Hyper-familiarity in profound uncertainty: how Syrian youth in Jordan work towards non-existent futures

ABSTRACT

Through an ethnographic and interview-based account of the visions Syrian youth in Amman, Jordan, hold of and for the future, this article explores the coexistence of the perception that ‘there is no future’ and myriad ways through which young Syrians work towards better futures. We argue that such work is undertaken in the indicative mood, marking out a place for Syrians in Jordan in the present rather than a way forward. We further show that indicative action in the context of a neighbouring host country in which Syrian youth live as ‘guests’ and predominantly with their families produces hyper-familiarity as a response to profound uncertainty.

KEYWORDS:

• Future; hyper-familiarity; indicative action; Jordan; refugees; Syria

Introduction

In 2022, Jordan hosted an estimated 1.3 million Syrian refugees (Karasapan 2022). Although they have the status of guests and thus a permission to stay that has no specific expiration date but is also not permanent, Syrians are left with little choice other than to (attempt to) survive in the present and forge some kind of existence in Jordan in the future. Even as the war in Syria has largely ended, return remains improbable within the foreseeable time and relocation to a third country is illusive to most refugees. Faced with such permanent temporariness (Turner 2015), young Syrians in Jordan are quick to point out that ‘there is no future in Jordan’. As every day is the same, nothing happens to make you capable of imagining that tomorrow might be different. Simultaneously, these same youths explain that they work diligently to forge a [better] future for themselves in Jordan. Moreover, such seemingly incompatible perspectives are sometimes uttered within the span of fifteen minutes. As such, Syrian youth not only alternate between inconsistent approaches to their own circumstances, they articulate them at once and navigate a terrain defined by them both.

In this article, we take as our starting point these kinds of practical engagements with a situation that, in the words of Syrian youth, is impossible. In line with the overall theme of the special issue, we examine how young Syrians in Jordan imagine their futures, how they work to reach them and how they come to perceive their futures in specific ways. As such, we outline one way in which displaced Syrians engage with the open endings they currently face (see Bandak this issue). Specifically, we ask how we might understand the kind of action these youths undertake as they attempt to forge nonexistent futures.

In her work on Uganda, Susan Whyte (2005) points out that the contraction of severe disease is managed not through attempts to gain certainty about one’s condition and prospects but rather through attempts to hold open possibilities through uncertainty. Conceptualizing such recourse to ‘ifs’ and ‘maybes’ as action in the ‘subjunctive mood’, Whyte shows that uncertainty allows for continued meaning-making action, which certainty is understood to close down. Thinking with Whyte, we argue that action undertaken in an effort to work towards a better future while the protagonist feels certain that such a future is impossible is precisely a way to manage the situation by creating meaning. However, while Whyte points to the meaning emerging from engagements with doubts and wishes, we show that our interlocutors also undertake action that counters the certainty of an impossible future with the certainty of inhabiting a specific kind of social role. We propose to think of such action as undertaken in the indicative mood (that is, as a statement of fact) and we argue that by acting out a well-defined social role our interlocutors keep at bay the ‘social death’ (Hage 2003, 78) connected to the lack of opportunity to forge a worthwhile life.

Showing how such action in the indicative mood simultaneously draws on established social definitions and forge particular kinds of social contexts for young Syrians in Jordan, the article proceeds as an investigation of the ways in which Syrian youth engage in indicative action in relation to their host society and their families. We argue that through recourse to tropes of familiarity, our interlocutors forge a place for themselves in Jordanian society that cements what is and foregoes the possibilities of what might be. The neighbouring state of Jordan plays a specific role in invoking this sense of familiarity. As a familiar cultural landscape and as a state that conceptualizes its welcome of Syrian refugees as hospitality to guests, Jordan lays the ground for a narrative that focuses more on social reciprocity than rights.

For Syrian refugees, this landscape emerges as a context of multiple and seemingly insurmountable obstacles as they face a severe loss of rights in a weak economy. The article argues that it is to navigate this landscape that our interlocutors take recourse to tropes of familiarity. We discuss how young Syrians in Jordan articulate the ‘ordinariness’ of their day-to-day lives, their place in the State of Jordan, and their relation to their parents with whom they have fled and for the most part still live. We show that invoking an idea of ‘ordinariness’ is one kind of indicative action that allows our interlocutors a place in Jordan by drawing on and producing notions of familiarity. As such, familiarity is engaged by our interlocutors in myriad ways that mutually intersect and reinforce one another. We argue that this multifaceted and multidirectional production of familiarity constitutes Jordan as a hyper-familiar context for Syrian youth and we employ the term hyper-familiarity as a way to simultaneously conceptualize this ‘familiarity in excess’ and capture the ways through which our interlocutors navigate a critical situation.

