The Poetics of Military Occupation: Mzeina Allegories of Bedouin Identity Under Israeli and Egyptian Rule - Hardcover

Lavie, Smadar

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0520068807 ISBN 13: 9780520068803

Publisher: University of California Press, 1990

Synopsis

The romantic, nineteenth-century image of the Bedouin as fierce, independent nomads on camelback racing across an endless desert persists in the West. Yet since the era of Ottoman rule, the Mzeina Bedouin of the South Sinai desert have lived under foreign occupation. For the last forty years Bedouin land has been a political football, tossed back and forth between Israel and Egypt at least five times.

About this title

About the Author

Smadar Lavie is Associate Professor of Anthropology at the University of California, Davis. She is co-editor of the forthcoming volume, Creativity in Anthropology.

From the Back Cover

"Smadar Lavie, in creating this beautiful book, has accomplished something wonderful. An Iraeli Jew, she sojourned among the Mzeina Bedouin with an open heart and comprehending spirit . . . [and] deeply engaged their way of life and their oral literature."―Maxime Rodinson, Directeur d'Etudes, Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes

"Speaking about a region where conflict, for all involved, has deepened divisions, separating 'us' from 'them,' Smadar Lavie courageously seeks out the paradoxes and ambiguities in everyday life."―Renato Rosaldo, Stanford University

From the Inside Flap

"Smadar Lavie, in creating this beautiful book, has accomplished something wonderful. An Iraeli Jew, she sojourned among the Mzeina Bedouin with an open heart and comprehending spirit . . . [and] deeply engaged their way of life and their oral literature."—Maxime Rodinson, Directeur d'Etudes, Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes

"Speaking about a region where conflict, for all involved, has deepened divisions, separating 'us' from 'them,' Smadar Lavie courageously seeks out the paradoxes and ambiguities in everyday life."—Renato Rosaldo, Stanford University

Reviews

"More than an anthropological study, the book describes in moving and often humorous detail the ways in which the Bedouin coexist with the expressions of modern culture."

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

The Poetics of Military Occupation: Mzeina Allegories of Bedouin Identity Under Israeli and Egyptian Rule

By Smadar Lavie

University of California Press

Copyright 1990 Smadar Lavie
All right reserved.
ISBN: 0520068807


1
The Poetics of Military Occupation
From Experience to Text

If we no longer think of the relationship between cultures and their adherents as perfectly contiguous, totally synchronous, wholly correspondent, and if we think of cultures as permeable and, on the whole, defensive boundaries between polities, a more promising situation appears. Thus to see Others not as ontologically given but as historically constituted would be to erode the exclusivist biases we so often ascribe to cultures, our own not least. Cultures may then be represented as zones of control or of abandonment, of recollection and of forgetting, of force or of dependence, of exclusiveness or of sharing, all taking place in the global history that is our element. Exile, immigration, and the crossing of boundaries are experiences that can therefore provide us with new narrative forms or, in John Berger's phrase, with other ways of telling.
Edward Said
"Representing the Colonized: Anthropology's Interlocutors"

Image not available.

Nuweb`a, Passover 1979.  The first Israeli annual rock festival

The Bedouin men in elegant pastel-colored terylene caftans sat in a circle on the ground, spellbound by the mimed hand gestures of a short, angular man dressed in beat-up Levis fringed at the ankles and a conspicuously short, dirty old caftan that had shrunk once upon a time in the wash. Over the caftan a brand new extra-large T-shirt, shining yellow, bore the black imprint of sun rays bursting up from behind craggy mountains that collapsed into lip-shaped sand dunes and flowed into a peaceful beach strewn with the obligatory palm trees. Above this pristine scene, a kitschy simulation of what he and his friends could see all around them, Hebrew script exhorted, "Sing a Song for Peace," and below, "Nuweb`a's First Annual Rock Festival, Passover 1979." The man's face sported a week's growth of beard stubble, and his fingernails were long overdue to be cut. It was already Thursdayhe had only one more day to eliminate this ritual pollution before the Friday Noon Prayer. His dingy headdress scarf, splotched with ketchup and car grease, was wrapped around not the usual white hand-knitted Muslim skullcap, but instead around a worn-out Sabra tembel (dunce) cap, probably forgotten by one of the tourists or settlersit bore the Menorah emblem of the state of Israel.

Every once in a while during the silent spectacle, peals of wild laughter shook the properly attired men. Smadar, the anthropologist, armed with notebook, Nikon camera, and Sony Professional stereo tape recorder, hesitantly tiptoed into the mag`ad rejjal (men's club the men's public arena)1 while this performance was in progress: Jum`a waved her over to an empty spot beside him. Smadar gestured "No, don't bother" to the men who were about to rise up and greet her by shaking her hand in counterclockwise order, as custom required. Sitting down, she immediately whispered to Jum`a, "What's going on?"

