Contemporary Levant

ISSN: 2058-1831 (Print) 2058-184X (Online) Journal homepage: https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/ycol20

Prejudice, military intelligence, and neoliberalism:

examining the local within archaeology and
heritage practices in Jordan

Shatha Abu-Khafajah & Riham Miqdadi

To cite this article: Shatha Abu-Khafajah & Riham Miqdadi (2019): Prejudice, military intelligence,
and neoliberalism: examining the local within archaeology and heritage practices in Jordan,
Contemporary Levant, DOI: 10.1080/20581831.2019.1667667

To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/20581831.2019.1667667

Published online: 19 Sep 2019.

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CONTEMPORARY LEVANT
https://doi.org/10.1080/20581831.2019.1667667

Prejudice, military intelligence, and neoliberalism: examining the

local within archaeology and heritage practices in Jordan*
Shatha Abu-Khafajaha and Riham Miqdadib
a
Department of Architecture, Faculty of Engineering, Hashemite University, Zarka, Jordan; bDepartment of History
and Archaeology, United Arab Emirates University, Al-Ain, United Arab Emirates

ABSTRACT KEYWORDS
A particular theme dominates contemporary heritage projects in the Colonialism; neoliberalism;
neoliberal context of Jordan: sustainable development on the basis of archaeology-based and
participatory approaches. Although these approaches are celebrated in heritage-development
academic and governmental circles, the history and power dynamics projects; participatory
approach
within which they operate remain underexplored. We aim to establish
a theoretical framework that examines why and how local communities
in the Arab region shifted from periphery to centre, and from
background to foreground, in the field of archaeology and heritage.
We situate archaeology and heritage within two seemingly different
contexts, colonialism and neoliberalism, that have governed the
relationship between the West and the Arab region. As we contrast
colonialist exclusionary policies with the inclusivity promoted by
neoliberal policies in archaeological and heritage projects in Jordan, we
argue that despite the obvious differences between the two, they both
managed to make substantial shifts in the perception of and attitudes
toward archaeology and heritage. In spite of participatory paradigms,
the shifts seem to have always come ‘from the outside’, operating on
sites and peoples alike.

A particular theme dominates the contemporary scene of archaeology and heritage in the neolib-
eral context of Jordan today: sustainable development on the basis of local participation. The
United Kingdom’s Art and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) and the Newton-Khalidi fund
announced in February 2019 awarded financial support to seven projects submitted for the Cultural
Heritage and Sustainable Development Programme in Jordan. The winning projects will establish
cooperation between British and Jordanian universities and scholars in an interdisciplinary
approach to archaeology and heritage sites in order to deliver sustainable development to
related communities’ lives. Similarly, the United States Agency for International Development
(USAID) took a shift from its 1980s tourism-oriented Cultural Resource Management Programme
(CRM) when, in 2014, it established its community-based project entitled ‘the Sustainable Cultural
Heritage through Engagement of Local Communities Project (SCHEP)’. The four-year project
(recently extended until 2022), implemented by the American Center of Oriental Research
(ACOR), has operated on nine different sites in different parts of Jordan with an aim to preserve,
manage and promote ‘cultural heritage resources … through job creation and capacity building
for communities around archaeological sites’ (ACOR 2019). Remarkably, literature and public lec-
tures, often presented by foreign archaeological teams to explain their work, have increasingly
embraced the rhetoric of sustainable development on the basis of local participation. As part of

CONTACT Shatha Abu-Khafajah s.a.khafajah@hu.edu.jo

*Winner of the 2019 CBRL Prize for Best Paper.
© 2019 Council for British Research in the Levant
2 S. ABU-KHAFAJAH AND R. MIQDADI

their projects, the teams turn archaeological and heritage sites into development projects where
they engage with selected locals, educate them, and ultimately empower them. Project literatures
and presentations are laden with images and videos documenting the engagement of locals’ with
the teams and sites. Sometimes locals attend these lectures to speak live to the audience about
their ‘empowering’ experiences in the projects.
We might rightly consider the current trend of participatory approaches to archaeology and heri-
tage in Jordan as capacity building projects that provide opportunities for disempowered, margina-
lised and underemployed members of local communities. After all, socio-economic empowerment is
‘central to the ethical and practical forces that shape the work of archaeologists and heritage pro-
fessionals’ (Gould 2018, p. 137). For example, Umm el-Jimal project in the north eastern borders of
Jordan (see de Vries 2013), the Temple of the Winged Lions project in Petra (see Tuttle 2013) and
the Tall Hisban project (see Ronza and Smith 2013) have created seasonal job opportunities in
some of the most deprived areas in Jordan. In fact, engagement with the locals has been part of
the Tall Hisban team’s agenda since 1968 (Abu-Khafajah 2007). Given the colonial history of archae-
ology in the region, however, we aim to critically examine the ethical and practical forces behind
these contemporary practices. Only in the early twentieth century, such projects were answering
to military intelligence agents as part of the colonial process that shaped the Arab region. In this
process local communities were trivialised, marginalised, and labelled as ‘ignorant’, ‘thieves’, and a
‘threat’ to archaeology and heritage; labels that linger on especially among local scholars today.
Why and how have the locals in colonial and postcolonial archaeological practices shifted from
the margin to the centre in contemporary neoliberal archaeology and heritage projects is at the
heart of this article.
To answer this question, we critically review the history of archaeology in Jordan as we situate it in
the context of colonialism in the wider Arab region. We explore the ways Western1 scholarship has
shaped the adverse image of local communities’ relationship with their material past in Jordan, an
image that has persisted from the early twentieth century until the rise of ‘local participation’ as a
rhetoric that has recently sought to actively engage locals. We examine this rhetoric in sustainable
development projects that are funded by international agencies such as the World Bank and the
USAID and show how they mark a shift from an economy-based neoliberalism to an ‘inclusive’
one. We use neoliberalism in its conceptual and analytical scope to examine the projects’ frames
of reference (local, national and international) and the mechanisms of power between the expert
and the local. This is important, we believe, because local scholarship in the Arab region has
tended to be passive and descriptive in approaching archaeology and heritage issues.2 We of
course acknowledge critical approaches that many Arab scholars (whether in the region or
abroad) have developed, and we cite some of them in this article. But our critique is based on an
absent Arab critical engagement with archaeology and heritage-related conventions. While many
parts of the world have broken from the universality of conventional practices and have formulated
their own charters to fit their socio-cultural and historical contexts when it comes to heritage percep-
tion and practice, the Arab region has yet to contribute to these universal charters in the shape of a
critical engagement that would reshape and redefine them.
We join Meskell (2015, p. 6) in emphasising that ‘examining heritage requires a more anthropolo-
gically nuanced and theoretically informed understanding if scholars are to address the motivations
behind heritage regulation’. Acknowledging politics in archaeology is at the heart of this examination,
as archaeology reconstructs times and places in the Arab region (and elsewhere) while exposing,
electing, and shaping material of the past according to political needs. We believe that it is no
longer acceptable for local scholars, particularly in the light of the colonial history of archaeology
and the recent complexities in the field, to simply report and document changes, without analysing,
criticising, and ‘doubting’ (Waterton and Watson 2013, p. 547). Such a critical approach might raise
and answer questions about the history of archaeology and heritage in the Arab region before
Western colonialism.
 CONTEMPORARY LEVANT 3