The article proceeds with a brief discussion of our methods of data collection followed by an historical account of Jordan as host country. We then examine how Syrian youth act in the indicative mood and produce what we call hyper-familiarity in concert with the Jordanian host society and their own families.

Methods

The present article draws on fieldwork and interview data collected for the project Viable Futures: near and long-term prospects among Syrian youth in Jordan. This research combines first- and secondhand fieldwork data with qualitative interviews conducted by Syrian and Jordanian youth who were first trained in qualitative research methods as part of the project.¹ While the interviews themselves provide valuable insights into the stories Syrian youth are able and willing to tell about their lives when asked in a somewhat official manner, our primary interlocutors in relation to interviews are not the interviewees but the interviewers. These research assistants, like the interviewees, were young (ranging in age from 16 to 25), from a variety of regional and socio-economic backgrounds, had obtained various levels of education and comprised both unmarried and married individuals (some also had children). The 27 women and 11 men thus faced the same obstacles as the youths they interviewed.

During several workshops, we deliberated with our research assistants on the stories they had heard and discussed how we might understand such stories. These conversations amounted to ongoing engagement with specific interlocutors that gave us contextualized knowledge on how Syrian youth interpret both their own situation in Jordan and the ways other Syrians relate to theirs. The interview-material is thus multi-layered and our interpretations of it is informed by our conversations with research assistants (see Hastrup et al. 2023; Holst et al. 2023).

Simultaneously, this article draws on secondhand fieldwork material² collected for the project by Danish MA students and interns. While the use of such data requires consideration of the particular positionality of the specific fieldworker, it allowed us to collect data from differently situated Syrians as our fieldworkers gained access to quite diverse groups of youths (see Berreman 2007). Moreover, through continuous discussion of the fieldwork with the fieldworkers themselves, our readings of the material are simultaneously informed by their insights on contexts and frames and go beyond their own analysis.³ Our own perspectives on the material are also guided by the field-visits we have been fortunate to undertake at various points during the process of data collection. Gaining access to such varied sources of information has proven particularly useful as we are able to let one kind of data inform our reading of other kinds of data.

For instance, the use of qualitative interviews can present challenges to interpretation as what people say and what people do is not always consistent (Berliner 2016). Thinking across various forms of data, we are able to discern that the central paradox of concern for us here – that our Syrian interlocutors simultaneously believe that there is no worthwhile future for them in Jordan and work vehemently towards forging such a future – exists in action as well as in speech. Besides concomitantly talking about the non-existent future and working towards forging a better future, interlocutors incorporate both perspectives in their actions. This can take the form of continuous alternation between attempts to find a way out of Jordan, resignation to accept a low-paid, insecure job and working towards finding new opportunities for employment and life conditions (see Lundgaard 2022; Soltani 2021). It can also take the form of working towards futures that are good ‘in theory’ but do not take practical circumstances into account, a point we will return to. As such, our access to various forms of material allows us to see how a central paradox in the lives of Syrian youth in Jordan is negotiated by them in various kinds of situations and through various forms of expression.

In extension of this point, it is important to underline that while various sections of the present analysis draw on distinct kinds of material (interviews, conversations with research assistants or fieldwork) our reading of any one kind of data is directly informed by what we see as an ongoing dialogue between the differing kinds of material we draw on for this article.

Jordan as recipient state

In Jordan, Syrian youth live in a place that is different from their country of origin yet resembles it in many ways. As a neighbouring country with close historical ties to Syria, the economic lives of the two countries have always been intertwined, especially in the north of Jordan, where seasonal pastoralists have crossed the border to seek work. In the same vein, tribal affiliations from before the construction of nation-states continue to tie Syrians and Jordanians together in myriad ways (Chatty 2017). Jordan, however, provides only limited access to rights and opportunities for their Syrian guests and of the estimated 1.3 million Syrians, who lived in Jordan in 2022, 80% lived below the poverty line, 60% lived in extreme poverty (Karasapan 2022). To understand how Syrian youth navigate through this landscape and envision their futures there, we begin by situating them within a more in-depth examination of Jordan as a host society. The aim is twofold. Firstly, we want to give a brief historically situated account of Jordan as a state that has survived not in spite of but because of the influx of refugees and humanitarian assistance. Secondly, we wish to analyse how Syrian refugee youth understand their position in and navigate through the landscape that Jordanian hospitality prepares for them.

The Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan is a construction by the Western colonial powers, a Kingdom carved out of the Ottoman Empire. This relation between the old colonial order and the lack of any post-colonial revolt or Arab socialist experiment has meant that the state of Jordan has always had an easy relationship with the West. Moreover, the Hashemite rulers of Jordan have skilfully managed and nurtured the close relation to Western powers, which has placed them in a position to forge various kinds of economically profitable deals. Moreover, the influx of first Palestinian refugees, later Iraqi refugees and most recently the hundreds of thousands of Syrians who have come into Jordan, has made Jordan a recipient state. The country has received vast amounts of humanitarian donations but also forged trade agreements that (at least in theory) should ease the access of Jordanian goods into European markets (Lenner and Turner 2019). As such, Jordanian authorities work actively to secure funds and opportunities that will sustain not only Syrians but also Jordanians and Jordanian society more broadly.

Jordan’s deftness in navigating the influx of refugees thus has historical roots in colonialism. Two years after Jordan’s independence from British colonial rule in 1946, the state of Israel was declared. The newly created state of Jordan saw the influx of a large number of Palestinian refugees. This event, together with the annexation of the West Bank in 1949 tripled the population of Jordan, leaving ‘native’ Transjordanians in the minority (Kelberer 2017). Today, a huge discrepancy exists between official and unofficial accounts of the percentages of Palestinians in Jordan, with official accounts putting the number at 43% and unofficial accounts putting it as high as 63%. Regardless of the actual figure, it is important to note that the state of Jordan has been accustomed to receiving refugees for almost as long as it has been a state, and has skilfully made use of indigenous concepts of hospitality in welcoming refugees from neighbouring Arab countries, making it culturally appropriate. Interestingly, although the state of Jordan stresses its hospitality towards the country’s neighbours, Jordan did not sign the refugee convention of 1951. Therefore, the home-grown welcome is practiced outside the framework of international responsibility. Palestinian refugees were given citizenship in 1954 by the state of Jordan, the only host state to do so, and King Hussein framed the naturalization policies as part of his duties under the culture of Islamic/Bedouin/Arab guesthood (Kelberer 2017, 150).

More recently Jordan received numerous Iraqi refugees as a result of the US led invasion of 2003, where the hospitality concept was to a certain extent replicated and the state of Jordan ‘continued to frame Iraqi residence in Jordan as temporary, within the contexts of both “guesthood” and islam’ (Kelberer 2017, 152). Victoria Kelberer notes that 60% of UNHCR’s Jordanian budget for 2007 was transferred directly to the Jordanian state in return for refugee protections and access to services. This marked the rise of Jordan’s use of refugee provisions as an ‘implement of rent-seeking’ (Kelberer 2017, 152). What Jordan has since become is in many ways a laboratory for a specific kind of development assistance that is intertwined with both state-controlled assistance and international NGOs providing aid in carefully planned schemes sanctioned at state level.

Katharina Lenner and Lewis Turner (2019) offer an important analysis of the ways in which the ‘Jordan Compact’,⁴ while fashioned to secure the simultaneous access to employment for Syrian refugees and access to European markets for Jordanian producers, in large part fails to achieve both these goals. Pointing to the relatively low number of work permits actually issued (around 60,000 out of a goal of 200,000 as per the start of 2022 (Chatty 2022)), Lenner and Turner argue that the plan has failed mainly because the specific professions targeted for refugee employment are difficult for Syrians to undertake. For instance, employment in the garment industry is singled out as a place for Syrian women to find work. However, factories are placed in zones far from urban areas and can only be reached with difficulty. There are no living accommodations for families and as most Syrian women are mothers (or youths where social norms prohibit their living outside the home) they can only take on such employment if they find someone to take care of their children. While Jordanian authorities are thus in one way skilled at navigating refugee situations to their advantage, efforts are only to a limited extent successful in forging viable conditions for Syrians (and Jordanians alike).

As a final element of Jordan’s response to Syrian refugees, we want to draw attention to the ways in which ‘hospitality’ both opens and closes specific avenues for inclusion in the host society (Al-Khalili 2023; Alkan 2021). In Jordan, Syrian guests are perceived as an economic and potentially political burden and there is a governmental insistence that they eventually should return home. This entails a denial of permanent residency but also a denial of the right to own property and a very limited access to the right to work (Post 2018). Syrians are thus in a position where access to proper wages is prohibitively difficult and they must continuously find money to pay rent. Many Syrians express worry regarding the issue of refoulement. They fear that working illegally might result in their arrest and subsequent forced return to Syria (Gordon 2017). Hospitality, however, also entails the acceptance of the presence of Syrians until such a time as they are able to return to Syria, just as Syrians can attend schools and universities and work legally in several fields.

