of movements across cultural and geographic space enacted by Jordanians of middle-class backgrounds 24a s they
shift from home to work, from home to leisure,
from kinship to citizenshipare what Rodney
Collins calls transversals.25 These movements,
in and out of cosmopolitan spaces, are certainly
not the first sorts of transversals to emerge in
Jordan. Prior to the current wave of neoliberal
reforms and the emergence of cosmopolitan
consumer spaces, cohorts of (frequently) men
transversed other spaces, though perhaps cover-

21. The term tribal is sometimes used in English and

sometimes in Arabic (qabili); the term cosmopolitan
is used in the same form in both languages.
22. Honor killings, while not common, continue
to number in the hundreds in Jordan annually. An
honor killing is when a member of an immediate or
extended family kills a family member for damaging
the family honor through alleged or real contact with
members of the opposite sex that are inappropriate
(e.g., outside of marriage). In practice, honor killings
are almost exclusively limited to women, though
one individual reported to me a killing of a man suspected of sexual encounters with another man. See
Rana Husseini, Murder in the Name of Honor (London:
Oneworld, 2009).
23. These insights are drawn from interviews and informal conversations with elite Jordanians conducted
from 1995 to the present, including eleven phone and

ing less distance both geographically as well as

in terms of social hierarchy. The symbolic and
literal geography transversed by Ammans aspiring cosmopolitans presents, however, a fruitful
focus for exploring innovation and creativity at
the margins and across the borders of economic
reform programs.
Jordans cosmopolitan elite imagine themselves to occupy a social space distinct from what
they describe as traditional and local social hierarchies; and indeed they have come to inhabit
distinct leisure spaces in a literal sense as well.
Prominent among these are expensive nightclubs and restaurants, where one can always
order a Caesar salad to be consumed in a fashionable environment with a soundtrack of western and European hits and a clientele of global
hipsters.26 Nightclubs, often featuring international djs brought in for stints ranging from
a single night to several months, typically serve
such international fare as sushi, chicken nuggets, and quesadillas. Bottle service27 remains in
vogue, and mojitos are ubiquitous, though likely
to be replaced by a new trendy drink by the time
this article reaches publication. Caipirinhas are
also popular, typically poured with either vodka
or Bacardis rum rather than with the Brazilian
sugarcane liquor cachaa, which the authentic
drink requires. The most elite places, however,
pride themselves in stocking hard-to-acquire
brands of liquors. One restaurant manager told
me that he carries liquors back in his personal
luggage that are not available through the importers in Jordan.28 Health clubs are also sites of
cosmopolitan consumption and performance,
with locations such as Dunes Club Amman 29

e-mail interviews conducted in late 2009 in connection with this research.

24. Of course, these transversals are not exclusive to
the middle class; my focus here is on Ammans aspiring cosmopolitans, but certainly transversals of
various sorts characterize the daily realities of many
Jordanians of diverse economic and social status.
25. Personal correspondence, December 2009. Collins has developed the concept of transversals in
his current work conceptualizing a similar dynamic
in terms of hustlers in Tunis. I am grateful to him for
suggesting the concept, as it nicely captures the sorts
of crossings that I am exploring here.
26. Anouk de Koning ascribes the ubiquity of caf
latte and Caesar salad in Cairos up-market coffee
shops as evidence of cosmopolitan belonging.
Anouk de Koning, Caf Latte and Caesar Salad: Cos-

mopolitan Belonging in Cairos Coffee Shops, in

Cairo Cosmopolitan, ed. Diane Singerman and Paul
Amar (Cairo and New York: American University of
Cairo Press, 2005), 22122.
27. Bottle service refers to the practice of purchasing
a whole bottle of liquor, which is served with a variety of mixers, garnishes, and a bucket of ice. Bottles
that are not entirely consumed can usually be left
behind with ones name written on the bottleanother means of marking ones membership among
the cosmopolitan elite.
28. Anonymous interview by the author, Amman, 14
August 2008.
29. Dunes Club Amman, www.1stjordan.net/dunes
club/index.html (accessed 16 April 2010).

30. Blue Fig, www.bluefig.com (accessed 16 April

2010).
31. I was charmed to note that the wireless signal is
broadcast via modems secured on the ceiling of the
airport with duct tape.
32. Interviewees name withheld by request. Amman,
July 2003.
33. This road continues south and eventually curves
to the east, providing a high-speed conduit between
East Amman and the commercial districts of West
Ammanbypassing the downtown area entirely.

34. The city mugs available from Starbucks internationallywhich feature cities such as Washington, DC, New York, Paris, and so onare country
mugs in the Middle East: they are available for Jordan, Oman, Abu Dhabi, Kuwait, and Lebanon, among
others; most can be purchased in any Middle Eastern
outlet of the chain, and not only in the country on
the mug.
35. Mecca Mall, www.meccamall.jo (accessed 16 April
2010).
36. City Mall, www.citymall.jo (accessed 16 April
2010).