Pride and prejudice: archaeology in action in the Arab region

In this article we engage with the history of archaeology in the region to find a theoretical framework
to explore the ‘reception’ of archaeology as an exogenous discipline and practice during colonial
time, and how this reception has influenced the perception of archaeology by locals, communities
and scholars alike. Given that archaeology is ‘the making of a present that also entail[s] the excavation
of a past’ (Abu El-Haj 1998, p. 174), we believe that local archaeologists can only contribute to the
development of the field when they ‘become more politicized, certainly more “theorized” … and
more active in their negotiations in a fuller global-and that includes the local level’ (Meskell 2006,
p. 167).
Archaeology in the Arab region came into modern being when Western scholars became inter-
ested in the regions’ material past while it was governed by the Ottoman Empire. This kind of ‘imperi-
alist archaeology’ (Trigger 1984) explored peoples and lands with particular economic, political and
cultural interests that suited Western empires of that time (Seymour 2004). Imperialist archaeology
preceded and facilitated Western colonialism as ‘archaeology developed at the core of the relation-
ship between capitalist advancement and the cycle of dispossession, appropriation and annexation
of territories’ (Mourad 2007, p. 154). It also shaped cotemporary conceptual and practical approaches
to materials of the past. Together with other disciplines such as anthropology, geography, biology
and geology, archaeology provided a ‘practical knowledge of the conquered or conquerable lands
and as such it is acknowledged by colonial administrators and theorists’ (González-Ruibal 2010,
p. 40; see also Meskell 2006). Shaped by a complex matrix of Western philosophy, history, science,
technology, nationalism and colonialism (Abu-Khafajah and Badran 2015), western archaeology cul-
tivated a sense of superiority in opposition to its inferior oriental ‘other’ (Kohl 1998, p. 227, Bernbeck
and Pollock 2007); pride and prejudice in action at a global scale. Ultimately, archaeology became
entangled in the process of colonialising peoples, their lands and their pasts (Anderson 1991), not
least through its activities, for example excavation and tourism that were introduced to the Arab
region in the colonial context. To what extent does neoliberal archaeology still nurture this ‘pride
and prejudice?’ We attend to this question in the second part of our article.
Colonialist archaeology was selective about the cultures that shaped the Arab region. It anchored
itself in the ancient cultures, referred to as ‘the cradle of civilisation’ (Seymour 2004, p. 325), while
intentionally dismissing more recent ones. For example, ancient cultures in Mesopotamia and
Egypt were divorced from their connections to Arab-Islamic cultures and were instead associated
with European culture as part of the broader development of human civilisation (Bahrani 1998,
Reid 2002). At the same time,
the Islamic past, Arab history and Turkish conquests were ignored. Islam as a unifying factor was (and still is)
viewed as a threat to any hegemonic power. “Islamophobia” in the 19th century led to a disregard for the
Islamic past and its remains. (Mourad 2007, p. 155)

Furthermore, materials of the past from the Arab region were considered placeless and decisions to
transfer archaeological artifacts to western countries were sometimes made lightly. For example, Ger-
trude Bell, a prominent British female traveller, politician, and the Director of Antiquities in Iraq until
1926, was known to decide on the artifacts that were to be kept in Iraq and those that were to be
transferred to museums abroad by ‘spinning a coin’ (Bernhardsson 2005, p. 144).
Archaeology contributed to fragmenting the pasts of the region, segregating them from their
land, times and peoples, and connecting a substantial part of these pasts to European cultures. In
this sense, archaeology reinforced the cultural superiority of the coloniser while depriving the colo-
nised of their past, thus leaving them with an arbitrary present and an uncertain future. Interestingly,
while Western discourses took pride in learning from, and advancing on, the ancient cultures of the
Arab region (Larsen 1989, pp. 229–230), and while they introduced people to the past as part of their
national agendas, through education, museums, and touristic trips (Silberman 1989, p. 4), the Arab
people – and their past and land – were experiencing prejudice first hand through archaeological
4 S. ABU-KHAFAJAH AND R. MIQDADI

expeditions in the region. This pattern of pride and prejudice with its dominant negative imagery of
Arabs continues in contemporary Western news coverage of archaeology, particularly through recent
conflicts. For example, Pollock and Lutz (1994) and Seymour (2004), who analysed news reports on
‘archaeology under fire’ in the region, make three observations. Firstly, following nineteenth
century orientalist perceptions, Western reporting continues to view the people of the region as
ignorant, greedy and destructive. Secondly, these reports seem to value archaeology over the lives
of the locals in this particular region of the world. And finally, they value the ancient past over the
Arab Islamic one: ‘during the invasion of Iraq [in 2003], full attention was given to what was con-
sidered as part of the “cradle of civilization” construct, yet Islamic remains were given a subordinate
position’ (Mourad 2007, p. 155).
Our turn to this brief history sheds light on the power of archaeology to (continue to) shape the
region. We strongly agree with Corbett (2011) that we need to take seriously biblical archaeology in
the ‘Levant’ since the early twentieth century and its role in shaping Jordan, confiscating Palestine
and establishing the state of Israel. We see the political use and abuse of archaeology in the
region as a constant practice and thus argue that exploring the power dynamics behind these
uses and abuses is essential for theorising archaeology and heritage practices. The following explores
the intersections between archaeology, military intelligence and religio-politics in the region.

