AESTHETICS AND THE FUTURE OF LAND

In April 2012, the same month the excavator crawled into Qadisiyya to break ground on home infrastructure, the US Ambassador to Jordan, USAID, and the RSCN arrived in convoys of white SUVs at Dana's UN Biosphere Reserve. The US diplomatic convoy visited Dana to meet tribal shaykhs and other local stakeholders who would retain their ownership rights to these houses under the terms of the ecotourism project and thus, the RSCN argued, benefit financially from the ecorenovations. US funds ensured the houses would become boutique hotels and suq shops designed by prize-winning Jordanian architect, Walid Munif.Footnote ²⁵ The RSCN envisioned the initiative as a step in their “nature-based development” campaign to use biodiversity conservation as an economic stimulus for local communities.

Environmentalists faced an unforeseen challenge: Jordanian owners of these houses did not want to operate the resulting businesses. Instead, they contemplated hiring Filipina or Sri Lankan workers, the labor force of Jordan's domestic economy. Without “native” employees running the businesses, environmentalists would be hard pressed to market the area as “living heritage.” Dana homeowners were keen to benefit from ecotourism, but they did not want to cut hair in the rehabbed village's barbershops, peddle Wi-Fi in its net cafe, or tidy its bathrooms for paying customers.Footnote ²⁶ US dignitaries were perplexed: why would Jordanians, who prided themselves on hospitality and yearned for steady employment, not want to work in this service economy? I ask instead: why did environmentalists presume Dana homeowners would want to participate in their living heritage plan?

For living heritage to sell, the RSCN and their donors depended on tribal shaykhs and representatives to act “traditional.” In other words, the NGO expected representatives of tribes to perform tradition by welcoming their tourist guests to Dana wearing customary robes (thawb) and red and white checkered head coverings (shimāgh). In commercializing what had been an honorable status, the NGO relegated tribal representatives to the sidelines of the renovation project. The RSCN identified being “traditional” as inconsistent with the modern know-how required to make the ecotourist venture a success. King ʿAbd Allah also expressed these disparaging views in a 2013 interview for The Atlantic when he referred to Jordan's southern tribal leadership as “dinosaurs” of the kingdom.Footnote ²⁷ In spring 2012, development professionals used the exact term, “dinosaur,” to refer to tribal elders and shaykhs in Dana. The RSCN sought to implement environmentalism at Dana in ways that required local residents to participate in their own subjugation in the process. Qadisiyya residents did not want to perform the affective labor of hospitality for the ecotourist market.

By analyzing space and place as a social process, I aim to disrupt the international development reduction of Dana to a distinctively cosmopolitan site and Qadisiyya to a wholly traditional one. The creation of modernity often involves producing representations of the past to fulfill present political objectives.Footnote ²⁸ Both Dana and Qadisiyya villages are places made through praxis, through the cultivation of aesthetics that visually project and materially enact affective and political relationships with land.Footnote ²⁹ Both Dana and Qadisiyya constitute transnational economies that are in every way modern. In fact, part of what makes them so is their claims on the authenticity of the past to implement appropriate forms of living in the future. In Qadisiyya cosmopolitanism is a resource for local construction. At Dana, the RSCN anticipates that local communities who do not move will serve global interests. Migrant, urban labor in Amman and abroad enables home construction in Qadisiyya.Footnote ³⁰ While families in Qadisiyya build houses over years with income from contractual labor, USAID's multimillion-dollar endowment aims to restore the houses of Dana village in three successive stages meant to transform the village quickly. Distinctive home-building projects in Dana and Qadisiyya represent emergent political and economic imaginaries in tension: both based on heritage ideals of the house, but one ecotourist and the other genealogical.

QADISIYYA AND DANA IN RELATION

In the mid-20th century, Dana and Qadisiyya were related villages. Dana residents grew vegetable gardens in family plots of tiny houses standing a meter apart and Qadisiyya's vast lands gave rise to working farms. For this community of nomadic pastoralists there was a necessary cooperation between Dana village and Qadisiyya's open lands; people moved seasonally across the Sharra highlands to support the grazing needs of their flock.Footnote ³¹ Shaykh Fulan al-Akh Sabah, one of the few who grew up in Dana village, told me that forty years ago there was nothing in Qadisiyya: there were no houses, only extended vistas of land and sky.Footnote ³²

Current Qadisiyya residents relocated permanently in the latter decades of the 20th century with the formalization of the UN biosphere reserve. Environmentalist policies governing land use at the nature reserve placed restrictions on practices such as grazing that partially incentivized the relocation to Qadisiyya and the transition of families from seminomadic pastoralism to settlement. Despite their past cooperation, in the last forty years Dana and Qadisiyya have become ever more structurally distant. Today the two kilometers between these villages might as well be twenty or one hundred; there are no busses to connect them and only meager economic or social ties to encourage infrastructure linking the villages. Though it is technically possible for people to walk the two kilometers, the white-hot sun, the mountainous terrain, and the fact that there are no longer strong family ties binding Dana and Qadisiyya de-incentivize the trek. Today's Qadisiyya residents see Dana as a destination for foreign tourists and the Ammani elite. They have stronger ties in Amman, a city more than four hours away, and Tafileh, the governorate's capital city an hour away.