Spaces and Practices of Aspiration and Consumption

553

Amman Cosmopolitan:

has been little affected: true, parks and public

spaces have been renovated and ornamental
public fountains splash in the summer months.
But East Amman is becoming as different from
West Amman as West Amman is from its own
recent past. In addition to the opening of some
half-dozen sushi bars, numerous world-c lass
restaurants, cigar lounges, and Irish pubs, the
boutique products available today rival those
available in New York, Paris, Milan, Tokyo, and
Dubai. Even more, the sites for these and other
material consumptions have become incredibly
stylish. Indeed, what is being consumed is not
limited to material goods and services, but also
includes cultural codes and even spaces, a particular cosmopolitan aesthetic. The most elite
boutiques for sartorial goods, for example, are
no longer located only along the traffic-hewn,
dusty, and tired-feeling streets of Sweifiyehthe
only places one could find them as recently as
the late 1990s; shoppers can now purchase their
Chanel handbags and Armani jeans in the posh
shops of more than a half-dozen glistening,
pristine malls, where they may pause during
their shopping for an espresso at any number
of modernist-styled cafes, or even a venti halfcaf latte from Starbucks.34 The newer malls are
bright and clean, adorned with large banners
advertising international movieswhich may
be viewed at the malls own reserved-seats-only
multiplexand icons such as David Beckham,
whose image hawked his favorite brand of
watch for most of 2008. Mecca Mall 35 and the
newer City Mall 36 located on the western edge
of West Amman will soon be joined by two
major malls in Abdoun, a neighborhood home
to some of the citys hippest nightclubs as well
as many of the cosmopolitan elite themselves.
Indeed, Abdouns major traffic circle remains
a site for congregating on weekend evenings

Jillian Schwedler

serving buckets of Coronas and cheeseburger

sliders in a lush landscape surrounding swimming pools and waterfallsall in a compound
south of the city surrounded by desert (the club
has a Facebook fan page). Like foreign businesspersons, Jordans cosmopolitan elites also
demand easy access in and out of Jordan via a
modern and efficient airport: the government
has extensively renovated Queen Alia International Airportcomplete with a Starbucks, its
local competitor Blue Fig, 30 a gleaming dutyfree mall, and free wireless Internet 31and has
upgraded the scenery one sees from the car window as one travels from the airport into Amman.
As one businessman and former government
official told me in 2003, the goal of these particular renovations was to create an experience
whereby the foreign visitor doesnt feel like he
is in the third world from the moment he gets
off the airplane.32 Streets elsewhere in West
Amman have also been improved: Zahran Street
has been entirely repaved with five major underpasses added to facilitate the rapid flow of traffic
into and out of downtown; a suspension bridge
connects the Fourth Circle of Zahran Street to
the commercial neighborhood of Shmeisani to
the north and Abdoun to the south;33 overpasses
and underpasses speed traffic between residential and commercial areas along Gardens Street,
from Gardens Street to University Road and to
new posh neighborhoods to the west of King
Hussein Street; and the list could go on.
Most of these infrastructure projects and
virtually all the elite services are concentrated in
West Amman, so that the neighborhoods have
been physically altered over the past decade
for the dual purposes of facilitating foreign investment and catering to the needs and recreational impulses of Jordans upper classes and
foreign visitors. East Amman, by comparison,

554

Co

ra
pa

ie
tu d

So

so

A
u th

ti v

si a

t
nd

he

a
frica
A
st
Ea

le
d
d
Mi

(especially Thursday night), where pedestrians

congregate while BMWs, Mercedes, and SUVs
cruise the scene. Just south of Abdoun Circle
is the citys largest (as of this writing) freestanding Starbucks, a two-level building with
outdoor terraces, a fireplace, and a guarded
parking lot. Starbucks is sandwiched between
the eco-conscious and hipster Blue Fig Restaurantwhich hosts art exhibits, artists, and
concertsand the concrete carcass of the Hard
Rock Caf Amman, a large building adorned
with a Petra-i nspired faade 37 and a roof-top
globe that continues to declare, Love All, Serve
All, despite being closed for nearly a decade.38
The new Taj mall under construction just to the
south is touted as Taj Life Style Center, where,
as its Web site (launched in 2009) announces,
The 50,000 m2 mixed-use retail project blends
chic shops, cafes, restaurants, and family entertainment venues together into one extraordinary cosmopolitan experience for the city
of Amman.39 The site further describes the
project: Massively projecting five stories upward from the lands surface, the structure is an
urban 21st century citadel, frequented by chic
travelers and cosmopolitan city residents.
Closer to the physical center of the city,
changes to the commercial district of Shmeisani
are also under way. The neighborhood was located at the western edge of the city twenty years
ago; today, it is nearly downtown. The eastern
edge of the neighborhood borders Abdali, and
precisely at this intersection is the site of the former mukhabarat (secret police) complex, known
informally as Palestine Hotel (Funduk Filastin)
because of its history of hosting politically engaged Palestinians for long periods of time. The
building was razed in 200240 to make way for the
Abadali Project, a neoliberal dreamland that is
planned to include seven gleaming skyscrapers,
million-dollar apartments, a pedestrian world
shopping mall, and space tailored to meet the
needs of international nancial services. (HSBC

37. Petra, southern Jordans Rose-Red City, is notable less for its Roman ruins than its earlier Nabatean
structures carved into the sheer rock. The faade of
Petras most famous building, the Treasury, is featured in the film Raiders of the Lost Ark.
38. In this sense, the low-brow globalism of Planet
Hollywood (whose outlet in Abdoun has also closed
down) and Hard Rock Caf seems to have failed in
Jordan.

