I have long waited for this kind of book, an embodied political economy of a staple food such as bread, and how it literally—rather than just symbolically—sustains a nation. Martinez’s evocative ethnography of bread and political stability in Jordan is a prime example of how minute attention to everyday food practices can yield deep analytical insights into the workings of a state. Its publication coincides with another recent book on bread in the region, Jessica Barnes’s Staple Security: Bread and Wheat in Egypt (2022). A political scientist himself and largely addressing comparative political sciences, Martinez makes good use of his long-term ethnographic fieldwork with bakers and inspectors in Amman, the capital city of Jordan, to explore how the state is performed through and by the everyday practices that sustain the national bread subsidy system. Martinez’s theoretical framework centers on Judith Butler’s notion of performativity and is greatly enhanced...

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