"Just watch," said Jum`a.

"I don't understand his hand gestures," she whispered back, starting to scribble in her field diary, "Apparently, South Sinai Bedouin mime differs from that of Marcel Marceau."

"I'll translate some for you. Keep writing."

The tembel-hatted man threw his hands over his head, miming frantic finger-picking of some stringed instrument. He writhed his hips, then immediately squatted on his hamstrings and ended up lying on his back kicking his legs in the air while furiously attacking the imaginary strings.

"He is playing now on the electric sumsumiyya (five-stringed lyre) 2 he told us about," Jum`a whispered in her ear, as the men burst out laughing again. "For three nights we couldn't sleep because of those electric sumsumiyyas. The goats were so out of it they refused all orders from the goatherding girls, and the dogs howled back all night. Thank God it's over."

The T-shirted bony fellow had gotten up and was now jutting his chin out at his fist, an imaginary microphone, closing his eyes as if in a trance state during a pilgrimage dance. Then he made some Bedouin deaf-and-dumb sign language gestures, which most Bedouin understand.

"Sing a song for peace, cry it aloud," Jum'a translated. "He says one of the young 'uns who knows Hebrew told him they kept singing and singing this song while they got more and more stoned, and then some of them screwed on the sand dunes while the performance was still going on."

"Hey," shouted one of the pastel-garbed men, gently tossing a few grains of sand at the mime to get his attention. "If they sing so much for peace, what are they doing on our land?"

The tembel-hatted man tilted his head up with a silly smile, formed a circle with the thumb and middle finger of his left hand, and gleefully jabbed the middle finger of his right hand in and out of it.

The group was swimming in waves of laughter. The pastel-garbed man raised his voice again, to call out: "And screwing us over while they're at it!"

Somber silence descended. The performer was wiping the sweat off his brow with the hem of his Passover 1979 T-shirt. He collapsed into an empty spot and someone served him tea.

"Now that the Feast of Baskawit (biscuits) is over, the annual migration of the Jews to our beaches has at last ended," another man said. "Many people will have jobs cleaning up after them, and the goats will have lots of garbage to eat."

The Israeli anthropologist Smadar tried to smother her giggles at the irony. The South Sinai Bedouin called the Jewish Passover "The Holiday of Biscuits." For them, matzo, or the Passover unleavened

bread, fell into the same category as store-bought cookies and crackers, known as "baskawit" or biscuits.

"Who was that guy, anyway?" she whispered into Jum`a's ear.

"Oh, don't take him seriously. He's just our local Fool."

Although this man was just a fool, his antic miming of the three-day rock festival raised unresolved existential dilemmas that the Mzeina Bedouin, a tribe of approximately 5,000 and the largest of the South Sinai Tawara intertribal alliance, had to face every day.

While the free-spirited nomadic tribes who roamed the Arabian deserts attracted turn-of-the-century European explorers in search of exotic experiences, and currently have become the nostalgic subject of ethnographic literature and films, travelers' accounts of the South Sinai tribes evoke images of less glamorous but still outlandish Bedouin. Dan Rabinowitz (1985) has recently emphasized that all nineteenth-and early twentieth-century travelers to the South Sinai, expecting to find the idealized pastoral nomads, were surprised to find instead only very few camels, sheep, and goats, and therefore concluded that the region was not prime pasture land (Rabinowitz 1985: 216). Hence, when travelers to the Eastern Deserts were still pursuing their romantic images of free and independent nomads, travelers to the South Sinai peninsula had long since been disabused of all such naivets. The latter travelers clearly recognized that the Tawara Bedouin of the South Sinai were almost totally dependent on the economic centers of the colonial powers occupying their territory: the Ottoman Turks and, later, the British. By the turn of the twentieth century, Tawara members derived much of their income from making charcoal and also from acting as authentic travel guides for genteel pilgrims and explorers, uneasily saddled on camelback, suffering through Mount Sinai and the rest of the peninsula. Tawara members could sell the charcoal only in the faraway Nile Valley, four to fourteen strenuous days away by camel. Or they could share camel rides and walk fifteen to thirty days north to Jaffa, to hire themselves out as the cheapest of laborers to Palestinian orange grove owners. They also cultivated date palms in the desert's few oases, tended petite mountain gardens, hunted whatever the fragile desert ecology would yield, and fished along the `Aqaba and Suez gulf coasts.