inaugurated its headquarters at the Atrium

building with a ribbon-c utting ceremony on
March 31, 2010.) Billed on its Web site as A
New Downtown for Amman as well as Ammans central business district, the project is
self-consciously cosmopolitan in its reimagining
of social spaces: the residential spaces are envisioned as Generating a New Meaning to Urban
Living,41 while the restaurants and shopping
arcades promise to Glitter Your Life.4 2 The
retail component of the project, called Abadali
Boulevard, declares itself to be a world-class
destination that places Amman on the international retail map.43 The models on the Web
sites are fair-skinned and generically European
(or American) in facial features, with women
sporting bare shoulders and paparazzi photographing the beautiful people as they enter and
leave shops and restaurants with cell phones in
hand, indifferent to the adoring and longing attention of those surrounding them.
During the summer of 2008, the city offered a pilot shuttle service called the Amman
City Bus, a hop-on, hop-o ff air-conditioned
sightseeing bus that completes a circuit of thirtyfive tourist and shopping spots every two-and-ahalf hours. For approximately US$40 for a day
passt he country has a per capita income of
US$8 a day, though residents ride for lessyou
can ride in air-conditioned comfort to visit such
tourist destinations as the Roman citadel and
amphitheater downtownA mman is the site of
the ancient Roman city of PhiladelphiaK ing
Husseins personal automobile collection at the
Automobile Museum, as well as the major shopping areas (including malls and the outdoor pedestrian area of Wakalat Street) and hotels in
West Amman. While the service is currently suspended, as of the summer of 2009 government
officials were talking about ways of reviving the
project and making the service permanent.
Reflected in these diverse projects are the
very real differences in the ways that Jordani-

39. Taj Life Style Center, www.tajlifestyle.com (accessed 16 April 2010).

42. Abadali Boulevard Company, w w w.abdali

-boulevard.jo (accessed 16 April 2010).

40. The main headquarters for internal security

had moved to a new complexresembling a prison
yardsouth of Amman a few years earlier.

43. See Profile under About Us at www.abdali

-boulevard.jo. The Web site also describes Jordan as
an economically and politically stable country in the
Middle East. See Amman under Our Location.

41. Abadali Project, www.abdali.jo (accessed 16 April

2010).

44. Ong, Neoliberalism as Exception.

45. I am grateful to Rodney Collins for urging me to
emphasize this dimension of my critique of Ong.
46. Seyla Benhabib articulates the ways in which cosmopolitanism can probably never be reconciled with
democracy. Seyla Benhabib, Another Cosmopolitanism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008).

555

and cosmopolitan spaces.45 It is to these complex transversals that I now turn.

47. See also Kwame Anthony Appiah, Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers (New York: W. W.
Norton, 2006).
48. See, for example, David D. Held, Democracy and
the Global Order: From the Modern State to Cosmopolitan Governance (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 1995), 267, cited in Harvey, Cosmopolitanism, 2. I am indebted to Harvey for making this
connection.

Spaces and Practices of Aspiration and Consumption

What is cosmopolitanismt hat to which some

Jordanians aspire? I have described the term
above as entailing a sense of being world-w ise
and well-t raveled, multilingual, hip or cuttingedge, and comfortable and fluent in the cultural codes of the worlds major urban centers.
One common definition of cosmopolitanism
entails the idea that all humans belong to one
community that shares a morality of inclusiveness, tolerance, and multiculturalism. Cosmopolitanism in this sense is frequently advocated
by western liberals as a panacea to internecine
conflict, resurgent nationalism, and all sorts
of bloody othering. Far from being inclusive
and multicultural, however, this sort of cosmopolitanism strongly emphasizes democracy46 but
in practice has little ability to tolerate or even
accommodate antirepublican global outlooks,
such as those supra-state identities put forth
by Islamists and socialists, to give just two examples.47 Prevailing conceptions of cosmopolitanism often appear intimately linked to globalization, as David Held notes,48 imagining a
borderless world where cultural capital flows as
freely as economic capital, lifting all boats from
economic underdevelopment as well as cultural
backwardness.49
But all notions of cosmopolitanism are
necessarily grounded, attached to place and
understood by people in concrete contexts.
In Jordan, the term cosmopolitan is most often
associated with elite consumerism, Western
cultural domination, economic globalization,
and secularism a sort of Western-c entric,
rational-secular humanism gone shopping. In
Amman the term is most commonly identified
with particular spaces and practices rather than
broad ideals of human community or multicul-

Amman Cosmopolitan:

Part II: Aspiring Cosmopolitans

Jillian Schwedler

ans inhabit and move across the landscape of

Amman. Indeed, the reach of neoliberal reforms certainly creates tiers of citizenship and
privilege of the sort Ong terms gradations of
citizen rights and benefits.4 4 It is not that the
upper classes, as a function of their wealth, have
greater access to the protections and rights encoded in law, but that the specific rights being
actively advanced, prioritized, and protected
by the government are those related to a neoliberal vision of economic growth (particularly
free trade, foreign investment, and cosmopolitan consumerism), at the expense of democratic
political rights (such as the freedom of political
expression, popular participation, and assembly
for the purpose of political protest). But despite
the concentration of projects aimed at Jordans
elite and affluent foreign travelersnot the
backpackers who stay in the same hostels they
have for decadest hese benefits do not map
neatly or exclusively along class lines, but spatially: those residing, working, or traversing particular spaces, regardless of economic class, may
reap at least some of the benefits of these infrastructural improvements and reform priorities.
Small-business owners can and are relocating
their offices to West Amman in part because the
new infrastructure has made transport from
their homes to their sites of employment in
West Amman quick and easy. The xed routes
of cheap shared taxis called service (pronounced
sair-V EES) have been expanded throughout
West Amman, another indication of a workingclass infrastructure benefiting from new roads
and shorter transit times. In this sense, Ongs
notion of tiers of citizenship entails rather
rigid structural connotations that are somewhat
at odds with the kinds of transversals enacted by
Ammans aspiring cosmopolitans. The notion of
tiers suggests a rather inflexible hierarchy, and
thus cannot fully capture the dynamism at work
in and around Ammans emerging neoliberal

49. Indeed, the connection between globalization

and cosmopolitanism requires a trick of what Masao
Miyoshi calls a liberal self-deception: far from neutral
observers, advocates of multicultural cosmopolitanism are actually fully collaborating with the hegemonic ideology, which looks, as usual, like no ideology at all. Masao Miyoshi, A Borderless World? in
Documenta XThe Book, ed. Jean-Franois Chevrier
(Stuttgart: Hatje Cantz Publishers, 1997), 202, cited in
Harvey, Cosmopolitanism, 2.

