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This article addresses the orchestration of domestic lighting as an object of anthropological study. It takes Bedouin domestic architecture in southern Jordan as a starting point in an analysis of how light is used as means of safeguarding spaces as part of hospitality practices central to Bedouin culture. By arguing that things are “ecstatic” in the sense that they transcend their own tangibility, the article shows how objects, such as tinted windows, impose themselves on other objects to shape the particular visual presence of the world that informants opt for. Such a presence of the world is analyzed through the notion of “atmosphere” as a contemporaneity of subjective emotions, cultural ideals, and material phenomena. Thus, while boundaries between interior and exterior may be upheld by tangible material strategies, such as walls, these boundaries may also simultaneously be permeated by the ecstasy of material things, which aim to safeguard other aspects of life through less tangible strategies. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper examines the process of incorporating the Bedouin of Petra and Wadi Rum in Jordan on UNESCO’s list of Masterpieces of the Oral and Intangible Heritage of Humanity in 2005. The author focuses on the Bedouin tribes around Petra, who were resettled in villages when UNESCO proclaimed the area part of the tangible heritage of humanity in 1985. Heritage is approached as a ‘process of assembling’ that emerges from the interactions of social entities operating on a smaller scale. By focusing on these entities’ various discourses about Bedouin heritage that are included in the reports and applications to UNESCO, it is argued that through the process of proclaiming intangible heritage, cultural categories are formulated so as to fit into contemporary imaginations, longings and settlement policies. Investigating the process of heritage inscription reveals the multiple, and at times contradictory, discourses that undergird the production of particular images of Bedouin culture through heritage institutions that interlock, rather than harmonise, them. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]