Dancing belonging: contesting Dabkeh in the Jordan Valley, Jordan

Ritual performances of dance (dabkeh) and music by Palestinian refugees on the East Bank of the Jordan Valley (Jordan) involve negotiation of public sphere and a rare occasion of exhibition of criteria of belonging on a tense borderland. These musical events have become crucial sites of encounter of the heterogeneous communities living in this liminal region. Besides, they constitute a place of reproduction, and at the same time contestation, of ideas of belonging, of solidarity as much as of difference and exclusion, in a context of political censure and a general lack of public places. The agency of the body and embodied identities in music and dance have become highly political in displacement. Through the analysis of some cases, I will show the public markers of status, the display of gender identity and the criteria of belonging and difference, which are otherwise censured or implicitly silenced. In synthesis, the paper explores a way of making home and place through dances and music 'out of place'. © 2006 Taylor & Francis.