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ABSTRACT
By exploring several layers of spatiality in the Bedouin town of Hura, this paper illuminates the process of constructing place and identities in the Bedouin community in the Negev. For this purpose we integrate two central themes in human geography-place naming and sense of place. We begin by locating these two theoretical issues in the experiential context of the Bedouins as a multi-marginalized displaced minority. In the empirical stage, we present three spaces of place naming in the town: institutional, residential and economic. We then discuss the "sense of place naming," that is, we interpret the cultural process which underlies the mechanisms of constructing spatial meanings and representations in Hura. Under harsh and hastened urbanization, urbanized Bedouins seem to prefer two basic fields of associations as a new indoctrination tool to their spaces. First and foremost is a "powerful Islam," which dominates institutional and residential spaces. The second is the Israeli-Western-capitalistic inclination, which dominates the economic-business arena. After a long period of non-naming occurrences, these new and ambivalent naming trends suggest that positive bonds to local space have developed among some residents of Hura. However, two major worlds of meaning which prevailed in Bedouin spatiality in their more nomadic phases in the past-tribal-kinship and ecological-natural-are excluded from their contemporary new representation, indicating new urban Islamic non-tribal culture ideals and identity aspirations.
Introduction
Coercive settlement of pastoralists in rural and urban communities by modern states has been a major concern in recent decades (Khazanov, 1994). Settling processes, as a multi-dimensional transformation, raise some questions about the new spatiality of pastoralists in these new settings, such as how they develop a sense of place and reconstruct their space, and what mechanisms reconcile this space with their inherent sociopolitical territorial structures and cultural codes. One of the possible mechanisms in such processes is naming and renaming of space, producing an "archeology of meanings" whereby "The names of locations within areas record the forms of human experience that have occurred within them..." (Stewart and Strathern, 2003:6). Given that pastoralists represent one of the most primary phases of human spatiality, these questions have received very little attention. In particular, studies of sedentarization have largely disregarded spatio-consciousness implications of changes in pastoral mechanisms of constructing space and place.
Hura...