Du fellah au cultivateur. Lectures symbolique dans les campagnes de la Vallée du Jourdain

Facing the overwhelming literature on the Jordan Valley in the last half century, one encounters reports, statistics and indicators on agricultural productivity of “farmers” of the Jordan Valley: a self-evident label linked to a supposed rooted community in this region. Since the beginning of the modernization process on the east bank of the valley, the label and identity marker of “Jordanian farmer” has become the site of the encounter of different cultural definitions, the site of contestation between endogenous and exogenous representations of the self in the Jordan Valley. Here, terms of belonging refer inevitably to a symbolic struggle, where “global” labels, as the one of farmer, supported by international and national agencies in the last half century have the power to define “others” and have legitimised the planned intervention and the radical transformation in this region. In this agrobusiness context, there has been an over-production of data, surveys, and reports which are part of the of the routinization of development and of agricultural bureaucracies. A construction of a huge knowledge in time, linked to ideas of local agricultural communities and to a project of society that has imposed in this area: this production of knowledge is intimately linked to a process of “construction of ignorance”, an effective gap between planners’ representations and local reality and dynamics.