The Tribes of the Hills of North-Eastern Jordan: Some Ethnographic Remarks

The present paper summarises the ethnographic data of the fieldwork campaigns I conducted between June 2020 and May 2022 in different areas of North-Eastern Jordan, in the governorate of al-Mafraq. The fieldwork was done in numerous villages along the Syro-Jordanian border, where members of different Bedouin communities were interviewed and recorded according to qualitative methodology, while recounting their life, their diet, their habits, their occupations, their traditions, and their beliefs. The ethnographic description is based on memorial narratives and life-stories and is accompanied by the original terms in the local variety of Bedouin Arabic. The article will constitute an updated study on these tribes, for which an ethnographic description is currently lacking. Moreover, this article will also describe what has changed after the settling of the nomadic tribes in the area, who have abandoned their old lifestyles and progressively adopted new ones, without rejecting their traditions, and being proud of their Bedouin origins.