Archaeology, military intelligence, and religio-politics: pushing the locals to the

margin
During the American military preparation for the 2003 invasion of Iraq, politicians and military forces
consulted with archaeologists over the sites to be avoided during military operations (Stone 2005,
p. 934). This incident is not unique; orientalist scholars and archaeologists have in the past worked
for military intelligence in the region before, during and after WWI (Mourad 2007, p. 161). Their pol-
itical influence contributed to the production of modern political and national entities in the Arab
region. T. E Lawrence (‘Lawrence of Arabia’) and Gertrude Bell (‘the Arab king-maker’) are among
the most influential orientalists who shaped the modern political history of the Arab region. Their
prejudice against the locals was sometimes subtle, but it can be discerned clearly in statements docu-
mented in their diaries and correspondence. For example, ‘the Arabs can’t govern themselves … no
one is more aware of that than I’, reported Gertrude Bell to Mark Skyes in 1915, just before the Skyes-
Picot Agreement that divided the Arab region between the United Kingdom and France was signed
(Wallach 2005, pp. 152–153). Indeed, ‘[a]rchaeologists, employed as colonial officers in imperialist set-
tings were engaged in a form of nationalist archaeology in the sense that their work was used to puff
up the glory and sense of self of their employer’ (Kohl 1998, p. 227).
While Lawrence and Bell were openly political, other scholars had a subtler religio-political pres-
ence. Their accounts, a ‘blend of anthropology and archaeology, would become common currency
… and would play an important role in justifying colonial conquest’ (González-Ruibal 2010, p. 39).
These accounts rendered the locals ‘inferior’, ‘ignorant’, and ‘greedy’, and their recent past as irrele-
vant and unimportant. In this literature it is ‘the small, the simple, the elementary, the face-to-face’
(Appadurai 1986, p. 357) encounters that shape the image of the locals and their relationship with
the past. The complex, the literate, and the historically deep connection with the past in Arab and
Islamic culture remained unexamined (Abu-Lughod 1989, p. 279). For example, the lack of interest
in archaeology among locals is often attributed to religious reasons. Trigger (2005, p. 267) ascribes
the failure of Arabs to develop an interest in materials of the past to the association of the latter
with jahiliyya, pre-Islamic life. Such interpretations were fed with accounts of Western travellers in
the region during the 18th and 19th centuries. They related the destruction of ancient sculptures
found in classical archaeological sites in the region to iconoclasm in Islam. It is telling that it is the
same reasoning that explained the Talban’s spectacular destruction of Bamiyan statues of Buddha
in Afghanistan in 2001; they also claimed religion as a reason for destroying the statues (Flood
2002). Yet, one might argue that Afghanistan has been ‘Islamic’ since the seventh century AD,
 CONTEMPORARY LEVANT 5

long before the statues were destroyed. The possibility that this destruction had political motives
rather than theological ones was hardly entertained.
Archaeologist Nelson Glueck’s work in Jordan is exemplary of the misrepresentation of locals,
especially given his respectable academic status among Jordanian archaeologists. Although he
was interested in biblical investigations, Glueck’s vivid anthropological accounts of the locals are
worth exploring. In his book The Other Side of Jordan, Glueck (1940, p. 36) suggested that the only
way to control local workers’ cupidity and prevent them from ‘carrying off’ archaeological findings
was by offering them easy money for every artifact they handled. Beside cupidity, he argued,
locals demonstrated ignorance of the past and biblical history to an extent that it was only
through him, Glueck, that the locals were able to gain some insights into that past (Glueck 1968,
p. 202). In reading his account, one cannot help but wonder why his subjects, Muslim Arabs who
are believed to be acquainted with the Bible – at least through their awareness of their holy book,
the Quran – showed very little knowledge of this religious past. Was it a lack of communication
between him and the people that led him to such a conclusion? Or was he using dominant orientalist
tropes that presumed Arab inferiority? What interests us here is that, whereas orientalist discourses
have been heavily critiqued in Western scholarship since at least Edward Said’s publication (1978),
these questions have not been raised among local scholars, perhaps because the authority of
Glueck – and generally other foreign scholarship – remains unquestioned.
As we grapple with the question of why local scholars have not been more vocal about question-
ing archeological discourses embedded in military intelligence and political agendas, we follow Pfaffl
(2010, p. 6) in her proposition that ‘[t]he identity and socio-political views of the researcher turn him
[/her] into a tool for manifesting the theoretical concept of politics and a political set of ideas as a
tangible, however possibly constructed, reality within his/[her] area of expertise’. We find it important
to highlight the political repercussions of Glueck’s (and other archaeologists) scholarship, which we
believe has shaped contemporary archaeology and heritage in the Arab region. While we acknowl-
edge that these archaeologists, considered by many to be ‘the father(s) of archaeology’, laid the foun-
dation of the discipline in Jordan, we argue that there is so much room to revisit the nature of this
parentage through critique and a rethinking of the political nature (and consequences) of their para-
digms. This self-reflexivity will infuse much needed ‘critical reinvigoration, even if that means inject-
ing doubts about the ontological quality of much that passes for heritage and its research’ (Waterton
and Watson 2013, p. 547). Such doubt is precisely what is needed to strengthen archaeology and heri-
tage studies and move them forward in the Arab region.
It is mainly in postcolonial scholarship of archaeology and heritage that prejudice against locals
was most noticeably critiqued and where locally-inspired and context-oriented approaches toward
the past and its materials were developed. The focus on the local challenged the universality of
Western and conventional heritage values and practices in World Heritage Sites. Local views on
material pasts soon began to receive governmental and international recognition (Bowdler 1988,
Ucko 1989) and were reflected in international charters concerned with archaeology and heritage
(Taylor 2004). Among others,3 the World Archaeological Congress (WAC) was established in 1986
to mitigate Western influences on local communities and to acknowledge their perceptions of and
attitudes towards material pasts. Its founder Peter Ucko, for example, argued that the main issue
in archaeology and heritage practice is not the lack of people’s interest in materials of the past
but the ‘lack of awareness [among professionals] of other peoples’ cares and concerns’ (Ucko
1989, p. xvii). This newfound interest in ‘the other’ shifted the local from the margin to the centre
in archaeology and heritage studies. The second part of the article examines this shift with particular
interest in neoliberal heritage-based development projects operating in Jordan.