Within this landscape of limited welcome, Syrian youths navigate in both expectable and surprising ways. In the following sections, we unfold first the readings of the landscape that our young Syrian interlocutors engage in and second the kinds of future orientations these readings are intertwined with.

‘Everything is ordinary, but … ’: Reading the Jordanian landscape

When asked the question ‘what is it like to be Syrian in Jordan?’ a large proportion of our interviewees responded simply with the word ‘aadi, meaning ‘ordinary’. The word could also be translated as ‘normal’ or ‘usual’. As with the English ‘normal’, ‘aadi covers a variety of meanings ranging from normative judgement to an indication of statistical probability (Hacking 1991). Although it carries several possible meanings, the word ‘aadi stakes out a clear ground for the continued conversation by indicating that nothing unfamiliar is taking place. Another often given first answer was tabi’iy meaning ‘natural’. Tabi’iy is a stronger word than ‘aadi and forcefully brings home the point that nothing that is not familiar and acceptable is unfolding. As these answers prompt the question what exactly is ‘ordinary’ in fleeing your country of origin and finding refuge in a neighbouring state, what is said next puts these initial affirmations that everything is as usual into a different light. Many interviewees go on from ‘aadi or tabi’iy to say such things as ‘everything is ordinary, but the only problem is being able to pay rent’. ‘Everything is ordinary, but I don’t have access to education’. ‘Ordinary’ is thus countered by a statement indicating some of the key challenges that Syrians face as they lack rights, means of income and freedom of movement in Jordan.

These answers are open to various interpretations. The regularity with which terms such as ‘aadi or tabi’iy were invoked indicate that they could be read as culturally specific ways to engage in difficult conversations. Before moving on to criticize your host, as a guest you might start by making sure that your listener does not take you to be a completely ungrateful visitor (Shryock 2012). This interpretation is both supported and slightly challenged when we situate it within the specific autocratic context of Jordan. In Jordan, political activity related to Syria has been strongly discouraged and, as guests, Syrians are expected to remain uncritical of the politics of their hosts (Soltani 2021). It is thus perfectly possible to understand these ‘aadi’s and tabi’iy’s simply as incantations warding off any ill-will that might be directed against the protagonist for criticizing the provisions of the Jordanian authorities.

It is equally possible to understand ‘aadi (but less so tabi’iy) followed by a statement of what is problematic in Jordan as a way of expressing lukewarm feelings about the situation as a whole. ‘aadi is sometimes used as a way to avoid saying ‘good’ (mnih). To say that everything is ordinary but you lack opportunities and income is thus to commit to neither a completely negative nor a completely positive evaluation of the situation.

Although we heed such interpretations, we want to suggest that these statements should be understood as ways in which our interviewees indicate that life in Jordan is indeed ordinary and natural in the sense that it is familiar. One is alive and relatively well all things considered. Routines have been established and the everyday proceeds in recognizable patterns. Most interviewees told us that they had, luckily, managed to make friends in Jordan. For the question: ‘Do you know mainly Syrians or also Jordanians? Are these people friends or just ‘connections’?’ the usual answer was: ‘I have many friends, both Jordanians and Syrians’, using terms like ‘neighbours’, ‘like us’, and ‘there is no difference between Syrians and Jordanians’, ‘they are friends and neighbours’, ‘I consider them my family’. Among our research assistants, we also experienced this sense of a bond with Jordanians. During a workshop, we asked whether our Syrian interviewers felt lonely in Jordan, ‘not at all’ was the unanimous answer. One young woman burst into tears as she told us how scared she felt now that she had to leave Jordan as she had obtained asylum elsewhere. This prompted another young woman to state that ‘Jordanians and Syrians are one big family’, at this most of the young people nodded in agreement.

In some ways, Jordan is thus like home. Not only because Jordan and Syria are culturally similar or because tribal ties connect people across borders, but also because everyday practices unfold in social interactions that cut across national categories. Alfred Schütz (1945) reminds us that to feel at home is to sense that one can read the mind of the other and to experience that one does not have to explain oneself. This kind of mutual recognition can only come from sharing everyday lives and routines in face-to-face interactions. Significantly, we see that our young Syrian interlocutors do not invoke historically based political categories of Arab brotherhood, rather they highlight the everyday practices of visiting neighbours, hanging out with friends and sharing particular routines as what makes them feel at home.

