This book explores the transition from oral to written history now taking place in tribal Jordan, a transition that reveals the many ways in which modernity, literate historicity, and national identity are developing in the contemporary Middle East. As traditional Bedouin storytellers and literate historians lead him through a world of hidden documents, contested photographs, and meticulously reconstructed pedigrees, Andrew Shryock describes how he becomes enmeshed in historical debates, ranging from the local to the national level.

The world the Bedouin inhabit is rich in oral tradition and historical argument, in subtle reflections on the nature of truth and its relationship to poetics, textuality, and power. Skillfully blending anthropology and history, Shryock discusses the substance of tribal history through the eyes of its creators—those who sustain an older tradition of authoritative oral history and those who have experimented with the first written accounts. His focus throughout is on the development of a "genealogical nationalism" as well as on the tensions that arise between tribe and state.

Rich in both personal revelation and cultural implications, this book poses a provocative challenge to traditional assumptions about the way history is written.

Andrew Shryock is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at the State University of New York, Buffalo.

“In this new ethnography of a ‘national’ or ‘political’ culture, [the author] examines the efforts to write down and publish oral histories currently being made by members of ‘tribal’ societies in the Jordan Valley. . . . In describing these encounters, Shryock illuminates complex tensions between dominant and subaltern voices and between oral and written discourses. He places the recitation of oral history in social context and shows how some narrators succeed in imposing their own variants of history while others fail. . . . Honest and innovative.”—MESA Bulletin

“A sophisticated, fascinating, and beautifully written essay on the meanings and effects of recording history. [This book] moves from an analysis of how orally transmitted narratives of tribal history produce group identities to an investigation of how the urgency of participation in contemporary Jordanian politics has led to attempts to write and publish these histories—and how the act of writing makes a material difference in the history that results.”—Digest of Middle East Studies

“Shryock’s study of politics and the past in Jordan successfully combines two kinds of investigation: one into ways of thinking, speaking, and writing about history among various people in today’s Jordan, and another into the ways ethnographers ask and learn about these historical discourses. . . . This book will be of great interest for its information about the changing cultural forms that the telling of history takes, the political implications of such forms, and the dynamic character they exhibit.”—Anthropological Linguistics

"Shryock's argument is as important for the understanding of historiography and national identity in the contemporary Middle East as was Benedict Anderson's discussion of 'print capitalism' for the emergence of national identities in early modern Europe."—Dale Eickelman, author of Knowledge and Power in Morocco

Co-winner, 1997 Albert Hourani Award, The Middle Eastern Studies Association