Neoliberalism at work
Contrary to Clarke’s (2008) call for the retirement of neoliberalism as a concept, we argue that archae-
ology and heritage practices still have a lot to gain from this concept. Neoliberalism varies from ‘a
6 S. ABU-KHAFAJAH AND R. MIQDADI

socially constructed term of struggle … that frames criticism and resistance … [to] a rigorously
defined concept that can guide research in anthropology and other social sciences’ (Jessop 2002,
p. 65). We acknowledge the bulk of diverse literatures that detangle neoliberalism and its complex-
ities, and realise that this is no place for investigating it. However, as Coombe and Weiss (2015, p. 43)
rightly note, ‘[h]eritage studies need a more anthropologically nuanced and theoretically informed
understanding of neoliberalism, governmentality, and human rights to address the changing con-
ditions of heritage regulation and to understand the political struggles in which new “heritagized”
claims are now imbricated’ (emphasis added). In the following, we draw on lessons learnt from
research on neoliberal heritage projects in different contexts.4 We use this analysis to reflect on
the Jordanian context and to draw connections between neoliberalism and neocolonialism.
Critical scholarship of neoliberalism (Andah 1995, Peet 2009, Venugopal 2015) has seen it as a
modern colonial power conducted by the ‘unholy trinity’ of neoliberalism’s agents, to use Peet’s
(2009) words: the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Trade Organis-
ation (WTO). Together with other organisations such as the United States Treasury, these agents
‘imposed [a neo-colonial agenda] upon an unwilling and vulnerable third world … [thus] creating
deformed, paralysed or dependent trajectories of development’ (Venugopal 2015, pp. 176–177).
Scholars of neoliberalism maintain that its techniques, even if unintentionally, nurture the colonial
idea of development as being something exogenous, applied by foreigners and practiced on
those who are ignorant, incapable of evolving and in need of help and guidance (Peet 2009, Venu-
gopal 2015, p. 176). These scholars maintain that neoliberalism deepens the dichotomy between
foreigners as donors and locals as recipients. They argue that neoliberalism fosters the idea that reci-
pients are ‘completely unprepared to resist whatever inroads foreign powers as well as their multi-
nationals and world bank bodies maybe making into various areas of their social fabric’ (Andah
1995, p. 155); they are already crippled by corrupted political systems and deteriorated economies.
The rhetoric of neoliberalism emerged in international development policies after WWII. Neoliber-
alism depended heavily on efficient allocation of resources in order to increase economic value and
mobilise international aid in developing countries. This efficiency relied on applying a set of political
and socio-economic concepts, such as free-markets, decentralisation, privatisation, and delegation of
governmental responsibilities towards citizens to private bodies associated with foreign agencies
such as the World Bank and the USAID (Harvey 2007, p. 13). In this sense, neoliberalism creates a
channel of power dynamics that connect international bodies directly with locals in an attempt to
generate revenues and magnify profits. In relation to heritage, the Cultural Resources Programme
(CRM) that emerged in the 1980s in many parts of the world is a form of neoliberal governmentality
that ‘legitimizes new relations of power and knowledge as it creates new subject positions for indi-
viduals and social groups, while fostering the articulation of collective subjectivities holding posses-
sive relationships to culture’ (Coombe 2013, p. 380; see also González 2014, Coombe and Weiss 2015).
Culture in this perspective is a resource to be exploited – mainly through tourism. This earliest appli-
cation of neoliberalism in archaeology is responsible for converting conventional excavation and con-
servation projects into rehabilitation projects for touristic purposes, with all the socio-cultural
changes that came along.
Neoliberalism is evident in Jordan through privatisation policies and practices that have domi-
nated the country since 1989 in response to the government’s failure to fulfil its financial obligation
to international aid agencies. The delegation of the government’s responsibilities to the private sector
and the establishment of new public-private partnerships were backed up by ‘amendments’ in the
administrative framework of the Jordanian state to support private investment and free-market
enterprise in the country. This ‘fundamentally altered the nature and structure of Jordanian space’
(Corbett 2011, p. 186). A prominent example of neoliberalism functioning in the Jordanian urban
space is the Abdali Project in Amman. Initiated in 2005, a private investment body possessed and
immediately demolished the Abdali governmental and residential neighbourhood, a prominent
part of the modern history of Jordan and its capital Amman (Daher 2011). Jordanians saw Abdali
being sold, sieged, demolished, rebranded, rebuilt and managed by private companies. In the
 CONTEMPORARY LEVANT 7

heritage context, neoliberalism is manifested in World Bank-funded cultural heritage projects con-
ducted since 1997 in five ‘key historically and culturally important secondary cities’ in Jordan
(World Bank 2006). A close examination of these projects concluded that they ‘neutralise, fragment
and reproduce space as a “tourist product” … As they deliver unity and organisation, they eliminate
variety and locality; the very components that give spirit to a place’ (Abu-Khafajah et al. 2014, p. 455).
The adverse impact of such neoliberal ‘development’ projects on peoples’ lives led to wide-scale cri-
ticism of the World Bank and foreign agencies’ policies in foreign media and literature (Western and
otherwise).