While life is thus in some ways ordinary and familiar there are also problems. Syrians lack the right to stay indefinitely, the right to own property, the right to work in any profession (to name just a few missing rights) and they experience what they refer to as racism from Jordanians in their daily lives. One young man, Tamam,⁵ explained the situation of Syrians in Jordan thus:

Now, the feeling is not good. This is because in Jordan there are some people who are racist and they like to distinguish that these are Syrians. I mean, sometimes when I find that people do not distinguish between Syrian and Jordanian, in that moment I feel I am in my country, but when there are people who are racist, the feeling is not good at all.

As this statement indicates, the reading of the landscape can vary over time and space as it depends on the specific situation one relates to (Bandak 2012). It simultaneously alerts us to the ways in which those problems mentioned in an extension of ‘aadi or tabi’iy are acutely relevant to the everyday existence of Syrian youth in Jordan. Their situation is exceedingly difficult in some ways. The question is how we should conceptualize the ways in which Syrian youth perceive this landscape as ‘ordinary, but … ’?

To get at such a conceptualization, we turn to Henrik Vigh’s (2008) discussion of the concept of chronic crisis. Vigh (2008) argues that while crisis usually designates a specifically critical point in time, a turning point that will then soon be replaced by an outcome, the reality that many people live in conditions they themselves understand as chronic crisis forces us to reconsider the concept of crisis. Chronic crisis in Vigh’s conceptualization is a context for action and meaning defined by fragmentation of the social, a separation of the whole into parts that destabilizes structures and relations. Moreover, as actions take on different meanings (also for the people acting) depending on context and as crisis is a terrain of continuously shifting context, living with crisis entails that people must continuously reassess their assessments of the social. This situation can render all social, political and personal norms and relationships unstable (Jackson 2008; Pedersen and Højer 2008) and necessitate navigational skills in order to stay continuously afloat (Vigh 2010).

Thinking with Vigh, we identify a similar chronicity in the situation of our interlocutors. However, for our Syrian interlocutors it is not society that is destabilized, merely their own position in it. While Jordanian society is socially and politically stable, the individual situation of Syrians is characterized exactly by crisis as most avenues for social and economic participation are closed for them thus destabilizing their place in the structure and their relations to others. Significantly, this crisis cannot be resolved by taking action, it is chronic as it is inscribed in laws and perceptions of others that show no signs of changing anytime soon. Vigh (2008) speaks of contexts of chronic crisis as situations in which people experience history as acting upon them rather than them shaping history. No action will remedy the situation. We see this among our interlocutors who believe that the power to change their condition of crisis lies beyond them, all they can do is act as best they can within the given circumstances.

We thus suggest that ‘ordinary, but … ’ indicates a reading of the economic, political and social landscapes of Jordan as exceedingly familiar while Syrians for their part are in a state of crisis within this recognizable structure. One could also say that our young Syrian interlocutors take recourse to the familiar as they navigate the crisis in which they find themselves. First, they talk about their lives in Jordan as familiar in the sense of being ordinary, recognizable and characterized by sociality among brothers, sisters, neighbours, that is family and its immediate local extensions. Second, they establish social relationships with Jordanians and other Syrians to feel at home in Jordan.

Here, we get an initial sense of the ways in which recourse to and production of familiarity among our young Syrian interlocutors takes on a quality of being hyper. Familiarity in several forms is invoked in speech and action and deployed in response to a sense of being placed in a critically unstable situation. Familiarity is thus produced in excess. Building on these initial insights, we argue that familiarity becomes hyper as it is launched to overcome a crisis that cannot be resolved through Syrians’ own actions and thus necessitates the continued production of more familiarity. This point, however, hinges on the ways in which familiarity is continuously produced not only in relation to Jordanian neighbours and friends but also in relation to the Jordanian state and people’s own families. Familiarity becomes hyper as it is produced through and permeates all significant areas of life. To unfold this argument, we turn first to the ways in which our interlocutors imagine their futures in the context of the Jordanian state.

Navigating the role of the guest: looking at the future from Jordan

When asked ‘What kind of future do you imagine for yourself?’ our Syrian interlocutors, with very few exceptions predominantly among women, answered that there is no future for Syrians in Jordan. This was true of interviewees as well as people with whom we engaged during fieldwork. The lack of future was linked with the perception that a lack of rights and opportunities prevented them from forging worthwhile existences. For instance, they could not hope to obtain better employment than the low-wage jobs that many held without a permit (therefore rendering them unprotected from employers who wanted to cheat them while also at risk of deportation if caught by authorities) and they could not hope to one day own a house.