In the 1960s and 1970s, the Jordanian government incentivized permanent settlement by extending national hydraulic infrastructure to Qadisiyya. In the same period, the government erected basic housing in Qadisiyya to further encourage the relocation of Dana residents. Like many others, Shaykh Fulan al-Akh Sabah, who grew up in Dana, seized the chance for extra space and moved his family to the new village. The opening of the local Jordan Cement Corporation factory in the early 1980s provided thousands of these new villagers with jobs in a wage economy.Footnote ³³

At the end of the 1980s and in the early 1990s, the RSCN formally demarcated Dana as a nature reserve. Community activist Rashid al-Akh Sabah recalled that Dana's conservation management plans created greater restrictions on grazing livestock and introduced park rangers to enforce these new land regulations, encouraging more residents to abandon Dana for Qadisiyya.

It was a 3 million–dollar grant from the UN and the World Bank in 1993 and 1994 that created the Dana biosphere as a test case for the implementation of the UN Rio Convention of Biological Diversity in the Middle East.Footnote ³⁴ A major component of this grant was the transformation of the RSCN from a society of compatriots to a viable, nongovernmental organization. From that point forward, conservation institutionalized environmentalism as a royal form of governance, subjecting Jordanian territory to new land regulations.

Dana's conservation area is Jordan's largest nature reserve. It covers 320 square kilometers, including both the village plateau and expanses of the valley below, and its perimeter extends almost to the Jordanian–Israeli border. In 1994, Jordan and Israel negotiated a cold peace under the terms of the post-Oslo Wadi Araba treaty. That year the US government directed foreign aid to Jordan in quantity.Footnote ³⁵ The US–Jordan Free Trade Agreement six years later confirmed the relationship of foreign aid and environmentalism with specific regulatory measures to safeguard ecology. In the last decade of the 20th century, parallel movements for peace, profit, and preservation intersecting at Dana catalyzed environmentalism in Jordan.

The combined pressures of overcrowding in Dana where there was no civic infrastructure or employment, growing environmental restrictions on land use, and government incentives for relocation encouraged the nearly complete abandonment of Dana for Qadisiyya. By 2012 only a handful of families made their home in Dana, where tourists already outnumbered them. Families had abandoned seminomadic residence in various forms of temporary refuge in open, outdoor space for concrete homes in Qadisiyya.

In Qadisiyya I investigated how families built homes while living under economic duress. What seemed like a paradox to me was a practical solution for families who found that in a toxic economy of uncertain futures and just scraping by, building a house was a secure investment. Parents might not be able to guarantee that their kids could find work, but they would have a place to live. Homes, as Arjun Appadurai asserts, “never cease to carry a trace of the need to expand the meaning of humanity.”Footnote ³⁶ Members of the al-Akh Sabah family involved in building houses in Qadisiyya spoke about their houses as a familial refuge, where investing in the aesthetics of home exteriors was their argument for the dignity of the family and its durable future.

BUILDING HOUSES IN QADISIYYA

One thousand Jordanians in the Qadisiyya community of 10,000 lost their jobs in 2001 when the Jordanian government sold its controlling shares in a cement factory to the French multinational, Lafarge. It cost between 30,000 and 40,000 US dollars to build a modest, one-story home, so most homes went up in stages over long periods of time. As the kingdom increasingly privatizes national industry, the government and its foreign aid donors formally discuss environmentalism—with its lucrative global contracts and ecotourism promise—as a possible asset for growing Jordan's rural economy. At Dana, the RSCN created fifty-nine jobs. Though the RSCN idealized growing a green economy, the program has not yet and will not likely deliver the amount of jobs necessary to get Qadisiyya working again.

Despite the dearth of jobs after Jordan's privatization of the Lafarge cement factory—which marked Qadisiyya as within Jordan's “poverty pocket”—families in the village's most prosperous neighborhood, where several members of the al-Akh Sabah tribe lived, initiated construction of half of its twenty-five houses in the last five years. With savings scraped together from odd jobs in a patchy labor market, families built houses on inherited land slowly. Families building houses faced periods, sometimes years, when construction stalled due to a shortage of funds or competing priorities.

Families earn an average monthly income of 300 JD (roughly $450). The state has been the largest game in town: men commonly worked as teachers or, more often, collected pensions as retired army employees; women who worked outside the home taught or ran community associations. Without local opportunity, many men migrated to Amman to serve as temporary labor for odd construction or security jobs. Qadisiyya does have a small private sector economy comprised of local small businesses like its one-room grocers, its beauty salons, and its thriving minibus operations, but for several residents of the al-Akh Sabah familial residential area it was the initial income from the army coupled with earnings from migrant labor odd jobs as security guards that funded construction in fits and starts. To counteract the insecurities of the labor market, saving clubs (jamʿiyya) run by Qadisiyya women helped move construction forward.

