Content area
Full Text
The epilogue to this special issue briefly charts the main approaches to the study of Bedouins in the Naqab/Negev2 and argues for forming a colonial scholarly paradigm. The essay highlights three promising perspectives within this paradigm-settler society, indigeneity and "gray space" - to form an initial step in redefining the field. The epilogue does not claim to be exhaustive, and the ideas presented here undoubtedly need further elaboration, substantiation and reflection. Neither are they entirely new, as some authors have used the colonial paradigm in the case at hand, although they have remained few and far between.
Let us start with the present issue of Hagar, which includes a rich set of articles that add significantly to a growing body of knowledge on Bedouin Arabs in the Naqab. To the best of the editors' knowledge, this is the first volume of an international social science journal to be devoted to this community. This not only speaks volumes for the (regrettable) lack of past research on Bedouin mobilization, identity and politics in the context of Israel/Palestine, but also illustrates a new surge of interest. The latter is in part due to the growing influence of relevant fields of study dealing with minorities, Islam, indigenous peoples and the margins of Palestinian and Israeli societies, to name but a few. In this respect, the current volume makes a very important contribution on its own. However, it also illustrates the limits of existing paradigms for studying Bedouin society, which have been framed, in the main, by the concepts of modernization, urbanization, politics of identity and gender, and most recently globalization.
The limitations of past studies begin with the definition of "Naqab Bedouin society." This "society" constitutes small remnants of the Arabs living in the region prior to 1948. It continues to be embedded within far wider networks in the Palestinian West Bank and Gaza, in Jordan and elsewhere in Israel (Parizot, 2004, 2005). The usage of this category should therefore be constantly problematized as reflecting a forced division of the Naqab Bedouins from other parts of their own society. I have chosen to use the term "Naqab Bedouins" in this paper chiefly because it is most commonly used by the community itself, both in Arabic and Hebrew. However I...