‘Inclusive neoliberalism’ and the ‘obedient other’

Towards the end of the second millennium, it became clear that local communities where neoliberal
projects took place were rapidly degrading (Soederberg 2004, Mawuko-Yevugah 2010). The decline
was explained on the basis of the donor-driven, locally-imposed and economic-oriented neoliberal
policies that failed to even mitigate poverty. In response, neoliberal policy-makers called for design-
ing and implementing poverty reduction policies on the basis of social development ‘by incorporat-
ing a role for civil society through the participation of NGOs’ (Mawuko-Yevugah 2010, p. 108).
Consequently, the concept of ‘inclusive neoliberalism’ that relies on participatory approaches
emerged in the rhetoric of World Bank projects to indicate ‘good governance’, sustainable develop-
ment, and community inclusion and empowerment (Bergh 2012, Craig and Porter 2003). In order to
be ‘inclusive’, neoliberal policy-makers realised that they had to surpass economic politics and focus
on socio-cultural ones. This realisation emerged in the aftermath of the September 11 terrorist attack
on the United States. In this culturally charged context, the United States formulated the 2002 Millen-
nium Challenge Account (MCA) as ‘an attempt … to tie its aid and development policy to the so-
called War on Terror’ (Mawuko-Yevugah 2010, p. 113). While the obvious purpose of ‘inclusive neo-
liberalism’ is to facilitate ‘economic, juridical and social governance in order to create ideal conditions
for international finance’, the managerial system of foreign aid under the MCA indicates ‘a disciplined
inclusion of the poor … and technical management of marginal economies, governance and popu-
lations unprecedented since colonial times’ (Craig and Porter 2003, pp. 54–55). But unlike colonial
times, power in ‘inclusive neoliberalism’ is hardly top-down. Rather, it takes a subtle form of domina-
tion where, in the new rhetoric of neoliberalism, people are considered capable but in need of gui-
dance, ‘good governance’ and discipline (Cooke and Kothari 2001, Abrahamsen 2004, p. 1464, Hickey
and Mohan 2004). Governing those who ‘can’t govern themselves’ now comes in the form of neolib-
eral sustainable development.
Beside economic reformation, for developing countries to be included in foreign aid, they have
had to abide by political and socio-cultural positions that support the ‘War on Terror’ led by the
United States. Accordingly, those who unconditionally support the United States policy and its
‘War on Terror’ have been subject to aid, and those who have dared to differ have faced exclusion.
These exclusionary policies evoke early colonial constructions of the uncivilised other. This time ‘the
other’ is ‘a passive and silent homogeneous unit that is unwilling to embrace neoliberal moderniz-
ation and thus remains a potential threat to the “West”’ (Soederberg 2004, p. 297). For the ‘obedient
others’, they have had to live up to the expectations of the donors in order to continue receiving their
money (Abrahamsen 2004, p. 1464). But mechanisms of ‘inclusive neoliberalism’ in ‘obedient
countries’ have also enforced a further search for ‘obedient citizens’, thus neglecting and marginalis-
ing those who are otherwise ‘unempowerable’. Plets describes this process as a systematic ‘structur-
ing of local subjectivities, governmentality and local power relations’ (Plets 2016, p. 377).
Participatory approaches may well reverse top-down approaches, as participants become ‘agents
of change and decision-making’ (Mawuko-Yevugah 2010, p. 185). Undoubtedly, they mitigate the
market logic that dominated development discourses in the 1980s and 1990s. Yet, they also mark
new power dynamics that international donors exercise over recipient countries (Ferguson and
Gupta 2002, Mosse and Lewis 2005). Following Michele Foucault’s writings on power and other
8 S. ABU-KHAFAJAH AND R. MIQDADI

scholars’ analysis of power in the context of neoliberalism, we explore power dynamics in participa-
tory approaches and reflect on heritage projects in Jordan.

Heritage projects in Jordan: the neoliberal effect

Understanding participation in terms of power dynamics is at the heart of the analysis and critique of
neoliberalism in the twenty-first century. Many studies use Foucault’s ‘technologies of control’ to
analyse neoliberal projects in developing countries (e.g., Abrahamsen 2004, Mawuko-Yevugah
2010, Behrent and Zamora 2016, Dean 2016, Leshem 2016). Subjectification, as a technology of
control used within participatory approaches, shapes the core of this critique. The technologies
and rationalities of ‘partnership’ imply ‘creation of norms and social and cultural practices at all
levels’ (Kothari 2001, p. 141) to govern the ‘interplay between race, power and counter-hegemonic
ideology’ (Seedat 2012, p. 490). These processes aim to repackage, rebrand and socially activate neo-
liberal politics, policies and orientations, to stand for the resentment of, and threats to, conventional
neoliberal principles (Mawuko-Yevugah 2010, p. 112, Cahill 2012). To achieve these aims, neoliberal
agents contextualise the principles of neoliberalism in the local settings of development projects by
establishing ‘institutional and epistemological [reconfigurations], while cultivating subjectivities tex-
tured by the rule of the market and economic commodification’ (Plets 2016, pp. 376–377). With this,
neoliberalism has shifted from being a global condition into being ‘an assemblage of technologies,
techniques, and practices that are selectively appropriated’ (Coombe and Weiss 2015, p. 52) to create
and sustain ‘associations between diverse constituents’ (Anderson et al. 2012, p. 174): i.e., locals and
international agents.
In Jordan, the diversity of these constituents is well-marked by the involvement of foreign univer-
sities and scholars in archaeology and heritage projects on the basis of cooperation with local univer-
sities and scholars. The projects mentioned in the introduction of the article (the seven AHRC-funded
projects in the Cultural Heritage and Sustainable Development Programme) provide a prominent
example. Jordan, as many other Arab countries, has long been accustomed to the presence of
foreign universities and scholars working on archaeological and heritage expeditions in the
country. Their presence was predominantly based on long-term projects, divided into seasonal
ones, with the specific aim of building and accumulating knowledge about the sites in question
over time. However, these long-term knowledge-building projects witnessed a neoliberal shift
when, in the last few years, a relatively big number of projects collectively funded by similar
funding bodies began to operate at the same time on diverse archaeological and heritage sites in
Jordan. Project time is now relatively short, up to two to three years, and the aims are basically con-
cerned with sustainable development on the basis of community engagement. In this sense, heritage
has been redefined to situate these new aims. Bill Finlayson (2018) captures the new approach to
heritage in his report on Cultural Heritage and Sustainable Development in Jordan:
Heritage is a potential educational resource for the development for local communities, employment, a driver for
professionalism, enhances urban environments (social wellbeing, good citizenship), and is a driver for innovation
by motivating creativity. Work needs to be undertaken to realise this potential.

