Signs Worth Defending: Dignity, Shame, and the Semiotics of Political Feeling in Jordan's Arab Spring.

Dr Yazan Doughan

London School of Economics and Political Science

This paper examines how a single imported sign — balṭajī (regime thug), circulating through news reportage on the Egyptian uprising into Jordan — reorganised what a marginalised, historically loyalist neighbourhood in Amman felt was worth defending in its own political conduct. Before 2011, gestures of deference toward state authority carried an affective charge of patriotic virtue, materialised through longstanding practices of supplication and patron-client attachment. However, as the figure of the balṭajī began to be mapped onto local loyalists through the unfolding news event of the Arab Spring, it reorganised the affective valence of these deferential gestures in the very moment of their performance. What was once virtuous patronage was re-cast as hired thuggery, converting familiar conduct into something newly available to shame. I argue that this was not just a change in behaviour but a change in the neighbourhood's own vocabulary for political feeling: karāmeh (dignity) replaced loyal deference as the value worth defending, and direct demands replaced older idioms of pleading. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork and building on accounts of affect as a social force that fixes what language treats as meaningful or worth fighting for, I trace how a single circulating sign can recalibrate an entire register of political feeling, producing not communicative persuasion but a felt, embodied re-alignment towards one's own past and present conduct. The paper shows shame's capacity to function not as a silencing force but as the very mechanism by which a community's semiotic resources for political expression are contested and remade.

Bio: Yazan Doughan is an anthropologist whose work straddles the linguistic and socio-cultural branches of the discipline, with a close engagement with social and legal theory, conceptual and social history, and moral philosophy. His work blends ethnography, genealogy, and history to shed light on the question of social justice in contemporary postcolonial contexts, with Jordan as a primary field site.