Undeniably, it is employment by the state—in public schools, community associations, and, primarily, the army—that fuels the current construction boom. Men who served in the army overseas for six months earned a bonus. For his service in Haiti with the Jordanian army, Haitham al-Tafili earned a bonus of 4,000 JD (roughly $5,650), enough padding to turn a bank loan into a down payment on a house. In the absence of such opportunities several families I spoke with turned to the bank. For Muhammad al-Akh Sabah, who earns an army pension as a retired soldier of 290 JD per month, a bank loan was necessary for his down payment of 18,000 JD.Footnote ³⁷ Almost half of his income each month is devoted to the payment of that loan. Individual families use bank loans and government salaries to raise a new, middle-class Qadisiyya. The aesthetics of the Qadisiyya home—which were anathema to the government-supported, spare ecomodernist design of Dana's rehabbed orientalist village—were underwritten by families with private capital and Jordanian government cash.

Each of these steps in home building represents an incremental movement toward expanding Qadisiyya village; each specifies a relationship between residents and governmental, corporate, and transnational entities. On meager income, building a house required commitment. However, as fathers passed into death, sons converted inherited land into familial dwelling. After registering the property with the baladiyya (municipality), families hired an architect to draw up plans; they purchased building materials, hired Egyptian laborers, and got to work.

At the outset, home building involved converting landed property into other forms of value expressed in home construction and design. The first step in the process—registering the land with the baladiyya—primed land for construction by inscribing ownership in the local cadastre. The process of registration funneled land ownership through the legal mechanisms of state, reinserting the power of the government as the arbiter of land rights. After registering his property, Muhammad al-Akh Sabah paid an architect from Amman, whom he privately commissioned, 160 JD ($226) to draft plans for his modest home. This next step in the process of home building required landowners to make the bus trek from Qadisiyya to Amman to hire experts who could formulate home construction plans. Qadisiyya homebuilders identified private sector expertise as a necessary qualification in the process of converting land into propertied homes. With architectural plans in hand, families purchased building materials. Houses were built with cement purchased from the LaFarge cement factory. Thus, Qadisiyya homes, from the foundation to the walls to the roof, raised and enveloped the residence in the substance of its economic decline.

With the land registered, plans drafted, and materials purchased, the final step toward building involved commissioning construction workers. The strong preference in Qadisiyya was to hire Egyptian laborers to build these homes. Egyptian guest workers in Jordan were relatively inexpensive to hire and dominated the construction business across the country. In Qadisiyya, landowning residents identified construction with transnational labor. Hiring Egyptian workers signified the dignity, honor, and class position families sought to represent by building these very homes. Between periods of major construction, landowners and their sons would sometimes oversee particular construction projects—such as digging trenches for plumbing—or undertake discrete projects—including laying and leveling gravel within the unfinished home interior. However, when it came to major construction, families relied upon contractual Egyptian labor. For families in Qadisiyya the ability to hire workers was the first step in demonstrating social status. The ability of Qadisiyya landowners to employ transnational contractual labor elevated the value of their own provisional, contracted labors that funded these homes.

Each one of these steps in home construction represents ties that bind economies between Qadisiyya and capital, provincial Jordan and transnational labor markets. These houses, built in Jordan's rural “poverty pocket,” in the seemingly tucked away places of the monarchy, were in every way cosmopolitan. Qadisiyya home design referenced Gulf cosmopolitan aesthetics and the petro dollars that support this architectural style.Footnote ³⁸ Government, corporate, and transnational networks of capital moved through the land and out into the aesthetic expression of these homes. Local residents converted government-earned wages and privately acquired loans into resources for a future they built.

QADISIYYA EXTERIORS

Immediately after laying the foundation and erecting the walls of the home, families began to embellish the home exterior. Before there were rooms, electricity, and running water, homes featured columns spiraling up verandahs, grand staircases rising to the entrance, and filigree-embellished, hand-forged wrought-iron doors protecting the threshold. Exteriors were meant to be grand. These design elements were not treated as decoration, but prioritized as primary features of the construction process. As in nearby Yemen, Qadisiyya's new Jordanian homes are emblematic of a material and ideological shift in appropriate dwelling indicative of middle-class yearnings.Footnote ³⁹

This transition in housing at Qadisiyya is particularly notable when examining the house structures families once used at Dana. Dana residents built houses with few, if any, windows. These houses were dark, one-room stone shelters that served the functionalist purpose of providing temporary shelter at night or in rough weather. Families spent most of their time outside sheltered by thick wool tents that offered space to lounge, fresh air, and portability. These structures were sometimes used to store perishables and at other times used as refuge from punishing summer sun or to escape frigid, snowy winters. The houses were built with the chief goal of keeping the weather out, and their lack of windows indicates an orientation to life outside, beyond the closed-off house interior.