Despite this near universal sense that Jordan holds no worthwhile future, our interlocutors proceeded to outline how they worked and planned towards better futures in a wide variety of ways. The youths mentioned everything from wanting to open a beauty parlour over getting a university education to returning to a peaceful Syria. Of particular interest to us is the way in which future plans are discussed without reference to the aforementioned practical obstacles to such futures that the Jordanian state lays out. The worthwhile future therefore exists strangely out of context, it is divorced from specific expectations to what life in Jordan might actually offer and emerges entirely as imagination (Bryant and Knight 2019). However, as Amira Mittermaier (2011) reminds us, dreaming, the imaginary, is (or at least can be) social and interpersonal. Thinking with Mittermaier, we suggest that seemingly decontextualized future imaginations are in fact clearly situated and forged in relation to specific social platforms. Beauty parlours and educations are profitable avenues in Syria (and in Jordan if you are Jordanian), they are familiar roads towards a successful future. Holding on to such dreams in the face of lack of rights to own property (or a business) and lack of rights to work in educated professions entails invoking the kinds of futures that people who are in their own country might aspire to. It thus places Syrian youth squarely within established social narratives of both Syrians and Jordanians.

In their efforts to forge futures, our interlocutors mention that they work hard to see opportunities and grab them when they can and that they generally attempt to heed the advice offered to them in order to learn from the experiences of others. In their specific work towards forging viable futures, Syrian youths are thus constantly confronting the obstacles that invariably hinder their roads towards their dreams. While dreams are expressed in curiously context-less ways navigating towards them is an ongoing encounter with the context of being Syrian in Jordan. In fact, a commonly expressed general sentiment was that ‘you have to keep fighting and persevere to overcome all obstacles and reach your goals’. Looked at from this perspective, dreams about the future emerge as indications of the kind of person one would be could one aspire in this way. Working towards a university education (even while being prohibited from working in professions related to it) indicates a particular position in a particular social order. Although it also entails a wish that ‘perhaps’, ‘maybe’ this could lead to something different, we want to highlight how this kind of labour is undertaken mainly in the indicative rather than the subjunctive mood (Whyte 2005). This is so because rather than situating these dreams clearly in the context of the obstacles that must be overcome to ‘perhaps, maybe, hopefully’ reach something better, our interlocutors divorce their goals from obstacles thus indicating themselves as persons whose place in society is stable and recognized.

Such indicative dreams, and actions towards making them come true, hark back to the position of guests that Syrians have been afforded by the Jordanian state in interesting ways. The host–guest relationship is a significant one in both Syria and Jordan. Andrew Shryock (2012) points out that while guests are necessarily subject to the rules and regulations of their hosts, honourable men are made and broken on the reputations as hosts that people can only acquire through the sympathetic reviews given by their guests. As such, guests are significant contributors to Arab houses among the Bedouin tribes of Jordan. One could argue that our young Syrian interlocutors invoke such an understanding of the host–guest relationship as they speak and act in ways that indicate that they are persons who can contribute significantly to Jordanian society.

However, while such a view challenges a notion of a pre-given structure of power in the host–guest relationship, the question is whether it is possible to extend this model of hospitality to state-refugee relations.

In her work on Syrian refugees in Turkey, Charlotte Al-Khalili (2023) argues that hospitality as a host–guest relationship cannot work when interacting with the state. She shows that her Syrian interlocutors reject acts of generosity on the part of the Turkish state as they cannot reciprocate these and therefore would be left in a role of undignified recipients rather than equal partners in a game of reciprocity should they accept these gifts. Among our interlocutors in Jordan, we did not register an outright rejection of state hospitality but an almost complete lack of reference to it. The hospitality discourse of the Jordanian state is neither challenged nor confirmed by Syrian youth. Instead, our interlocutors highlight reciprocities at the scale of daily life. They refer to neighbourly exchanges indicating a mutuality of relationships in which roles of host and guest might be fixed in terms of national belonging but can interchange at the level of everyday sociality. Syrians might also host their Jordanian neighbours in specific interactions (see Alkan 2021). At the level of everyday life, the host–guest relationship is thus reaffirmed but as a matter of interchanging roles. At the level of positions in society, Syrian youth appear to perceive their role as that of the guest with no rights and the guest with power to contribute significantly to the household interchangeably.