556

Co

ra
pa

ie
tu d

So

so

A
u th

ti v

si a

t
nd

he

a
frica
A
st
Ea

le
d
d
Mi

turalism, so that hotels, malls, nightclubs, restaurants, and glitzy foreign investment projects
can be easily juxtaposed to spaces that do not
fit this image even as they may embody global
market and cultural flows. As Parker notes, East
Amman is not without its own form of cosmopolitanism: The image of East Amman as an
isolated slum suggests a degree of passivity and
essentialism that would seem odd to anyone familiar with the vibrant economy of its marketplaces and the subaltern cosmopolitanism of its
inhabitants. The Palestinian refugee camp of
Wihdat, for example, is home to one of Jordans
most vibrant produce markets and a dizzying
array of low-end consumer outlets.50
Yet as Jordanian blogger Ahmad Humeid laments, Amman has become a divided
city. Thats a sad reality we have to face.51 East
Amman has its own vibrancy and cultural flows,
but the government has invested in a neoliberal vision that is most readily realizable, at
least for the time being, in more affluent West
Amman. The global superstore giant Carrefour
has opened a major outlet in East Amman, but
in a location easily accessible to West Amman
via a new highway; it remains unclear what proportion of customers are drawn from nearby
neighborhoods, but the availability of high-end
brands suggests that Carrefour will draw an elite
clientele and will not soon put local markets out
of business. The result is that the city remains
largely divided in terms of the spaces routinely
traversed by various segments of the population. Jordans economic elite (as well as foreign
visitors), for example, seldom venture into Ammans downtown souk of wust al-balad (city center)where the enterprising shopper can find
refurbished appliances, cheap cell phone batteries, used clothing, and all sorts of oriental
kitschexcept on their way to visit the ruins
of the ancient Roman city of Philadelphia 52 or
when they head downtown for a cultural experience, like having lunch at long-established

50. Parker, Tunnel-Bypasses, 119.

51. Ahmad Humeid, www.360east.com/?p=1014 (accessed 16 April 2010).
52. The downtown area itself is being considered
for radical redevelopment. One plan imagines it as a
cosmopolitan neoliberal space, another as a classic
Middle Eastern souk, which would entail use of orientalist imagery to create an old city casbah to attract

working-class restaurants like Jerusalem Restaurant. Likewise for the Jordanian citizens who
shop, eat, and relax in the dusty downtown with
a glass of fresh mango juice or an argila (water
pipe), the booming nightlife in West Amman is
not immediately apparent, though its licentious
behavior is made visible through taxi-driver
gossip, disapproving mosque sermons, newspaper articles and advertisements, and the stories
told by the young Jordanian men who work as
waiters, bartenders, busboys, and bouncers in
the citys many clubs and restaurants.
But the crucial issue here is not that East
Amman is providing the labor that enables the
functioning of the neoliberal spaces that make
up Amman Cosmopolitan. Rather, I wish to
move beyond the critical literature on neoliberalism to suggest 1) that neoliberal reforms do
not create only exclusions and disenfranchisement for the working classes, but also spaces for
self-imagination and inventiveness as a result of
transversals, and 2) that as a consequence, the
ideal consumer citizen envisioned by Jordans
neoliberal reforms is not an identity or experience attainable only by the upper class and economic elite.
Much recent literature on neoliberalism
has emphasized the ways in which economic
reform projects (neoliberal and otherwise)
work to provide benefits and guarantee certain
rights to small segments of the population while
rendering fewer legal protections and rights to
the majority. Scholars have examined the differential modes of treatments of populations53
and how the idea of the global in practice only
works to connect in a highly selective, discontinuous, and point-to-point fashion, 54 leaving
portions of the populations outside these processes in terms of opportunities and benefits,
but also, in a more literal sense, spatially. James
Petras and Henry Veltmeyer explore the ways
in which resistance to neoliberal exclusions is
often channeled from destabilizing antisystem

tourists as well as a higher class of Jordanian leisureseekers. The development project is currently prevented by the existence of a tenant law that makes
it virtually impossible for landlords to evict tenants,
even commercial tenants. Revisions to these laws are
due to change in 2010, at which time the downtown
area will likely undergo significant redevelopment
that displaces the lower-end retailers.

53. Robert Castel, From Dangerousness to Risk, in

The Foucault Effect: Studies in Governmentality, ed.
Graham Burchell, Colin Gordon, and Peter Miller (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), 294, cited in
Ong, Neoliberalism as Exception, 79.
54. James Ferguson, Global Shadows: Africa in the
Neoliberal World Order (Durham, NC, and London:
Duke University Press, 2006), 14.