Thus the perception of heritage is transforming under neoliberalism. The term archaeology is rapidly
fading from project agendas and is replaced with heritage, a term more inclusive and dynamic than
archaeology (see Abu-Khafajah and Badran 2015), to accommodate the rhetoric of sustainable devel-
opment. However, these projects are based on archaeological sites; they carry the ‘archaeology gene’,
the scientific and academic value of heritage, within them.
In a neoliberal sense, heritage is perceived as an assemblage machine of ‘[t]he most varied
elements … from … cultural representation … to European funding programmes, aesthetic tastes
and evaluations, urban planning policies, old plows and agricultural tools, and many others’ (Gonzá-
lez 2014, p. 7). This machine is run through a dynamic cultural technology ‘constantly in the making in
relation to the constantly changing landscapes where different players’ interests are often intricately
 CONTEMPORARY LEVANT 9

juxtaposed’ (Plets 2016, p. 378). This dynamicity transforms heritage from being approached directly
as a resource to be exploited into being a process of ‘fluid social practice(s)’ (Plets 2016, p. 378). Heri-
tage in this sense is conceived as a socio-cultural issue that needs to be run by new experts; scholars
who can at once advance the ‘scientific’ scope inhibited in the ‘archaeology gene’ of heritage and
negotiate convenient power relations with locals in order to run heritage as a socio-cultural
process. Experts are forced into this kind of duality in handling heritage because their neoliberal
funding bodies are pushing towards participation as a condition for funding. These experts are
not necessarily conventional agents of neoliberalism; they tend to be research-focused and humani-
tarian-oriented.
The socio-cultural dynamics of ‘inclusive neoliberalism’ are increasingly recognised as a creative
power (Didier et al. 2013, Brenner et al. 2010, p. 199) that operates on peoples and things. It repro-
duces ‘spaces, states, and subjects in complex and multiple forms’ and reconfigures ‘bodies, house-
holds, families, sexualities and communities’ (Larener 2003, pp. 511–512). It reinvents involved
individuals as ‘agents of agents’; those who function in the space between the locals and funding
bodies (i.e.. World Bank, USAID, NGOs, research organisations, etc.). They are the experts and the
entrepreneurs who ‘displace social risks away from the state and out to an array of “responsibilized”
individuals, associations and communities’ (Brenner et al. 2010, p. 199) in order to achieve
development.
While functioning in this tense space between those with power and those to be empowered,
these experts practice subjectification, ‘the self-application of power, making oneself conform to a
normalized standard’ to achieve development (Bonta and Protevi 2004, p. 130). In the context of sub-
jectification, ‘politics is reduced to … value creation and appropriation under a public sphere organ-
ised by socio-scientific knowledge, which … reinforces the forging of individuals as entrepreneurs’
(González 2014, p. 6). In terms of heritage projects, especially those conducted in monumental
sites with anticipated financial profit, subjectification is an efficient mechanism where ‘the self-
empowerment of capacitated citizens and self-organized communities … facilitate rapid permit
granting for commercial development of tourist heritage zones’ (Coombe and Weiss 2015, pp. 43,
47). The creative power of ‘inclusive neoliberalism’ capacitates individuals to run the heritage
machine to achieve sustainable development by ‘engineer[ing] social change from below’
(Coombe 2013, p. 378) using rhetoric, policies, and practices of ‘inclusive neoliberalism’. This engin-
eering implies interaction between experts and locals through which locals are supposed to be
empowered as jobs created and development achieved.
The role of Western-funded experts (locals and foreigners) in forging locals into entrepreneurs is
crucial for investigating the neoliberal effect on heritage projects carried out in Jordan and elsewhere.
Most, if not all, heritage projects are conducted by Western agencies that come equipped with knowl-
edge and experience and the power that comes along with them; not dissimilar to the archaeological
expeditions of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. As part of the creative power that runs the heri-
tage machine, experts have to synthesise the ‘archaeology gene’ with the rhetoric of sustainable
development. This implies ‘constant reiteration and renewal of technical language, methods and
orthodoxies’ (Crewe and Harrison 1998, p. 109) and amalgamation between conventional vocabul-
aries (conservation, restoration and management) and activist ones (empowerment, capacity build-
ing and job creation). While doing that, the experts gain more power and accumulate cultural capital
that tightens the rhetoric of development as being foreign, imported and bestowed from above
(Mawuko-Yevugah 2010, pp. 189–190). Kothari (2005, p. 428) builds on the role of experts in the
development process to conclude that prejudice, inherited in ‘cultural capital acquired by being
from or of the West’, governs power mechanisms in the participatory relationship between the
expert and the local.
The cultural capital of the experts allows them ease of movement in the space between the local
and the international, the powerless and the powerful, the recipient and the donor. While being ‘fluid’
they ‘move resources, authority and concepts from donors to recipients, and return images, infor-
mation and legitimisation from recipients to donors’ (Townsend et al. 2002, p. 832). Arguably with
10 S. ABU-KHAFAJAH AND R. MIQDADI

different motivations, experts’ power and ease of movement resemble those of military intelligence
agents who occupied the space between locals and international powers in colonial times. However,
the promise of prosperity that is based on empowerment, capacity building and job creation almost
completely obscures the power dynamics behind their hybrid job, as scholars and as development
agents of foreign funding bodies.
The following section uses this discussion of power dynamics to analyse heritage-based sustain-
able development projects in Jordan. The aim is not to provide a detailed study of a specific project
but to establish a much-needed theoretical framework that helps us approach archaeology and heri-
tage practices in Jordan through a lens that is more critical than the current tools.