Shaykh Fulan al-Akh Sabah recalled that at Dana all ten members of his family, his parents and his brothers and sisters, shared one room. He remembered life there was cramped and uncomfortable. His family washed up, cooked, and carried on with everyday living in that single-room shelter. His adult daughter, Nur al-Akh Sabah, recalled buying a kilo of sugar for one qirsh.Footnote ⁴⁰ Now, she said, you can't buy anything for one qirsh. Families counted wealth by sheep and ample gardens of pomegranates, olives, and figs.Footnote ⁴¹ Though the village was not hooked into the national water and electric grid in the mid-20th century, the area was then, as it is today, a vital military resource. Shaykh Fulan al-Akh Sabah boasted that, like other men on the highlands, his father fought against the Ottoman Empire in the 1916 Great Arab Revolt. The village, he attested, has been integral to political processes of state and nation.

The idea of home represented by the new Qadisiyya house of the early 21st century is one cultivated in aesthetic detail. The elaboration of home exteriors specified individual familial prosperity within a community of relations. The performative value of the aesthetic discriminations in homecraft differentiated nuclear from extended kin within this Qadisiyya neighborhood. Building families recognized their aesthetic choices as signs of devotion and care to the future of the family, an act that both honored and preserved familial life by turning land into a new kind of refuge. Like most everyone I knew building houses, Muhammad al-Akh Sabah identified that his motivation for construction was the future of his family.

When I commented that Najla al-Akh Sabah's house was one of the most extravagant I'd seen, she replied, beaming: “Oh, no. Others have larger homes, probably.” Najla's husband, who earned a plentiful income by working in the Emirates and as a Saudi boarder guard, has been building a two-story home on top of her current humble abode. In 2012, she picked out ceramic bathroom and kitchen tiles, stainless steel faucets packaged in protective flannel bags, and pink porcelain sinks, all of it stashed just inside the entryway door of her new home for months waiting to be installed. She was excited about her kitchen backsplash, which read “breakfast” in English. Najla doesn't read English. These interior furnishings were clear markers of her financial success in a village without great opportunity.

Families who lived and worked elsewhere owned Qadisiyya's handful of richly embellished homes. The grand stature of home design was visual confirmation of their class elevation and mobility.Footnote ⁴² These elaborate houses visually expressed a rural cosmopolitanism whereby an emerging class of residents with urban opportunity and cash reserves earned from social mobility could build a family home in Qadisiyya, whether or not they lived there full time.

For most Qadisiyya families, building a house was a costly venture that required years of accumulated savings from temporary employment in the Jordanian capital, teaching contracts in the village, or coveted bonuses for army service abroad. These were houses built primarily with the salaries of government jobs, but which indicated a desire for upward class mobility that public employment typically could not provide. Qadisiyya families told me that it often took a decade or more to finish their houses.Footnote ⁴³

For years on end, homes stood like decorated skeletons at various stages of construction. Inside gravel-filled rooms overturned wheelbarrows, abandoned tools, and partially installed plumbing emphasized that work was economically contingent, but in process. Open windows waited for glass that would someday come. As with provisional housing in India or South America, poles of steel rebar protruding from rooftops were important signposts of unfinished business, placeholders for future generations to expand up into the sky as families filled out successively. Even with completed homes, the unfinished look was precisely the point. The metal poles guaranteed the possibility of adding cement floors to accommodate a growing family.

These new homes were monuments of a still unrealized future. As families waited to move in, their children, for whom they said they were building, grew up in small apartments across the street, watching the house of their intended childhood lay in various incomplete stages of construction. These kids would graduate and go to college or the army. Many I talked to had no plans to return. These homes were materials of ambition in a political void of opportunity. The Qadisiyya landscapes of provisional homecraft were constrained by a politics of inequality resulting from a lack of steady employment. The construction of these homes was a refusal to be hemmed in by these constraints, but the length of the construction indicated that the pursuit of the family home took place under duress.

QADISIYYA INTERIORS

Behind the rich exterior elaboration, Qadisiyya's interiors demonstrate the prioritization of the house as a familial refuge. Interiors in Qadisiyya were both inhabited and imagined. In 2012 when I arrived in Qadisiyya only one of the newly constructed homes was inhabited, by me, a renter for a family that had relocated to Amman. By 2017 families were living in about a third of the new homes in the al-Akh Sabah community. Families mostly made their homes in cramped apartments across the street or next to their future, unfinished homes. Families who owned finished houses did not necessarily inhabit them, but channeled their resources—the very ones that enabled home completion—to establish a life in Jordan's capital. In this way Qadisiyya's finished house was a counterpart to the provisional house: because of financial resources, on the one hand, or a parity of capital, on the other, both the finished and unfinished house stayed empty.

Interiors in the newly completed home and the temporary apartments alike reinforced commitment to family life. Farshas (futon-like sofa mattresses) lined the perimeters of family rooms with extra seating for anticipated guests. Delicate paneled curtains overlaid with heavier draping screened off windows for privacy. Carpets blanketed polished concrete floors. Interior furnishings softened and warmed the cold, hard surfaces of the Lafarge cement-rendered chambers. As in the home of Muhammad and Nur al-Akh Sabah, families extended that warmth through the house by choosing fabrics in the jewel-tone hues of ruby, amethyst, and emerald. Competing patterns in royal tones saturated interior lives.