55. James Petras and Henry Veltmeyer, Social Movements and State Power (New York: Pluto Press, 2005), 9.

59. Giorgio Agamben, State of Exception (Chicago:

University of Chicago Press, 2005).

56. Saskia Sassen, Territory, Authority, Rights: From

Medieval to Global Assemblages (Princeton, NJ: Prince
ton University Press, 2006), 11021.

60. Ong, Neoliberalism as Exception, 5.

57. Sassen, Territory, Authority, Rights, 277321.

58. Ong, Neoliberalism as Exception, 4.

61. Ong, Neoliberalism as Exception, 23.

62. Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, Friction: An Ethnography of Global Connection (Princeton and New York:
Princet on University Press and Oxford University
Press, 2005), 4.

Spaces and Practices of Aspiration and Consumption

557

Amman Cosmopolitan:

as inclusions and exclusions rub up against each

other can be productive: friction results when
the rubber hits the road, but it is essential for the
vehicle to move forward. As she argues in her
study of neoliberalim in Indonesia, cultures are
continually co-produced in the interaction I call
friction: the awkward, unequal, and unstable,
and creative qualities of interconnections across
difference.62 The notion of friction is useful as
well in thinking about the ways in which neoliberal reforms do not in fact include or exclude
neatly; the edges of these projectslegally
and spatiallya re sites of contestation as well
as creativity. Thus while Ongs idea of neoliberalism as exception points to the construction
of political and social spaces that are differently
regulated and linked in diverse and selective
ways to global circuits,63 I aim to shift our attention away from examining precisely how those
exclusions are generated and toward the ways
in which peoples who find themselves at the
blurry boundary of inclusion/exclusion strive
to negotiate, imagine, and reconstruct the opportunities and possibilities of marginal spaces.
Precisely what it is these individuals do can lead
to new practices and crossings of the sort captured by Collinss notion of transversals, that is,
movements from work to leisure, from private to
public, from family to citizen, from tradition to
modernity, and so on. Jordanians daily traverse
a wide range of symbolic and physical spaces,
negotiating the crossings between them just as
they negotiate interactions within each. In her
study of how the production of desire in China
lies at the heart of neoliberal projects, Lisa Rofel
emphasizes that reforms can have contradictory
effects: they enhanced ordinary citizens sense
of the new possibilities that lay within their
reach but also increased frustrations with the
new social inequalities that sometimes became
evident.64 But frustrations are not the only response to the realization of the possibilities that
appear to lie just out of reach. Even seemingly

Jillian Schwedler

social movements into the carefully controlled

and controllable spheres of elections and local
reform organizations.55 In her study of citizenship, Saskia Sassen likewise emphasizes the ways
in which disadvantaged subjects, such as factory workers, see their inequalities formalized
through reform policies and into law, despite
the fact that they are sometimes successful in
gaining formal rights;56 certain subjects, such as
housewives and mothers, are excluded through
a different means, namely, their categorization
as nonpolitical.57
Ong also emphasizes the ways in which
exceptions to neoliberalismspaces governed
by logics other than neoliberalism a re invoked to both include and exclude populations
and spaces from neoliberal calculations and
choices.58 She does not use the notion of exception in Giorgio Agambens sense of a decision
made outside the juridical order, 59 but rather
to denote an extraordinary departure in policy that can be deployed to include as well as
exclude populations as well as spaces. Indeed,
the exception can also be a positive decision
to include selected populations and spaces as
targets of calculative choices and value orientations associated with neoliberal reform.60
What all these studies emphasize is that
neoliberalism, like globalization, is not a single
process or set of reforms that creates predictable
and replicable effects across diverse locales, nor
does it entail a simple retreat of the state from
spheres of economic activity (so that markets
can frolic freely). But economic globalization
is rightly associated with staggering numbers
of the globally excluded,61 so in addition to attention to the specific processes and means of
exclusion, we also need to identify an analytical angle that allows us to examine the ways in
which peoples struggle at the bounda ries of
neoliberal projects, practices, and spaces. Anna
Tsings notion of friction is useful here, as it
points to the ways in which the tensions created

63. Ong, Neoliberalism as Exception, 9.

64. Lisa Rofel, Desiring China: Experiments in Neoliberalism, Sexuality, and Public Culture (Durham, NC,
and London: Duke University Press, 2007), 9.

558

Co

ra
pa

ie
tu d

So

so

A
u th

ti v

si a

t
nd

he

a
frica
A
st
Ea

le
d
d
Mi

excluded Jordanians t hose who are not

imagined to animate the governments dream
of recreating Amman as a global, consumerist,
cosmopolitan city of the worldare not entirely
disempowered, and they are certainly not docile.
Populations always animate the margins of neoliberal exclusions. Many will remain excluded,
despite considerable efforts to join in, while others will see new possibilities, new ways of being,
and imagine themselves as included rather than
excluded. Indeed, some will even find ways of
participating in forms of economic and leisure
activity that are prioritized by neoliberal visions
even as they feel the effects of the selectivity of
neoliberal reforms. For example, residents in
a neglected neighborhood may move across a
variety of spaces to inhabit and animate other
spaces, which they can imagine were intended
for use by them. Their activities may not be of
the sort envisioned by neoliberal reforms,65 but
they are actually made possible through the juridical, spatial, and cultural reconfigurations
attached to neoliberal reforms. In this sense,
marginal and border spaces can be spaces not
only of exclusion and disappointment but also
of opportunity and vibrant inventiveness.
How, then, are such spaces being negotiated in Amman? The regimes neoliberal priorities imagine a population of citizens that
are politically quiescent but patriotic in their
consumerism, who can animate the project of
refashioning Amman as a city of world stature.
Yet while certain elite spaces are most accessible
to those with disposable incomes, the ideal consumer citizen envisioned by Jordans neoliberal
reforms is an identity that is also accessible to
those who are able to assert themselves as aspiring cosmopolitans. Neoliberal reform projects
have created new patterns of both work and
leisure activities that bring increasing numbers of Jordanians from East Amman into West
Amman. Notions of class and social status are
being complicated as middle-class workers both
inhabit and imitate the spaces of leisure that
are fashioned according to the desires of the
wealthy cosmopolitan elite. Indeed, practices of