In this way, indicative action entails recourse to familiar social strategies that reinforce rather than challenge the narrative of hospitality that the Jordanian state perpetuates. The familiar, in the shape of well-known host–guest relationships, is launched by both the Jordanian state and Syrian youth and these practices mutually reinforce each other. Hospitality as narrative and practice is thus present everywhere and never challenged although as a system of welcome it heavily restricts the options for Syrians. In this way, hospitality itself becomes hyper. As a social form that is both culturally familiar and plays on the familiarity of engaged parties it reinforces the sense that the familiarity that Syrian youth read into the Jordanian landscape is continuously multiplied as it seeps into and emanates from their practices and narratives regarding all aspects of their interactions with their Jordanian hosts.

This production of the familiar in excess happens also in Syrian families. As such, our notion that Syrian youth navigate Jordan through hyper-familiarity grows out of an identification of the production of familiarity through all significant aspects of life that then mutually reinforce one another. We turn to the family context next.

Choosing the clear social ground of family

Of the 140 young Syrians interviewed in Amman, 93 percent were in Jordan with their families. More than a mere practical circumstance our interviewees expressed a sense of being closely connected (Joseph 1993) with their relatives: ‘My family supports and loves me’, ‘I have settled close to my family to be able to support them’ were common statements. Syrian youth in Amman speak in fond and loyal terms about their families and go to great lengths to uphold family bonds.

In discussion of the question of family solidarity our research assistants pointed out that there appeared to be a discrepancy between these avowals of mutual love and support and the great demands and restrictions parents were placing on the young people interviewed. Leila, one of our young female research assistants, explained with an agitated voice and facial expressions interchangeably signalling disbelief, anger and exasperation that one of the young men she interviewed had been entirely under the control of his father. ‘His father takes all the money he earns so he cannot save. He wants to go to university but his father decided that he must work to support the family’. While Leila was indignant that the father would so blatantly disregard what, in her opinion, was the best interests of his son, she was also frustrated with the son for not standing up to his father. As this example illustrates, the sentiment among our research assistants was that parents were not putting their children first but rather sacrificing the future opportunities of youth for the sake of immediate survival for the family.

The frustration our research assistants expressed with what they perceived to be a general trend of bad judgement and lack of concern for youth among the parental generation reveals layers of discontent emerging in relations between family generations. Significantly, our research assistants and most interviewed Syrians only had positive things to say about their own families thus placing the problem with other people. Dissatisfaction with one’s own parents is, we find, often only expressed in indirect and subtle ways, which indicates that most Syrian youth prefer to uphold the power hierarchies inherent in Syrian family life (Gallagher 2012). Investigating discontent is, however, revealing of the extent to which Syrian youth choose indicative over subjunctive action and what such choices produce. As one example of a general trend among our interlocutors, we unfold the story of Omar to discuss how veiled expressions of dissatisfaction with parental decisions point to the ways in which Syrian youth inhabit family life as simultaneously a possibility for care and a site of imposed limitations.

Omar⁶ wanted to go to Istanbul where he thought his chances of pursuing an education and gaining the right to work were much better. He stayed in Amman, however, as this was what his mother wanted. On one occasion, as Omar came home from a 14-hour shift in the bakery where he worked, he encountered his mother who was having coffee with a friend and our fieldworker on the balcony. Omar sat down and told the small group of women that his work was extremely demanding and boring and that he was always tired when he returned. He also lamented the lack of prospects as he was working illegally and saw no way to improve his situation (Lundgaard 2022).

Significant about this encounter is that while Omar expressed his dissatisfaction with his conditions of work to his mother and while these complaints might be part of attempts on his part to persuade her to let him go to Turkey on his own, he stopped short of criticizing her decision to keep him in Jordan or defying her and leaving without her permission. In this sense, both Omar’s mother and Omar uphold established norms of family solidarity and unity in which Omar as the son, the younger generation, shows love and respect by following the dictums of his mother (Joseph 1993; 1994). Omar’s mother’s decision could be read as an attempt to survive at all costs in a very difficult situation, sacrifizing Omar for the benefit of the family as a whole. However, Omar could also work and make money in Turkey and we therefore argue that Omar’s mother’s decision should also be viewed as an expression of a particular kind of family ethos, one that privileges the morality of acting as a ‘responsible’ family member (Gallagher 2012, 282). In the same vein, Omar’s lack of defiance could be understood as a sense of dependency on his family’s practical support in a situation where most everything else has been lost. However, it could also be read as a strong commitment to the ideal of being a good son.