The warmth that dressed Qadisiyya interiors in plush fabrics and deep colors extended into activities of the house. When familiar guests arrived, they were immediately extended a hand-sized glass of hot, sweet tea. Tea was the ritualized signature of Jordanian hospitality. While guests sipped refilled glasses, families watched Turkish soap operas such as Fatima and Wadi al-Dhiʾab (Valley of the Wolves). As they watched, women like Nur al-Akh Sabah would tell me: “these shows are very bad. They don't tell the truth about families. We don't watch them.” These tantalizing TV serials and everyday gossip enlivened spaces of formalized hospitality; these negotiated controversies animated the interior space.Footnote ⁴⁴

Of all the rooms in the Qadisiyya house, the formal reception room was the most elaborate—furnished with the finest farshas, carpets, and curtains a family could afford—and reserved exclusively for unfamiliar company or formal meetings. Unlike the comforts of an interior family room space, reception rooms were often separated from common areas of the house by exterior doors accessed by a separate threshold. These rooms were spaces of formalized hospitality that drew upon iconography of a monarchal ideal—like the bird-beak brass coffee pot—that tied a morality of hospitality to king and country. Shryock writes: “sovereignty is manifest in the ability to act as host, and this is why it makes sense to most Jordanians when the Hashemites describe Jordan as a house, and Jordanians as a family.”Footnote ⁴⁵ In this way, the formalized reception rooms were like portals that, through practices of hospitality that honored host and guest, linked individual families in a set of relations extending all the way up a social hierarchy concluding with the king. In Qadisiyya, families deliberate whether shaykhs today truly exist and whether tribes are socially effective, but the honor accorded by hospitality—commonly associated in Jordan with tribes and heritage—retains value even as other forms of heritage are questioned.

The architectural style of the new Qadisiyya house exhibits the value of hospitality in its very design. It is the thresholds of exteriors, with their grand staircases, columns, and doors, that initially welcome the guest into the embrace of the familial interior. The most richly elaborated features of the new Qadisiyya home were all directed at the guest in a way that boldly proclaimed an individual family's status to arriving company (and passing neighbors) while also welcoming the guest with aesthetic detail. Inside the home, paint immediately marked affluence. Glass chandeliers in entryways illuminated and guided visitors into the comforts of the reception area.

The aesthetics of the new Qadisiyya home design—from the transnational processes underwriting its construction to the aesthetic deliberations of its furnished interior—created an ideal for the future of a family deeply engaged with processes and practices of global citizenship. Further into the interior living space of the family, American iconography decorated the children's rooms. The once-inhabited, now empty chambers of my landlord's daughters’ room, like the rooms of other village girls, were decorated with Hannah Montana, SpongeBob, Strawberry Shortcake, and Minnie Mouse. On an adjacent wall, a hand-painted mural in candy-striped colors read ma shāʾ allāh in Arabic characters.Footnote ⁴⁶ Tensions between the values of Islam and American consumerism were recognized, but, as with Turkish serials, the continual negotiations of these frameworks were the entertainment of everyday life.Footnote ⁴⁷ Aesthetic choices imagined a family future as one engaged with the visual iconography of global media and committed to the idealized village values of hospitality and religious virtue. These were not isolated village cottages, but houses whose very construction forged a rural cosmopolitanism via participation in labor markets and the consumption of international media that intimately framed aesthetic discriminations.

The same devotion to hospitality that governed the aesthetic commitments of families to home construction also made the idea of servicing Dana's heritage village seem disgraceful. Paid hospitality was viewed as “dirty work akin to prostitution”Footnote ⁴⁸ and thus, to return to a question raised at the beginning of this article, Jordanian homeowners did not want to operate the businesses of Dana's ecoheritage village. Instead, they recognized guest workers from the Philippines and Sri Lanka—who typically cleaned bathrooms and served food in Jordanian hotels as part of the country's transnational underclass—as the most appropriate employees for ecotourism.

BUILDING HOUSES IN DANA

The major act of environmental cultivation at Dana was the creation and expansion of the biosphere itself. Qadisiyya families too cultivated nature in their gardens, which was the true measure of household wealth. However, global environmental organizations such as the RSCN did not recognize Qadisiyya's horticultural acts as an expression of environmentalism. At Qadisiyya, the cultivated garden featured peaches, apricots, lemons, loquat (iskadunya), grape arbors, cacti, and—if resources allowed—walnut and pistachio trees. These gardens were more than beautiful; they represented familial autonomy from fluctuating markets. It was the gardens that formed a link to Dana for Qadisiyya families who like Shaykh al-Akh Sabah fondly recalled Dana's verdant terraced landscape. Like the adjacent home-building projects in the once-connected villages, the broken horticultural link between Dana and Qadisiyya raises questions about how projects of land reform get coded as environmentalism and demonstrates that environmentalism is a project of global capitalism.