Power dynamics within participatory approaches: rebranding scholars and locals

Under neoliberalism the authority over heritage has shifted from the state to ‘new agencies and
coalitions of agencies, joint partnerships, public–private alliances, global–local or multi-scalar assem-
blages of NGOs, international authorities, and transnational agencies’ (Coombe 2013, p. 378). In the
case of Jordan the ‘new agencies’ are not entirely new. Many of them, such as ACOR, the French Insti-
tute of Archaeology of the Near East (IFABO), the Council for British Research in the Levant (CBRL) and
the German Archaeological Institute in Jordan (DAI), have existed in the Arab region, in one form or
another, since colonial times. They persisted in the postcolonial context, only to be faintly monitored,
reported, and inspected by representatives of the newly independent states of the Arab region. In
Jordan, as in other Arab counties, the ‘joint’ management of archaeological and heritage sites by rel-
evant foreign bodies and the state represented the earliest forms of decentralisation, before the
entrenchment of neoliberalism. In these agencies new roles amalgamated the scientific with the
social in accordance with the politics of project funding bodies.
Decentralisation of power in heritage projects hardly implicates the neoliberal state in absolute
withdrawal, but a mere ‘devolution of authority’ (Coombe and Baird 2015, p. 145) creates a collective
approach to heritage in which scholars operate as experts and development agents of foreign
funding bodies. In this approach
NGOs, state and privately sponsored museums, local associations, women’s organizations, professional societies,
and many other structures can take on heritage preservation as an explicit cause, becoming devoted custodians
of local patrimony assets while deriving economic and educational benefits for themselves. (Cernea 2001, p. 76)

The devolution of power and subjectification of individuals optimise the economic and educational
benefits of heritage. Heritage becomes ‘a force of production in itself … [and] a means of making
development strategies more socially and environmentally sustainable’ (Long and Labadi 2010,
pp. 1–2). This force of production can be seen in action during ‘heritage project season’ in Jordan,
as project sites become independent entities, platforms with their own power hierarchies and
dynamics. These entities are hybrid, globally-integrated and locally-responsive. Their experts
connect the local to the global, internationalise the local, and ‘localise’ the international. In such
hybrid contexts ‘it is no longer possible to capture the scope of international heritage without
proper consideration of global institutions, national politics, and local developments and social
movements’ (Meskell 2015, p. 5), especially that contemporary national and international politics
of heritage are ladened with neoliberal ‘actors and concepts, such as NGOs and their rhetoric, to con-
solidate control over value-laden spaces such as historic centres, national heritage, and so on’
(Meskell 2015, p. 13). These spaces are hybrid with juxtaposed values, agents, and powers that
come together under the label of sustainable development projects.
To see this as a dramatic shift from the colonial exclusion and marginalisation of locals is perhaps
true and just. However, a comprehensive examination of the power dynamics of these entities may
reveal a subtle resemblance between colonial and neoliberal approaches. Before archaeology scho-
larship was infused with neoliberalism, its scholars were basically trained as archaeologists and con-
servationists whose work was mostly restricted to excavation, documentation and preservation. The
 CONTEMPORARY LEVANT 11

inclusion of locals remained optional, arbitrary, unstructured and mundane. But when international
funding bodies began to request partnerships with locals, as part of their ‘inclusive neoliberal’
agendas, this reconfigured institutional and epistemological structures of projects. It affected their
theoretical and practical frameworks, their aims and objectives, team structures, and power dynamics
between team members (scholars and involved locals, on one hand, and the team and the rest of the
local community on the other). This implied rebranding scholars as development agents, educators,
job creators, and capacity builders. Scholars now have to juggle their new managerial roles with their
archaeology scholarship to meet funding agendas.
In their mission to secure funding and to meet project aims, scholars and experts have tended to
simplify and universalise complex communities, cultures and histories ‘to a few underlying, guiding
principles’ (Patterson 2006, p. 377). Part of this simplification is the lack of awareness of, or maybe
indifference to, the structuring of subjectivities and power dynamics the experts create when they
select ‘obedient locals’ to be included in their projects. We outline two kinds of locals: the ‘empow-
ered’ and the ‘powerless’, both constituting part of the project team, and both under pressure to
improve, develop, and contribute to the project as a function of their membership and for the
sake of continuity and inclusion. The ‘empowered’ are usually educated youths and women, who
are brought to the foreground, while the ‘powerless’, usually those assigned mundane jobs,
operate in the background, thus providing depth to a globally-integrated, locally-responsive, and
self-organised platform. As a result of this selection, three different levels of power dynamics
appear. The first level is the embedded power tension created between those ‘included’, the ‘empow-
ered’ and the ‘powerless’, and those excluded, the ‘unempowerable’. This tension is derived from the
fact that the selected ones are associated with the experts and the presumable ‘privilege’ of this
association. They develop socio-cultural capital that differentiates them from the excluded. This
nuanced power dynamic, associated with neoliberal heritage projects that operate on the local
level, is worth examining, especially when these projects consider themselves socially sustainable.
The second level is the power dynamics between the ‘empowered’ and the ‘powerless’. It is gen-
erated from the fact that the ‘empowered’ are delegated with responsibilities of certain importance in
comparison to the ‘powerless’. But the tensions that might rise as a result of this dichotomy are con-
tained by the rhetoric of empowerment and continuous development.
The third level is embedded in the process of subjectification experts practice over the included
locals. Projects provide ‘new ways of representing and performing socio-economic and political
relations and identities, in a process of selection and purification that emerges relationally in social
contexts of interaction’ (González 2014, pp. 6–7). Selection and purification are mechanisms of sub-
jectification, as ‘the practices of encouragement, motivation, incitement, and inducement’ turn into
guidance, governance and discipline ‘in the name of empowerment and participatory management’
(Coombe and Weiss 2015, p. 49). The social context of interaction is where the complex power
dynamics take place in the name of delivering neoliberalism’s promise of prosperity. It is a fascinat-
ingly hybrid context where academic values juxtapose with new meanings and uses generated from
transforming archaeology into development projects. The hybridity is also evident in the merging
between the local and the foreign, something that has always taken place in archaeological sites
since colonial times. However, this time neoliberalism has shifted ‘the local’ from the margin to
the centre. This shift implies new responsibilities for locals and experts alike. It is in the space of
responsibility-creation and promise-realisation that power dynamics operate and neocolonialism
takes place.