work, leisure, and self-presentation have shifted

in ways that allow a segment of Jordanians to
gain economic and social opportunities through
employment in high-end restaurants, bars, and
nightclubs. While overall employment in Jordan hovers around 30 percent, private-sector
employment in the areas of trade, hotels, and
restaurants has increased from 9.8 percent in
1987 to 20.3 percent in 2003.66 Still, only 2 percent of the total workforce (and 6.2 percent of
the private sector) are employed in restaurants
and hotels. 67 With 58.2 percent of jobseekers,
male and female, below the age of twenty-five,
these are highly coveted jobs.68
I do not wish to imply that high-end hotels
and restaurants are the only sites of entry for ostensibly excluded portions of the population to
forge cosmopolitan identities within the spaces
of neoliberalism. But these self-consciously cosmopolitan leisure sites are exemplary, because
the need for workers entails the need for workers who appear to fit inwho can blend into the
scene as if they belongand thus require those
workers to adopt a cosmopolitan representational code, at least while at work. This transversal entails more than a particular kind of dress,
but also a self-presentation that includes ease
in engaging the cosmopolitan elite, as well as
comfort and fluency in the cultural codes that
signal worldly cosmopolitanism. The bartender
must know not only how to make small talk and
be conversant in the topics that will be of interest to the customer who waits for a friend to arrive, but how to make eye contact and likewise
not violate conventions of personal space. The
shop clerk must know not only what fashions
are hot, but how to greet and interact with the
customer in ways that suggest an understanding
of shared values and experiences (Everyone
dreams of owning a Birken shoulder bag!). As
workers learn these codes and adopt them for
self-presentation, they often carry them on their
selves as they leave their place of employment,
though not necessarily as they return home.
The need to staff elite establishments has
considerably expanded over the past decade, as

65. See especially Ong, Neoliberalism as Exception,

and Tsing, Friction.
66. European Training Foundation, Unemployment
in Jordan, 24.

67. Ibid., 38 and 28.

68. Ibid., 30, table 10.

69. Wild Jordan Caf, www.wildjordancafe.com (accessed 16 April 2010).

71. alqasr-hojo.com, www.alqasr-hojo.com/vin.htm

(accessed 16 April 2010).

70. ATICO Fakheldrin Group, www.atico-j o.com/

renchai (accessed 16 April 2010).

72. Grand Hyatt Hotel, www.amman.grand.hyatt

.com/hyatt/hotels/entertainment/restaurants/
index.jsp#5811972 (accessed 16 April 2010).

Spaces and Practices of Aspiration and Consumption

559

Amman Cosmopolitan:

York. Because of the proliferation of high-end

leisure establishments, patterns of employment
have shifted as the demand for younger and
hipper staff has increased, creating new opportunities for those who once could hope to
gain a position as a waiter only through years
of apprenticeship in the citys few top restaurants. The owners of the most elite nightclubs
mandate a particular look, but their reported
efforts to hire staff from other establishments
suggest that employment is not open to anyone:
only those who show up for an interview having
already adopted the desired representational
code are likely to find employment.
Why should we care about the specifics
of these new jobs for young men, other than
to note changing employment trends? How
has the proliferation of jobs in Ammans cosmopolitan sites of leisure and consumption accompanied changes in the leisure practices and
self-u nderstandings of the young Jordanians
who work there? Individuals are defined, and
define themselves, through their adaptation of
a representational code. That is, they wish to be
recognized by and recognizable to the group to
which they wish to belong; they also may wish
to differentiate themselves from other groups.
How they present themselves is also going to be
contingent on context, and is likely to change
as transversals take Jordanians from space
to space, context to context. In every context,
this process necessarily entails others recognitions of who belongs and who constitutes matter out of place. Recognition by all audiences
is of course not equally valued. As Norma Moruzzi argues, we cannot fully understand selfpresentation without a comprehension of how
local practitioners use the codes.73 What are
these young men saying through their dress,
hair, language, ringtones, favorite place to hang
out, selection of CDs on the floors of their cars,
and so on, and to whom are they saying it? In a
similar manner, young male mall kids gel their
hair into faux hawksslicking the sides of their
hair down and spiking the top in ways that enable them to easily erase the effect upon return-

