One leitmotif of my long-term ethnographic fieldwork in Jordan has been the importance of marriage in mediating the integration of millions of refugees into the young nation’s social fabric. My ethnography Affection and Mercy tells this story through the lens of a mixed Palestinian and Jordanian village where I have conducted over 20 months of ethnographic fieldwork. Even before independence, the country’s state Sharia Courts were being fashioned into sprawling “Infrastructures of Legitimacy” that both included and excluded particular categories of migrants from the polity. For instance, Jordanian women remain unable to pass on their citizenship to their children to this day, which renders the children of stateless men likewise stateless.  

At the same time, Islam has served to moderate many of the exclusionary dimensions of modern personal status codes by emphasising the shared confessional identities of native and newcomer. Islam has also served as a migrating discourse in its own right, bringing with it new ideas about the importance of companionate marriage, the need to protect vulnerable groups like women and children and the advantages of “disciplining Muslim men”.  

Housing policy represents another intersection of marriage and migration. Here, the quintessentially ‘housed’ relationship of marriage has been swept up in wider struggles over the very nature of citizenship and property, with local tribes entering into alliances with refugees to contest state claims to the ownership of land. Using metaphors of marriage and hospitality to understand their relationship, native and newcomer unite at times in a shared project valorising the “proliferation of men” over the mere ‘proliferation of wealth’.  

Taken together, this research helps to show how histories of migration, marriage and gender are deeply entangled and mutually reinforcing.