Shifting people from the margin to the centre

Breaking with what we see as a passive and descriptive approach to archaeology and heritage in the
Arab region, and drawing on our observations and analysis of practices in these fields, we examined
the power dynamics that govern archaeology and heritage in Jordan. We specifically explored
powers that pushed the locals to the margin, as ‘ignorant and thieves’, during colonial times, only
12 S. ABU-KHAFAJAH AND R. MIQDADI

to be brought back to the centre recently, as part of the ‘inclusive neoliberalism’ wave that has swept
the world. We examined archaeology as a colonial process that has shaped contemporary Arab pol-
itical spaces, whether through the foregrounding of specific pasts, peoples and cultures while obscur-
ing others, or through orientalist (mis)representations of the region’s peoples, which has had violent
political repercussions still resonant today. As regional politics shift and turn in the region, we traced
the changing perceptions and practices of archaeology and heritage in neoliberal projects in Jordan –
a country considered to be one of the most politically stable in the region. We examined how neo-
liberalism transforms archaeology and heritage into hybrid entities, juxtaposing the global with the
local, foreign expert with the ‘obedient local’, and conventional archaeology scholarship with the
rhetoric and practices of ‘inclusive neoliberalism’. By coupling the colonial with the neoliberal, our
aim is to establish a framework through which archaeology and heritage – their concepts, practices,
peoples and power dynamics – can be critically approached in the Arab region.
We by no means deny the importance of participatory approaches in empowering locals; after all,
contemporary Western scholars who reach out to locals in order to educate, empower, and create
opportunities are very different from colonial scholars. However, it is worth remembering that
while the latter facilitated colonisation, the former might have encouraged ‘dependent trajectories
of development’ (Venugopal 2015, p. 177). Obviously, policies that encourage participatory
approaches are far subtler than the ones of colonial times, and in some cases are research-focused
and humanitarian-oriented. But we should still allow ourselves to question the nature of participation,
how it operates within heritage-based development projects and what kind of inequalities it pro-
duces. In criticising the conventional and in questioning the marginalisation of the local, postcolonial
literature has advanced theories and practices in archaeology and heritage. We have argued that
applying a similarly critical approach to neoliberal heritage-based development projects would
uncover both the challenges and the potentials in local involvement in these projects. This might
contribute to a better project management that would work towards the sustainable development
of peoples and places of heritage.

Notes
1. We particularly refer to the different colonial regimes of the late 19th and early 20th centuries and contemporary
powers that have shaped and continue to shape the current spatial, socio-political and economic context of the
Arab region.
2. We would encourage a meta-analytical approach to this literature on which we can begin to build a solid critique.
3. Since its establishment WAC has emphasized diversity and inclusion in the discipline of archaeology (Stone 2006,
p. 63). Concepts of locality, diversity and inclusion were also used to mitigate universality in the 1979 Australia
ICOMOS Charter for the Conservation of Places of Cultural Significance (Burra Charter), the 1983 Canada
ICOMOS Appleton Charter for the Protection and Enhancement of the Built Environment, the 1992 New
Zealand ICOMOS Charter for the Conservation of Places of Cultural Heritage Value, the 2002 Principles for the Con-
servation of Heritage Sites in China and the 2003 Indonesian Charter for Heritage Conservation.
4. For example, Ghana (Mawuko-Yevugah 2010), Spain (González 2014) and Russia (Plets 2016).

Acknowledgment
Professor Peter Stone in Newcastle University provided the much-needed encouragement to initiate the critical
approach in this article back in 2007 when Shatha was his PhD student. Professor Zeyad Al-Salameen and Dr Aahed Khlie-
fat recently read and commented on earlier versions of this article. Our friends and colleagues in the Hashemite Univer-
sity and the United Arab Emirates University contributed to this article through supportive structured and casual
conversations. The CBRL Prize for Best Article Committee and the editor of Contemporary Levant provided intense revi-
sions of the ideas and the language of this article. We are grateful to all of them.

Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.
 CONTEMPORARY LEVANT 13

Notes on contributors
Shatha Abu-Khafajah graduated as an architect from the University of Jordan in 1997. She specialized in documentation
and conservation of archaeological heritage while doing her master degree in archaeology. Her PhD in cultural heritage
management from Newcastle University enabled her to synthesise architecture and archaeology with special interest in
establishing a sustainable approach to heritage management in the Arab region that is community-based and context-
oriented. She is currently an associate professor at the Hashemite University in Jordan. Her research focuses on examin-
ing the relationship between people and their built environment.
Riham Miqdadi obtained her BA and MA degrees in Archaeology from Mo’tah University and University of Jordan
respectively. She pursued her PhD degree in Near Eastern Archaeology from University of Tübingen in Germany.
Riham participated in several archaeological excavations in Jordan and Syria. She is currently an assistant professor at
the Department of History and Archaeology in the United Arab Emirates University. Her research focuses on ancient
near eastern archaeology, Arabian Gulf archaeology, typology of the ancient pottery and manufacturing techniques,
and cultural heritage studies and practices.

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