At home in Amman? Scales of diasporic belonging amongst Palestinian-Jordanian Christians
Creators: name: Evans, Annabel C.
Publisher: name: Loughborough University
Year: 2022
Subjects: subject: 49999 Earth Sciences not elsewhere classified
subject: FOS: Earth and related environmental sciences

description: This thesis proposes an integrated theorisation of diaspora, religion and home through a focused ethnography of Palestinian-Jordanian Christians. It makes a novel contribution to the geographies of diaspora by theorising a triadic framework which grounds diaspora through religion in an everyday, multi-scalar approach to home. Doing so brings to the foreground the ways in which religion functions as productive analytical category for the geographic exploration of diasporic home. Through the symbiotic management of space and time within diaspora and religion this thesis analyses how the self and its sense of belonging is both inherently, and at times paradoxically, transcendent and grounded. This is done through an engagement with four scales of place - the nation, the city, the self and the global - through which this thesis presents the key findings of the Palestinian-Jordanian Christian experience in Amman and their diasporic connections to Palestine. Firstly, this thesis posits the inherent contradictions of the nation in producing, containing and obstructing home in diasporic religious communities. This thesis presents the ways in which Palestinian-Jordanian Christians adopt and reject, reflect and adapt the territorial nation through alternative, material and mobile notions of place. Secondly this thesis moves to recognise the role of localised space in the production, narration and orientation of home for Palestinian-Jordanian Christians living in Amman as a city with its own localised connections to and echoes of Palestine. This is followed by engaging with notions of embodiment, considering how the self experiences and produces certain spaces, times and journeys as places of diasporic, religious importance, central to the maintenance of home. Finally, the global networks of mobility utilised by Palestinian-Jordanian Christians are analysed, highlighting the positioning of home within broader spatial and temporal opportunities and constraints beyond the nation. Interwoven through this analysis is an awareness of how temporality is enfolded and deployed in diasporic, religious contexts to produce and protect home. The original contributions for the field are therefore threefold. Firstly, they are conceptual by arguing for an incorporative dealing of religion with regards to diaspora and home. This advances key work recognising religion as a decisive element of the diasporic experience which both transcends and grounds the self in space and time which is constitutive to the creation and maintenance of home. Exploring the shared ontologies of religion and diaspora brings into sharper clarity the dynamic, complex and sometimes even contradictory relationships to and between space and time at work in the everyday, lifelong endeavour of being and feeling at home. The second key contribution is analytical by exploring religion and diaspora across and through multiple scales of home. In doing so, home is simultaneously stretched across and contracted within numerous registers of place to explore its expansive and concentrated use of space and time. Religion is presented here as particularly useful in exploring these complexities by recognising the role of the impalpable and ineffable on tangible experiences of belonging, intentionally obscuring distinctions between the physical and the affective, the corporeal and emotive. Finally, this thesis offers methodological contributions by utilising an innovative and underused methodological approach in geographical research. The use of a focused ethnography demonstrates the merits and further possibilities of the well-used ethnographic tradition with concentrated modifications, acknowledging and operationalising the narrower parameters ethnographic research must often take place within. This continues to ensure methodologically robust, innovative and insightful ethnographic research whilst contending with contemporary conditions and requirements.