Jillian Schwedler

new hotels each bring a handful of venues, and

Jordanian entrepreneurs strive to create spaces
that remind them of their favorite places in cities like New York and London. Interviews with
seven managers of some of the hottest spots produced a refrain familiar to me during my own
experiences working in restaurants and bars in
New York: there is no shortage of applicants for
positions, but managers struggle to find enough
suitable employees. Several major new hotels have opened in Amman over the past decade, including Four Seasons, Sheraton, the
Grand Hyatt, and LeRoyal. Independent and
hotel-based restaurants such as Asia, Canvas,
Wild Jordan69 (with its environmental theme),
Ren Chai,70 Blue Fig (also environmental), the
Sanctuary, Glass, the Living Room, the Grotto,
and Vinaigrette71 present a sleek modernist aesthetic, often serving organic foods and craft
beers, and displaying the work of local artists
on the walls. A decade ago many waiting and
bartending positions were filled by foreigners:
Americans and Europeans in the most expensive places, Eastern Europeans and East Asians
in the seedier establishments. Jordanian men
have also long staffed many of the restaurants,
often in a style more of an elegant Italian restaurant: head waiters, men of forty or older
and wearing dark suits, supported by teams of
younger men wearing vest, shirt, and tie. The
flood of new establishments, particularly those
aiming to attract the most elite clientele, has
led managers to try to hire top staff away from
competitors. What is new in these places is the
relatively rapid spread of a cosmopolitan hip
aesthetic, emerging first in the late 1990s and
exploding in the past five years. The Grand
Hyatt Hotel Web site, for example, describes its
new 32 North restaurant as cosmopolitan and
sleek, a unique dining venue more likely to be
found in New York, Sydney, or London.72 The
older gentlemen waiters are left to run the old
formal restaurants, like Romero and Trattatoria, while the young and beautiful servers don
black from head to toe and pour mojitos while
djs spin the latest tracks from London and New

73. Norma Claire Moruzzi, Trying to Look Different:

Hijab as the Self-Presentation of Social Distinctions,
Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa, and the
Middle East 28 2 (2008): 22534, 226.

560

Co

ra
pa

ie
tu d

So

so

A
u th

ti v

si a

t
nd

he

a
frica
A
st
Ea

le
d
d
Mi

ing homeand adopt a particular repertoire of

posing and gesturing when hanging out at the
mall in an act of self-presentation that signals
their position to others, who in turn are recognizable to them. Given that malls are private
commercial spaces, adopting the right representational code can also mean all the difference
in terms of gaining admittance by the guards
staffing the metal detectors that stand at the entrances. Similarly, in the sleek, high-end neighborhood of Abdoun, multiple groups find ways
to share the same cosmopolitan spaces: some by
working in the establishments, some by patronizing them, and still others by hanging around
the central traffic circle, cruising and listening
to music while meeting friends and drinking
a Coke but not actually patronizing the more
expensive and exclusive establishments. One
might characterize this group, pejoratively,
as circle rats akin to mall rats: they know the
spaces to inhabit, aim to approximate the desired representational code (and frequently develop a specific code of their own), but do not
have the ability to pass as part of the cosmopolitan elite, let alone possess the disposable income necessary to buy drinks and food at prices
akin to those in New York City.
Yet these diverse segments of aspiring cosmopolitans are able, through their adaption of
a specific cosmopolitan representational code
that they and others recognize, to claim their
own place within a particular social locale,
which they understand in hierarchical terms:
stretching to a higher status in terms of class, or
to a higher status in terms of coolness and hipness, as cutting-edge. That is, they are responding to, as well as producing and reproducing,
hierarchies of social capital that are naturalized within the space of Bourdieuian habitus,74
spaces that exist at the boundaries of neoliberal
reform projects while affording new opportunities of entry to an otherwise largely excluded
segment of the population.
Indeed, there are distinct and multiple
spheres of aspiring youths, with many loath to
be (mis)recognized as belonging to one other

group. For example, many of these aspiring

cosmopolitans who work in bars and clubs
adamantly distinguish themselves froma nd
would abhor being confused for t he male
mall kids. The aspiring cosmopolitans and mall
kids both might wear jeans and T-shirts, but
how they wear them, how they fit the body, what
brand they wear, and where they wear them are
practices that create distinctions between them
that are recognizable to themselves and sometimes to others. The waiters and bartenders, for
example, sport the carefully gelled hair of the
metrosexual rather than the slick pompadours
and faux hawks. During my ethnographic work
in nightclubs, I noticed repeatedly in conversations that the aspiring cosmopolitans see
these differences (from mall kids) as well as
similarities (with the cosmopolitan elite). (The
mall kids and weekend Abdoun loiterers, of
course, are also engaged in transversals that
may aptly be described as aspirational.) They
are careful to reproduce and even exaggerate these distinctions from mall kids, lest they
be confused for them, while reproducing and
adapting the codes they recognize in the cosmopolitan elite. These representational codes are
comprehensible to others, and indeed rely upon
recognition. Something as seemingly simple as
a cell phone ringtone or choice of cologne can
function as an important marker of distinction
or similitude.
The self-presentation and status negotiating of these aspiring cosmopolitans extend beyond their places of work to their own sites of leisure activity. In many ways, they strive to emulate
the leisure practices of the cosmopolitan elite,
but at places that are somewhat less expensive
than many of those in which they work. In their
free time they hang out less at the malls than
they do at Starbucks, and they frequent clubs
that embody a cosmopolitan aesthetic but are
not among the hottest spots to be seennor the
most expensive. So while the cosmopolitan elite
will drop hundreds of JDs (US$1.40 = JD 1) in a
single night buying whole bottles of liquor75 and
platters of chicken wings, sushi, pizza, and tapas

74. Moruzzi, Trying to Look Different, 228.

75. If you can afford it and are known to the bartenders, waiters, or owners, you can purchase a bottle of
liquor at an elite establishment and leave any remaining portion behind with your name on it, so it is waiting there for you on a subsequent visit.