To this day, the basic fact is that the Mzeina have been in the hinterland of every occupier of the South Sinai, and therefore have had to depend for their survival on the occupier's center of power (Marx 1977a , 1980; Lavie 1989; Lavie and Young 1984). In the course

of the Arab-Israeli conflict of the last fifty years, the South Sinai has been a political football tossed at least five times between Egypt and Israel. From the 1940s until 1952, the Sinai was governed by the Egyptian King Farouq but patrolled by British army units. From 1952 to 1956 it was under independent control of the Arab Republic of Egypt. Although the South Sinai has officially been an Egyptian territory since Ottoman times, the South Sinai Bedouin nonetheless still view the Egyptians as a foreign occupation force, now perhaps because the Egyptians, preoccupied by the tremendous problems in the densely populated Nile Valley, have been unable to develop much sensitivity toward the idiosyncrasies of their hinterland Bedouin population. In 1956 Israel, backed by France and Britain, staging one of the last major colonial wars over the nationalization of the Suez Canal, occupied the Sinai, but a few months later returned it to Egypt, which, by then aided by the Soviets, held on to it until 1967, when it was again occupied by Israel. Following the 1973 October War, and the politics of shuttle diplomacy and Camp David, Israel again returned the Sinai to Egypt in eight stages between January 1975 and April 1982 (see the series of maps illustrating the South Sinai international border shifts in chap. 2).

And throughout all this, the Mzeina Bedouin were nothing but pawns. The Egyptian, Israeli, British, American, and Soviet leaders never once consulted them or their leadership on issues of war, peace, occupation, or treaties.

This book attempts to show that the constant military occupation of the South Sinai precluded for the Mzeina the identity that both turn-of-the-century travelers' accounts and contemporary nostalgic literature or media accounts inscribed for the Bedouin: fierce romantic nomads on loping camels in the vast desert. On the contrary, the military occupation had penetrated Mzeini daily life so deeply and so long that it had become much more than soldiers, developers, settlers, and tourists impinging on the external political and economic relationships between the indigenous tribe and the state. The omnipresent occupations had permeated not only internal inter- and intratribal affairs, but also discourses as delicate and intimate as those between husbands and wives. Given that the Mzeina were helpless objects of external political processes, I argue that their Bedouin identity could be little more than literary allegory: tribal identity appeared as moralistic, multilayered narratives transcending the spatial and temporal boundaries of military occupation through symbolic defiance only,

because for Mzeinis to openly confront any armed or unarmed occupier could mean beatings, jail, even death.

Within the tribe, only a handful of charismatic individuals had the creative capacity to allegorize the military occupation by dramatizing its humiliations and absurdities for a Bedouin audience. Yet these individuals, gifted with persuasive theatrical skills, did not perform their dramatized critiques at regular, ritual-like intervals. Only when challenged by fellow tribesmembers would a Mzeini creative individual such as the miming Fool evoke the allegory of Bedouin identity. The story would unfold during the fragile interstices of a tense, discontinuous conversation. Such precious moments, filling the otherwise awkward breaks within the flow of everyday conversation, temporarily reconstructed the image of the tribe for the listeners, even though the political situation that had generated the allegory remained unchanged.

The aim of this book is to retrace the process by which Mzeina allegories of Bedouin identity emerge from performances by various creative individuals, each of whom plays a character based on his or her own identity: the Sheikh, the Madwoman, the Ex-Smuggler, the Old Woman, the Fool, the Symbolic Battle Coordinator, and The One Who Writes Us. Embedded in these performances is the poetics of military occupation.

Beginnings: Fieldwork By An Occupier

It might seem a bit awkward for an Israeli like myself to write an account of the resistance, even if only poetic, mounted to the Israeli occupation of the Sinai Desert. I grew up with the Zionist frontier mythologymaking the desert bloom, all the while mourning the eradication of desert spaces, and museumizing Negev Bedouin culture even while expropriating Bedouin land (Lavie and Rouse 1988). As a twelve-year-old right after the 1967 war, I was instructed by my teachers, many other Israelis, and the radio to consider the Sinai "the last frontier," a phrase that in the South Sinai context of the mid-1970s had ironically altered its meaningnot simply land to conquer, but land to conquer and preserve. Oddly enough, aside from establishing several settlements, the Israeli government had decided purposely to leave the South Sinai barely touched, as a safari space, a nostalgic replacement for the lost Negev wilderness perhapsan es-

cape from the social and spatial crowdedness of a small country (now not so small) like Israel (Lavie 1988).

