A significant part of my research entails reconstructing accurate and meaningful tribal networks. To do so, I primarily rely on Hinna Amari's Dictionary of Clans in Jordan and Palestine. Additionally, I make use of online sources such as the Arabic-language social media website Rabettah, in which users can provide information about their families' tribal genealogies, as well as official blogs or websites maintained by the country's tribes and official documents provided to me by their diwans. However, these tribal connections are not in themselves politically or socially meaningful. As part of this project, we also used a Louvain community detection algorithm to identify sub-communities within each tribe. This was helpful in determining which sub-divisions within tribes we can expect to become mobilizing factors based on available demographic information.
Using the graphics below, you can explore connections between various families and tribes in Jordan either by hovering over nodes to find the closest links, zooming in to examine specific relationships, or selecting particular families from the dropdown list. In these networks, vertices represent families, clans, and tribes, edges represent connections between these families (with directions going toward larger groups of families), and colors represent sub-communities that were identified within the network. At the moment, names are written only in Arabic. Note: This is an ongoing project, so some connections are subject to change as the project progresses.
Below, you can see the tribal networks in Kerak, a southern governorate of Jordan. Kerak's tribal structure broadly contains a handful of tribal alliances (Gubser 1973), which can be viewed in the figure below. From this diagram, it is clear that the population of Kerak is largely interconnected, with most families belonging to a larger kinship network.
In the governorate of Mafraq, we similarly see large networks of families strung together by tribal ties. The large tribes of northern Jordan, such as the Bani Hassan, Sardiyya, and Sirhan, can easily be seen here, along with a number of isolated families that do not belong to these larger networks.
Now contrast this with the network structure in Ajloun, pictured below. In Ajloun, the kinship networks are significantly more disjointed, with families generally being isolated from one another. Though this indicates greater fragmentation between families, it should not be taken to mean that Ajloun is less "tribal" or 'ashairi (Layne 2021). On the contrary, the networks presented for both Ajloun and Kerak represent roughly 70% of the population in each of these districts. However, nearly three times as many names from Kerak are represented compared to names from Ajloun. This indicates that Ajloun contains much larger families, whereas tribes and clans in Kerak feature greater levels of internal division.
Next, we can look at one specific tribe in Mafraq named the Bani Hassan, one of Jordan's largest tribes. The network diagram displays an intricate view of the Bani Hassan, with its two main sections, Thabta and Hiayyil, breaking off into a variety of branches and sub-branches.
We can contrast this structure with that of the Sardiyya tribe, another large tribe in northern Jordan. There is a clear difference in structure, in which the Sardiyya tribe features a number of branches, but not lower levels of division such as those present in Bani Hassan. This comparison shows the diversity of such family units in Jordan, even for those within the same region of the country.