Unlike Qadisiyya, the RSCN plans for Dana aimed to re-engineer an entire village as one holistic biosphere. Whereas excavators, overturned wheelbarrows, and deflated Lafarge cement bags marked Qadisiyya village as a work in progress, in Dana it was the half-story USAID billboard that announced the provisional nature of the future village. The restoration of Dana as a representative Ottoman village was part of an $8 million USAID grant that would rehabilitate the village and build corridors connecting Dana with Petra and Wadi Rum, sites that were at the heart of Jordanian tourism.Footnote ⁴⁹ The project would blanket Jordan's south in ecotourism, thereby amplifying the role of the private sector to forge new commercial relations between villages and towns. It would also generate economic links between villages that would be governed by international aid and the RSCN's model of “nature-based development” that promoted biodiversity by using ecology as a basis for private sector growth in tourism.

The RSCN's master plan imagined shuttles, or even camels, run by tribes that would transport people on a craft tour of local villages where artisans would showcase rustic honeypots and other “traditional” objects for buying customers as tourists moved north from Neolithic villages near Petra to arrive for a night in Dana's Ottoman heritage village. The likeness of the overall design to the Egypt exhibit at the 1889 World Exhibition in Paris is unmistakable.Footnote ⁵⁰ In Jordan as in 19th-century Paris, heritage was defined by large architectural structures as much as in miniaturized, reductive items for sale. The vision of Jordan promoted in this model of heritage was one primarily defined by international administrators and the cosmopolitan elite for a savvy market of affluent niche tourists looking for an unconventional experience in the Hashemite Kingdom.Footnote ⁵¹ The RSCN's reimagining of Dana as an orientalist village expressed the imperial logics of the Parisian display, but it was King ʿAbd Allah who authorized this act of international aid on Jordanian soil, indicating the internalization of international priorities within the architecture of the Jordanian state.

As far as the RSCN was concerned, tourism was a win-win: the conservation of environment was a development project that would benefit local communities with the creation of jobs that would grow the private sector and enable the RSCN to raise the $4.5 million per year that it needed to meet the cost of its annual budget by generating funds from tourism and its subsidiary sales of affiliated crafts.Footnote ⁵² Dana was the RSCN's ace in the hole. It was their most internationally known, globally lauded, and financially lucrative site. It was also the place where the organization pioneered the concept of using tourism for environmental conservation, according to Edward Taylor, USAID Liaison at the RSCN, who originally conceived the nature-based development model. Taylor told me that Dana village was crumbling to ruin, that it was dying on its feet. He worried that the village was subject to local renovation in a way that destroyed its tourism potential. Taylor believed the heritage model to be implemented at Dana had the potential to produce much higher revenue for tourism. With the RSCN's efforts, he was convinced that the new Dana would become a southern tourist center.

With no hydraulic infrastructure and no system of waste management, Dana presented a substantial construction challenge for the RSCN. Before they could restore the village's houses, the RSCN had to commission engineers to design, dig, and install water and sewage services. In so doing, the environmental organization used foreign aid funds to create what is typically municipal infrastructure, thereby overstepping its mandate.Footnote ⁵³ Dana village, Taylor acknowledged, was the organization's most ambitious project to date: “[We] never ever change the design scheme of a community . . . Dana will change the design of the community.” As Taylor notes, the RSCN's plans to make Dana a heritage village involved a complete redesign of its infrastructure and economy.

One of the most contested and controversial aspects of the RSCN's work was the settlement objective inherent to the design that transitioned pastoralists to other forms of economic opportunity. The RSCN saw Dana's 9,000 goats as a grave environmental threat because their grazing practices degraded the landscape. As at other conservation sites, the RSCN gradually worked to settle nomadic pastoralists in villages through biodiversity conservation. Taylor told me: “Our main tool is to develop alternative livelihoods. Feynan is an example: settlement from grazing. It will take a long time but it's happening.” Villagers in several RSCN sites earmarked for conservation have routinely challenged the environmental organization's right to land. The Director of USAID in Jordan, Kristen Jones, identified land rights as among the RSCN's greatest challenges. Indeed, in 2012 various communities identified as potential conservation sites protested the RSCN's biodiversity efforts on their lands.

Beyond the contested settlement objective, RSCN plans for Dana would also change its economic structure. While most families had moved to Qadisiyya, a few still lived at Dana and were not necessarily included in the conservation plan. There were fifty-five cottages at Dana, and the RSCN planned to renovate them in stages, including about twenty-five in the first restoration effort. Owners of Dana cottages included in the RSCN's plan could buy into the program at 5 percent of the total renovation cost, estimated at about 10,000 JD ($14,122). Dana homeowners would retain their ownership rights to the property and keep all profits generated from tourism. In an act of social engineering, the RSCN was effectively creating new economic inequalities in Qadisiyya: Dana homeowners turned business patrons of international tourism were projected to earn profits beyond typical village salaries. Even as the RSCN attempted to remake Dana, homeowners and community associations routinely protested their efforts, objecting that they had not been meaningfully consulted at management levels in the RSCN's plans despite the NGO's policy of integrated community management.