Conclusion

What does all this mean? As Allen Scott argues,

an ever-w idening range of economic activity is
concerned with producing goods and services
that are permeated with broadly aesthetic or semiotic attributes,80 and these attributes are socially productive in their own rights. Ammans
emerging spaces of cosmopolitanism create
rapidly expanding avenues for accessing a new
modern and patterns of employment imbri76. Le Royal Amman, www.leroyalamman.com/
chesters.html (accessed 16 April 2010).

79. Le Royal Amman, www.leroyalamman.com/silk

.html (accessed 16 April 2010).

77. Le Royal Amman, www.leroyalamman.com/

buddah_bar.html (accessed 16 April 2010).

80. Allen J. Scott, The Cultural Economy of Cities (London: Sage Publishers, 2000), 2.

78. alqasr-hojo.com, www.alqasr-hojo.com/nai.htm

(accessed 16 April 2010).

81. Scott, Cultural Economy of Cities, 3.

Spaces and Practices of Aspiration and Consumption

561

Amman Cosmopolitan:

cate with tiers of leisure activity as well as shifting subjectifications and self-representations.
In this way, forms of entertainment and distraction always function, at least in part, as personal
ornaments, modes of social display, sources of
self-awareness, 81 and acts of self-production.
The group Ive described as aspiring cosmopolitans self-consciously insert themselves into the
economy not only through their employment in
elite leisure establishments, but through their
patterns of consumption as well as by adapting a representational code that enables them
to traverse the space of the city as well as the
borders of perceived social hierarchies. Their
significance is not only in the ways in which
they are aspiring to engage in Jordans neoliberal dreamland future, but in the ways in which
they are imagining themselves as already part
of that project. Through their patterns of employment, leisure activity, and consumption,
they have called into existence a tier of cosmopolitan activities to accommodate their desires
while recognizing their somewhat lesser financial resources. The banalities of space form the
preconditions of shared experiences and thus
for identities and narratives. When these spaces
are remade, and movements across them altered
(new paths, quicker movement), new narratives
are constructed.
One might assume that Ammans cosmopolitan waiter/club kids have emerged as a
target of Islamists, rhetorically if not physically,
with the latter condemning the former for their
alcohol consumption, experimental drug use,
embrace of Western culture, and promiscuity.
I do not want to suggest that some Islamists are
not vocal in their opposition to what they see as
the amoral and decadent behavior of Amman
cosmopolitans. But I would like to raise a caution against suggesting the existence of a clear
binary between a pious, Islamic ascetic public
and secular cosmopolitan consumer-partiers.
Pious citizens have themselves grappled with
cosmopolitan aesthetics and practices, evidenced, for example, in jilbabs with faux rhine-

Jillian Schwedler

at high-end bars like Chesters 76 and Buddah

Club,77 and nightclubs like Nai,78 Silk,79 JJs, and
Kanabaye, the staff from those establishments
will often hang out at venues like Cube and Fizz.
These venues are still hip and cosmopolitan in
aesthetic, but they are not frequented by the
most elite, and thus the aspiring cosmopolitan
is unlikely to encounter the patrons he serves at
work (and drinks are still expensive but far more
affordable than at the most elite clubs). Cube,
for example, is located in the lower-mid-r ange
Sheppard Hotel, a space that previously housed
a tired bar with few customers; the new club,
with its sleek white-leather banquettes, is packed
to capacity many nights of the week. Yet upon
mentioning to an upper-class Jordanian friend
that I had been there the previous night, she replied (in English), Eww, why would you want to
go there? implying, as I understood it, that the
clientele was a bit down-market for her tastes.
Cosmopolitans and aspiring cosmopolitans do inhabit and animate some of the same
leisure spaces, however, primarily the more
casual but hip restaurantsplaces like Salute,
Grappa, Canvas, Books@Cafe, and Bigfellows
Irish Puband coffee shops, notably the many
outlets of Starbucks. And everyone eats Caesar
salads and drinks mojitos. But even as tiers of
cosmopolitan leisure sites create parallel spaces
for those with different levels of disposable income, they map onto similar spaces in West
Ammanneighborhoods in a city whose neoliberal spaces still, despite these inventive practices,
exclude the vast majority of the population.

562

Co

ra
pa

ie
tu d

So

so

A
u th

ti v

si a

t
nd

he

a
frica
A
st
Ea

le
d
d
Mi

stones reproducing YSL (Yves Saint Laurent)

motifs, muhaja-b abe fashions, 82 and the
much-d iscussed bad hijabi phenomenon in
Iran.83 Families, couples, and same-sex groups
of individuals donning conservative clothing, including variations of head coverings for
women, populate malls and coffee shops. Hijabs
are not unusual sights at places like Starbucks,
though they are most often donned by girls in
their twenties and thirties, who arrive as couples
(same or mixed sex) or in small groups, often
side-by-side with women whose heads are uncovered. If we want to advance our understanding
of political change in the context of selective and targeted neoliberal economies in the
Middle East, we will need to approach these aesthetic practices and representational codes not
as discrete and self-contained, where encounters
between competing codes necessarily result in
tension or conflict. Rather, we need to explore
these codes and how they are used to gain traction in our understanding of complex practices
of subjectification and meaning-making, and
thus as sites of new political possibilities.

82. Allegra Stratton, Muhajababes (New York: Melville House, 2008).

83. Nima Naghibi, Bad Feminist or Bad Hejabi? Moving Outside the Hejab Debate, Interventions 1 (1999):
5557 1; Moruzzi, Trying to Look Different.