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Representing Others
British explorers in late Ottoman Palestine believed they had sorted out the "Bedouin race." In racializing the Bedouin, they were guided by three ethnographic axioms. The first is the primacy of racial classification--a new scientific dogma sparked by the need to manage differences overseas. The origins of racial classification in modern European thought can be traced back to the debate between monogenists and polygenists in the early decades of the 18th century. These two groups sought to map the origins of human race(s) by charting differences in external appearance among present and past populations. While monogenism espoused a single origin of humanity as envisioned in the Biblical narrative, polygenism maintained that human races originated in separate racial lineages with varying qualities, and hence represented a hierarchy. Polygenism rested on the assumption that external appearance--including physical, biological, social, linguistic, and cultural traits--corresponded to distinct racial strata. Ultimately, it was the seemingly secular polygenists who began advocating the existence of racial supremacy among human races. Polygenism proved especially appealing to Europeans in the age of overseas adventure, trade, exploration, and discovery. In the course of 19th-century European colonial expansion, which involved the accumulation of new ethnographic, anthropological, linguistic, and biological knowledge, polygenism prevailed, becoming the intellectual hallmark of European racial thinking.1
In Palestine, this novel way of imagining human relations was undertaken by a new breed of British explorers whose interest in the Bedouin went far beyond the romantic legacy of the 18th century. These explorers were writing at the peak of scientific racism in England, British nationalism, and imperial expansion. Working under the auspices of the Palestine Exploration Fund Society, they embarked on imperial careers that reflected the strong nexus of knowledge and power underpinning British policy in Palestine. Their legacy culminated in a new racial taxonomy that, by simply sorting out the physical and social peculiarities of the local population, insisted on viewing its demographic strata as belonging to different races. As a result, three "Arab races" were sorted out: the Bedouin, the fellaheen, and the townspeople. Only the Bedouin, however, were labeled "true Arabs."
The second axiom is the dialectical relationship between race and nomadism. In a remarkably deterministic view, British ethnographers in Palestine singled out the Bedouin as a...