DANA INTERIORS

The realism of Dana's architectural preservation could only be partial. The dark, often-windowless one-room cottages needed rehabilitation to capture enough of the old-world charm while still catering to the needs of luxury adventure travelers. To attract eco-minded tourists, architect Munif and the RSCN liaison to USAID Taylor knew the details of heritage marketing had to be precise yet “modern.” No level of detail was overlooked. Taylor's minute aesthetic discriminations over color exemplify his rigor in cultivating an environmental aesthetic. In keeping with their efforts to restore the buildings to a prior form, Taylor had originally wanted to limewash interiors of the houses, as Dana residents once did, likely as a way of protecting against insects. After testing the wash in one of the houses, Taylor realized that the stark white would be too jarring for relaxation. The shiny finish sealing the limestone was equally unappealing. Taylor directed construction teams to abandon limewashing in favor of painting the chambers a regular light brown matte complementing the sandy color of exterior stone. In Dana's workshop where female RSCN employees were experimenting with candles, color was also an issue. As Taylor toured the facility with USAID Jordan's new director, Kristen Jones, he revealed a table of soft pink, fire engine red, vibrant blue, lime green, and robust orange square pillars and molded wax cast into blossoming roses. Jones exclaimed that the candles were “not ecocolors.” Yes, Taylor replied, they had a few details to work out.

Munif's designs were meant to bring Dana's “natural environment” into interiors as much as possible. He incorporated trees into buildings, built with locally quarried stone, and directed light in quantity through undressed windows. To prepare the dark, mostly windowless chambers of houses for a tourist market that favored illuminated interiors and housing with a view, Munif devised a “courtyard.” In this way Munif said he would “corrupt” rooms that were originally designed not as primary living chambers but as dark storehouses for perishable goods or shelter from punishing weather. The “courtyard” was a meter and a half square, roof-to-floor glass shaft that pierced the living quarters. The courtyard would allow light, wind, and even rain and snow to penetrate the interior of each remodeled Dana house. With the courtyard, Munif created an experience whereby the visitor to Dana would feel as if she “were part of the atmosphere.” Each of Munif's design elements were intended to create the feel of being close to nature by removing boundaries between human tourists and the “natural” world. The dismantling of barriers was a carefully planned architectural act, which was ironic since the buildings had been originally designed to keep nature at bay.

Inside, Munif furnished sparely. His beds were simple, purposefully unremarkable iron units built to disappear into the room. His spare interiors were a direct contrast with Qadisiyya's rich, embellished chambers where the thickness of farshas and the plush, embroidered fabrics were a way families demonstrated their status by valuing and honoring the guest. Whereas draped Qadisiyya interiors were designed for maximal comfort, Munif's Dana guesthouses were ascetic vestibules designed to highlight the textures of stone and the view outside. Munif said, “It's a word I hate, ‘decoration.’ I mean I think decoration is finished in the Wadi Dana. That's the decoration.” He added that for him good design was “in the fields in the Wadi Dana: the passing clouds, the shadow on the rock cliff, the branches of the trees of the canyon below them. That's the decoration to me. Or the alleys and gaps between the houses, that's the decoration.” In general, Munif told me, “Jordanians don't have good taste,” they decorated tourist accommodations as if recreating a scene from Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves. For him tourist kitsch ruined the beauty of places like Dana.

Instead, Munif's vision for Dana emphasized transparency and light, creating a permeable membrane between humans and their environment. Unlike the homes at Qadisiyya which were meant to enclose the family—protecting the modesty of women with curtains and preserving familial health with a shelter from harsh environs—the interiors of Dana brought the guest into direct contact with the raw materials of exterior walls, floors, and courtyards, design features that served as conduits guiding the visitor back to “nature.” It was almost a complete reversal: Qadisiyya families had become “city folk” to members of older generations such as Layla al-Akh Sabah who spent most of her childhood, adolescence, and early married life at Dana. Like others of her generation, Layla recalled life at Dana as one lived primarily outside. In the early 21st century, as Qadisiyya families expressed class desires in home interiors cultivated with manufactured items like glass chandeliers, which had been purchased with contracted labor in roughhewn economies, Dana environmentalists built structures that evoked a feeling of a life lived outside by concealing the labors of design and management that governed this new environmental communion.

One of the RSCN's major goals was to create an “authentic” experience at Dana. Every feature of Munif's restored house was planned to expose guests to the discovery of Dana's natural world; it was a world Munif so artfully crafted that any evidence of architectural planning was concealed by its very design. Key to Munif's architectural style was the act of making design seem effortless, as if an element arising naturally from the environment of the site itself.

DANA EXTERIORS

In contrast to Qadisiyya's construction of the longue durée, environmentalist restoration of Dana intended to renovate an entire village at once using methods and materials meant to be authentic. The restoration emphasized the simplicity of stone houses, rebuilding the fallen stone walls and caved roofs of houses such that their 21st-century adaptations would capture the feeling of what foreign visitors imagined it might have been like to live in this village one hundred years ago.Footnote ⁵⁴ Munif believed that buildings should be “a little bit shy.” The house, he believed, should be humble, designed in deference to the awesome beauty of the natural surroundings.

