"Of Camels and "Ca-mail

Engaging Complex Representations of Bedouins in Activism

Bibliographic Data

ID6013373
AuthorsE Mckee (0000-0001-5494-4873, corresponding author)
Year2010
Volume3
Issue1
Pages81-92
Publication date2010-01-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessNo
TypeARTICLE
VenueCollaborative anthropologies (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 1943-2550 • E-ISSN: 2152-4009
PublisherProject MUSE (PUBLISHER • US)
DOI10.1353/cla.2010.0003
OpenAlexW2030281209
LanguageEN
Citations received2
References cited25

Of Camels and "Ca-mail":Engaging Complex Representations of Bedouins in Activism Emily McKee (bio) I can combine computers and agriculture. I send my kids to college. . . . Tell your friends that we are people too, that we walk on two legs. —Yunis, Bedouin village council head While conducting fieldwork in the Negev region of Israel, I faced a troubling dilemma involving the complex consequences of essentialized representations in activist work. A public event organized by members of the Recognition Forum, a group of organizations working toward coexistence among Israeli Jews and Arabs and resolution of land conflict in the Negev, provides a good example of how I, as a researcher doing engaged anthropology, encountered this dilemma. This event, organized in response to the Israeli government's most recent home demolitions in an "unrecognized" village, had been billed as a day of "Traditional Bedouin Sowing in the Negev":1 The Al Talalqa Tribe have the honor to invite the public to a day of traditional Bedouin sowing on the tribal lands at Twayil Abu Jarwal (about 2 km north of Goral Junction). On this day we shall sow about 100 dunams with wheat and barley in the manual sowing traditional [sic] of the area. Participants will receive explanations about this method and will then be invited to try their own hand at it. (Recognition Forum and Bustan publicity materials, December 27, 2007) On a windy winter day the carloads of guests who had traveled to Twayil Abu Jarwal to take part in the planting were not led directly to the [End Page 81] fields. Rather, we were invited into a tent made of black tarpaulin and burlap coffee sacks and set up especially for the occasion and were offered sweet tea. We listened to speeches from community leaders and Knesset members, as young men from the village snapped pictures on their cell phones and several journalists photographed and filmed the gathering.2 We were then told that it was time for the planting and were led out of the tent and toward the fields. But after lingering along the edge of the fields and being carefully shooed out of the way of a tractor digging furrows, we were led back up to the tent for more speeches. The village sheik and another elder spoke of the injustice of home demolitions and the inequality Bedouins face in Israel. A Knesset member insisted that the residents of this village have a rightful claim to these lands because the Bedouin "are an integral part of nature here." After a thank-you and farewell, we visitors drove out of the village along the rutted dirt track and dispersed. During our car ride home my Bedouin Arab colleague who was driving reflected on the event. He was pleased that journalists, politicians, and Bedouin rights advocates from Tel Aviv had come, but he was frustrated that the event provided only a superficial look at the problems faced by Bedouin citizens of Israel and had largely been a platform for Knesset candidates and a few powerful community men to give speeches. That evening, as I sat to record notes about the day, I wrote about the incongruity between the public image of traditional, low-technology farmers and a more complex reality that I knew from fieldwork, and of which I had seen indications during the event. Even had we sown seeds manually that day, it would clearly have been a symbolic activity. The production of wheat and barley is no longer a significant means of subsistence, because Bedouins in Israel face many obstacles to farming, so most families now rely on wage labor. And those who continue to farm generally use machinery rather than manual means. I also noted my colleague's discomfort with the limited range of voices that were heard. Questions of Representation As I jotted down those field notes, I worried that my observations presented me with a dilemma of representation. How could I write honestly about the event without pointing out the contradiction between publicity and practice? And how could I be truthful about social movements [End Page 82] such as the Recognition Forum without highlighting the internal debates and disagreements that public events

Dilemma · Geography · Government (linguistics · Honor · Internet privacy · Media studies · Newspaper · Political science · Publicity · Sociology · Tribe · Anthropological Studies and Insights · Gender Studies · Geographies of human-animal interactions · History · Jewish and Middle Eastern Studies · Law

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