What we want to highlight about Omar’s story is that he participates in the production of a field of possibility for himself in which his role as older son in his family becomes key (Joseph 1994). While emerging literature on gendered and generational structures among Syrians in displacement often highlights changes in existing hierarchies and the conflicts that both lead to and result from such changes (Al-Khalili forthcoming; Turner 2019), we want to point to the work that goes into upholding family structures and the possibilities for identity this produces (Kanal and Rottmann 2021). While Omar believes that going to Turkey might make it possible for him to actually pursue the kind of place in society at large that he dreams of (being an educated person in a respected profession), he stays in Jordan where he knows for certain that he can inhabit the role of responsible son. While action in the subjunctive mood (Whyte 2005) is thus what Omar would prefer, ultimately he chooses to act in the indicative mood – privileging what is over what could be.

Interestingly, recourse to family life appears to strengthen its hold on Omar and his mother as they invoke it in displacement. While Omar’s mother would most likely have allowed Omar to go to Turkey for work had the family still lived in Syria, the significance of family togetherness intensifies in displacement. Significantly, for Omar the possibility of pursuing a path that might provide a form of social recognition as a valued member of society (rather than mainly of one’s family) that our interlocutors also seek out and which is also familiar to them (as shown above) is eclipsed by recourse to the familiar of family life. Indicative action is preferred over the risk of the subjunctive with the result that the family becomes more limiting for Omar than would have been the case in Syria. Omar’s story thus exemplifies the ways in which recourse to ‘who one is’ in the family can also co-produce that setting as excessively or hyper familiar in the sense that choosing this role amplifies its significance in one’s everyday life.

Conclusion

This article introduced the term hyper-familiarity as a lens through which we can understand the situation of Syrian youth in Jordan. We argued that Syrian youth who are at a stage in life when they are attempting to forge desired futures while still being dependent on their families take recourse to and produce hyper-familiarity as they navigate the critical circumstances they are placed in. Taking recourse to the familiar, Syrian youths are mirroring narratives of familiarity launched by their Jordanian host state as well as their parents’ insistence on familiar family practices. As familiarity is produced in several mutually reinforcing sites and ways it becomes hyper, it is everywhere and takes on several shapes.

We developed this argument through an historical analysis of the state of Jordan as a recipient state in which the ‘normalcy’ of receiving refugees from neighbouring countries lies at the very core of the nature of the state itself. Moving on from there, we showed that Syrian youth mirror and reinforce this narrative by referring to life in Jordan as ‘ordinary’ and we argued that in practice our interlocutors engage in exactly the kinds of social reciprocity posited by the state to navigate their situation. We then introduced Omar whose situation is an interesting example of the amplification of family loyalties among many of the Syrian youths we encountered in Jordan. The invocation of familiarity in all these contexts thus together render it hyper – familiarity is everywhere and manifests itself in manifold ways.

While the production of hyper-familiarity is connected to the particular political structure of Jordan, it also reveals a great resourcefulness among our young Syrian interlocutors who deploy familiarity to navigate through crisis. As such, hyper-familiarity should be understood as one particular tactic of meaning-making (see Whyte 2005) employed by refugee youths in a precarious situation. While our analysis points to the limited ‘future-making’ potential of this tactic, our hope is that Jordan might decide to permit Syrians a more stable place in society as the country did for Palestinians, thus allowing Syrian youth to use their considerable resourcefulness to contribute to Jordanian society.

Acknowledgements

Earlier versions of the paper were presented at two workshops, and we wish to thank the guest editor of this special issues, Andreas Bandak, as well as all contributors for the helpful comments they made at these events. We are similarly grateful to the two anonymous reviewers for careful readings of the manuscript and for pertinent suggestions for revisions.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

The work for this article supported by Novo Nordisk Fonden [grant number NNF20SH0064193].

Notes

1 Informed consent has been secured orally at the beginning of all interviews and at the initiation of fieldwork. In line with EASA’s ethical guidelines, we have moreover continuously discussed the topic of research participation and the publication of data with long-term interlocutors.

2 We are grateful to Dawn Chatty for alerting us to this term.

3 Whenever an analytical point is directly related to the analysis coined by our research assistants, we of course cite them.

4 The Jordan Compact is an agreement between the EU and Jordan that stipulates aid contributions and access to European markets for some Jordanian goods in return for certain provisions for Syrian refugees in Jordan.

5 All names of interlocutors are pseudonyms.

6 Omar was an interlocutor of Martine Lundgaard, an MA student at the University of Copenhagen who conducted fieldwork on behalf of the Viable Futures project in the summer and fall of 2021.