As one of those rugged Sabras, I spent one whole high school summer vacation climbing steep, majestic red granite mountains where lush cool springs led to small orchards of juicy pears and prolific old mulberry trees. We explored very narrow, high-walled sandstone canyons utterly barren of plant life, but thinly striped with striations of gold, purple, green, blue, red, and white. We snorkeled among the most beautiful coral reefs in the world, where golden fish, sea turtles, and poisonous cognac-and-black-striped lion fish with great fanlike spines swam among coral reefs colored lavender, peach, black, violet, orange, and ecru. And then there were the Bedouin, whom the various hiking guides introduced to us both as noble savages living in a state of nature, and as remnants of our dignified Biblical forefathers who gained their freedom from Pharoah's slavery and coalesced as a people in this very desert. I wanted to come back after my compulsory army service, despite the fact that I wholeheartedly opposed the transformation of Israel into the Israeli "Empire." I began to wonder whether there was something I was not being told about the Bedouin, such as their own response to tourists like myself, and to the whole Hollywood Ten Commandments media image of their tribes that Israel promoted to attract touristsan image that had caused gradual Western encroachment on their encampments.

A month after my discharge from the Israeli Defense Force in 1975, I arrived at the South Sinai beach village of Dahab on a hot October afternoon (see the detailed South Sinai map in chap. 2). Innocent of formal anthropological training, but driven by curiosity about the human aspect of the supposedly dangerous Arab Other, I dropped my backpack, cassette recorder, and camera bag on the ground near a thin chicken-wire fence delineating empty sitting space in front of what looked like part of an old army barracks. Most of one side of the structure seemed to have been removed, leaving an empty wall now filled with flattened cardboard vegetable boxes bearing Hebrew, German, and English print promising red-cheeked tomatoes to thaw the European winter. On the roof a sign in English, Hebrew, and Arabic (which I learned to read only two years later) announced: Zub Mar `Awwad. I deduced this might be a local supermarket of sorts.3

Wearing my modest outfit of baggy jeans, a loose Mickey Mouse T-shirt with elbow-length sleeves, and a turquoise kerchief to cover my hair, I sank down on my big backpack to rest from the heat and was immediately swarmed by kids shouting, "A Jew! A Jew! When is

she going to take off her clothes and walk into the sea?" But at that time, the only Arabic word I knew was shukran (thank you). Despite the fact that my grandmother's native tongue is Arabic, she had never spoken it in the family while I was growing up. All her children, as adults, had insisted she speak Hebrew with them. My mother had willfully "forgotten" her Arabic in the process of her upscale mobility to the European-Ashkenazi culture of my father, and my parents decided it would be better for me to learn French than Arabic as a second foreign language.

"Shukran," I said demurely in response to the children's greetings. They erupted in giddy laughter.

"Eh da? " asked one of the group, pointing at my camera bag. I took the camera out to show it to them, and they all said in unison, "Kamara! " I suddenly realized that this was the crucial moment of my first lesson in Mzeini Arabic, and envisioned myself, a devout young scholar, pointing at objects, exclaiming "Eh dah?", and filling my notebook with new words I would memorize at night in the glow of my flashlight.

A tall, dignified old man with gray beard stubble approached to check out the ruckus. With a wave of his hand, he scattered the kids to the four winds. He opened the structure's squeaky door, and a stuffy smell hit my nostrils. In the dim light I made out flour and rice sacks bearing Arabic script, plastic bottles of oil and cardboard boxes of waffles bearing Hebrew labels, tin cans of mackerel from Hong Kong, Bazooka chewing gum, and heavy plastic cases filled with empty Coca-Cola bottles. The old man carried my stuff in and put it under a faded postcard bearing the picture of Samira Tawfiq, a famous Arab pop star. Yes, this Zub Mar was indeed the neighborhood supermarket.

From a nearby palm frond hut, which must have been where he lived, the old man brought out a handwoven rug, a pot of warm tea, and six glasses. He laid the rug right on the ground in the fenced-in area in front of the store. While I was wondering why he had so many glasses, men and women started arriving, and soon the six were not enough. He forbade the returning hordes of children to come inside the fence, so they clambered all over it.

How could I explain to these people, without speaking their language, that I wanted to live with them so that I could learn about their way of life?

I cleared my throat. I cleared my throat again. By then, everyone, including the kids, was totally silent.

"Ebrani,`Ivrit , speak Hebrew," said one of the younger men in a mixture of Arabic and Hebrew.

And at that moment I made a decision, that as someone who might represent the current occupation even though against it, I would never speak a word of Hebrew with the Bedouin.

I cleared my throat again. I gestured with both hands at my heart, turned them to the ground, bent my head over my folded hands as if sleeping, then lifted my eyebrows up and tilted my chin, trying to convey that I was asking permission to stay overnight.

