Displacement, Historical Memory, and
Identity: The Circassians in Jordan
Seteney Shami
Yarmouk University
In recent years, anthropologists have become increasingly interested in 3 understanding the impact of individual and group mobility upon identity (Gupta and Ferguson, 1992; Malkki, 1992). The scale of mobility in the contemporary world may be a characteristic of modernity, but group displacement is a longstanding historical phenomenon. This paper explores the implications of displacement for identity formation as a historical process. The case of the Circassians displaced from the Caucasus during the late nineteenth century, and resettled in various parts of the Ottoman Empire, illustrates how core cultural
self-images that are central to the perpetuation of group identity are historically formed and informed by the process of displacement. The focus is on the Circassians in Jordan as one example of the shaping of Circassian identity in the diaspora outside the Caucasus, and of how this identity is partly perpetuated through changing interpretations of the past.
Currently the Circassians in Jordan form a largely middle-class urban community of about 25,000′ holding positions mainly in the government bureaucracy and military and endowed with substantial representation in parliamentary and executive branches of government. In addition to the specific local context of the settlement experience, the turbulent geopolitical changes of the early part of the century and the decades following establishment of the Jordanian state in 1921 (first as an Emirate under the British Mandate and later as the independent Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan), have seen complex political, economic, and social transformations that wrought corresponding changes in the Circassian community (see Shami, 1982). However, the historical memory of displacement and resettlement continues to provide central symbols of Circassian identity and informs their contemporary relations with the Jordanian state and society.
Displacement in and Prom the Caucasus
The Circassians are one of the indigenous peoples of the northwest Caucasus.
The Caucasus was inhabited from Paleolithic times and subjected to many
migrations and invasions. Therefore Caucasian ethnic groupings were continually formed and reformed through complex processes of fission and fusion
(Luzbetak, 1951). The mountainous nature of the terrain also perpetuated the
1National censuses in Jordan do not distinguish individuals by ethnic origin and therefore this figure is simply an educated guess, partially based upon a survey conducted in 1980 on a sample households. The bulk of my fieldwork on the Circassians in Jordan was conducted in 1979-1981 and funded by grants from the National Science Foundation and the WennerGren Foundation for Anthropological Research. The dissertation writing eriod was funded by pwo grants from the MEAwards Program administered by the Population &uncil Regional Ofice in Cairo. I have also constantly updated my initial fieldwork.
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https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1111/j.2050-411X.1994.tb00807.x