For Munif, Dana was like a found object. The real architect of the house, Munif relayed, was “Abu Muhammad who lived one hundred years ago.” He told me that he didn't want to be an architect in the case of Dana, but rather a problem solver: “I can add my methodology, but I have no style.” Munif saw himself as more of a “midwife” whose job was to listen to the site and develop a plan that would address both its ecological properties, such as the sunset and the wind, and its social dimensions, such as Jordan, unemployment, and values of space. These two layers of the site, Munif told me, should govern its architectural composition. His design ethos further erased the expertise that went into building the site: the extensive engineering studies of existing structures; the computer modeling that addressed each house as part of a holistic village ecosystem; the mathematical calculations required to erect a stable wall; and the historical knowledge Munif's team used to adapt principles of stone masonry.

When Taylor and Munif openly worried that local design would destroy the site's tourism potential, they were talking about the Tower Hotel, whose design they likened to the orientalist aesthetics of Arabian Nights. The Tower Hotel was not in the RSCN plan for the village and it was prominently located. The hotel perched at cliffs’ edge, at the base of the village's spine, and the valley sprawled for miles below it. In an act widely perceived as defiance, the hotel owner, Muhammad Qasir, circumvented building restrictions and added a second floor to his property, punctuating the vista with its rise. Qasir enticed tourists with a string of decorative lights that fed around the perimeter and crawled up its side, twisting into an electrified dilla (ceremonial coffee pot) that was a common Jordanian icon of hospitality.Footnote ⁵⁵

Whereas Qasir cultivated an aesthetic drawn from popular iconography of the Orient, Munif's major architectural efforts planned a site to highlight and augment “found” features of the environment. It was a power conflict waged in aesthetics. In spring 2012, the RSCN continued to pursue negotiations with Qasir. If Muhammad Qasir agreed to sign onto Dana's master ecotourist plan, he would be required to remove the second floor.

For Munif and the RSCN, the environment formed the basis of a new Jordanian aesthetic that showcased the country's natural beauty and recuperated architectural ruins to promote tourism as a conservation incentive. The aesthetic was a new kind of Orientalism whereby the principles of environment reimagined a village as a naturalized Ottoman heritage that had not been. This new aesthetic derived from the spare simplicity of Munif's designs that rejected embellishment, but masterfully conducted light in and through the village, directed the individual gaze, and studiously employed knowledge of stone and local geology to craft single-room cottages that looked much like they had risen, effortlessly, from the bedrock of the earth.

Since the RSCN identified conservation as a community-development project, NGO employees organized home construction as a local training opportunity whereby local residents would gain new job skills through their contractual labor at the biosphere. Every morning, a Qadisiyya minibus owner would collect this team of male recruits and drive them over to Dana. Every evening, he would drive them home. The RSCN hired expert construction teams to train their local employees to build with stone. The training imperative meant that progress on the village restoration was slow, frustrating Dana homeowners involved in the village revival plan. During his spring 2012 visit to Dana, the US ambassador explained the decision:

In June 2011, Tafileh residents stoned King ʿAbd Allah's motorcade during his visit to the city. In the year since, members of the Tafileh community mobilized the longest, most vocal protest against the monarchy, calling for an end to monarchal rule. Job creation was the monarchy's prime strategy to quell the protests and reestablish allegiance in the rural south.

It was unclear how the skills local construction employees gained at Dana would become resources of employment locally. The expertise that previous generations had used to build these Ottoman-era cottages at Dana had been lost as cement replaced stone in Qadisiyya. For one thing, stone was expensive. Only one of the new houses in Qadisiyya used the material, the house cost 40,000 JD ($56,500), and, despite their relative affluence, the homeowners couldn't afford to complete it. For another, stone masonry had limited applicability. Jordanian limestone was favored in Munif's celebrated architecture, but could be afforded only by international development agencies or by Amman's elite. Considering the limited applicability of the skill, the training offered by the RSCN uniquely served the interests of the NGO and development capitalists.

As one might expect, the RSCN's efforts at Dana created tensions in the community. Villagers protested their lack of input in the design of the site, their limited control over their labor power, and the RSCN's policies by routinely sabotaging village construction. Dana residents spilled out the contractor's sand and opened water taps to destroy a freshly laid foundation. During one of my visits to Dana, a homeowner, Karim Qasid, arrived unexpectedly to talk to the RSCN site manager, Sharif ʿAwad. He was concerned about the boundary of his property, which, like other properties, could not be clearly defined due to a shared wall. ʿAwad tried to reassure him that the complication would not pose revenue problems for his anticipated business at the site. Qasid repeated quietly again and again, “I don't know how.” ʿAwad offered to bring in a surveyor from Amman, but Qasid declined and left, reluctantly, without resolution. ʿAwad told me that his job required constant attention to problems for which there were no easy solutions. As he saw it, his challenge was converting a village, whose houses were built with a schema that defied separating family units into discrete properties, into an organized system of individuated businesses. Awad was charged with fitting a village built to emphasize familial collaboration into an international development blueprint for a heritage economy.