Some people smiled. "Marhaba! Welcome!" said the old man. He pointed at me with his right hand, then put it on his heart. By that time it was dusk. The smudgy cliffs seemed to be falling into the sea. On the soft breeze drifted smells of fish and cumin. The men went to pray in a space cleared of big pebbles and delineated by conch shells, with the mihrab , the small protruding semicircle before which the prayer leader stood, pointing southeast, toward Mecca.

A crumpled old woman opened the flimsy plywood gate of the fence and came in, carrying on her head a large round platter loaded with fish and rice. Several men followed, returning from prayer. This, l realized, was my first chance to practice my newly acquired Arabic expression and see if it worked.

"Eh da?" I queried, pointing at the fish.

"Hut . Samak . Hut , hut ," said the old man.

I left the circle of sitting people, went to the locked door of the store, and knocked nervously. The old man stared at me as if at a total loss, then hesitantly walked toward the door and opened it. I scrambled through the pocket of my backpack, grabbed the pen and notebook, and rushed back to my seat in front of the platter. Little did I know l had violated a prime rule of etiquette around the dinner tableone does not leave it just like that in the middle, without profuse apologies. Furthermore, if one leaves, one does not return. But I quickly slipped back to my seat and wrote in the notebook: "fishhut or samak." Sensing that the shocked silence probably meant I had done something wrong, I looked at the ground, hoping no one would notice how I was blushing. But then my scholarly curiosity won out. I raised my head, pointed at the rice, and exclaimed, "Eh da?"

"Ruz . Ruz ," said the old man.

I wrote in my notebook: "ruzrice," unaware that everyone sitting cross-legged around the platter was waiting for the guest of honor to start eating so they could eat too.

After a long, nebulous silence, the old man grabbed my right hand

and plunged it into the sticky rice, so I grabbed some in my fist. Then he stuck my hand among the slippery white chunks of fish, so I grabbed a few of them. Then he gently maneuvered my elbow to bend my arm and get my loaded hand to my mouth. Being lefthanded, I had hardly ever been required to do anything important, other than play the piano, with my right hand, and was unable to control the sticky mass, so most of it dropped off bit by bit before it reached my mouth. By this time everyone was in an uproar of laughter, not only because of my klutziness but also because my hand had touched the foodthat was the signal for the rest of them to dig their hands into the same platter and go to it.

"Oh, that's easy enough," I thought, and reached for the rice with my left hand. The moment I touched it, a stunned silence descended on the group and everyone hastily withdrew their hands. The old man patiently took my right hand back to the platter, but by this time I thought I had already made too many faux pas, whatever they might have been, and decided to give up eating for the present. I patted my rummy and waved my hands as if to say, "No more, thanks." But this also was not acceptable. So I had to keep reaching with my uncooperative right hand, just a bit at a time, so that the rest of the men and women would not stop eating. How long will this go on? Am I to sit here and eat for ever and ever? I looked around and heard some loud burps accompanied by a certain phrase, so I gathered up my courage to produce a soft burp. This time everyone beamed at me with broad smiles of approval.

"Rabena yahalaf `aleikum ," the old man said twice, pointing at me, then repeated the phrase again. I got the idea I was supposed to say it, so I did.

"Sahha wa`afia ," everyone answered me in unison, while I scribbled both utterances down, adding, "meaning yet unknownbut important!"

By then total darkness invited a sad red moon to rise from the east out of the Saudi cliffs, and to spread its beams into the Gulf of `Aqaba. As soon as the men left for the `asha (after dinner) prayer, all the women crowded around me and started patting my arms, breasts, abdomen, and legs through my clothes. They also touched my face and poked their fingers onto the kerchief around my head. I had no idea what to make of this behavior and just sat there on the ground in amazement, trying not to stiffen up. As soon as the moon rose and the men returned, the touching stopped.

Two years later one of the women told me that as of 1975, this was

the closest they had ever gotten to an Israeli woman, and they just wanted to see if I was a regular human woman with flesh and bones like theirs. The head poking was to find out if I had any head lice about to lay eggs. If they had touched one, it would have popped and squirted. All the while, they feared I might slap one of them, and they were surprised that I didn't. She, and other Mzeinis, also told me they all thought that just as all those hippies had come to live in the fake Bedouin-style village built for them as a tourist trap, I had come to live in the real thing. The problem was, I never took off my clothes.

My first night in the field, I was shown a corner where I could spread my sleeping bag, but I couldn't sleep all night, wondering what the future held for me.

The first week in the field everything seemed to be going quite well. Ten to thirty children constantly formed a safety belt around me, eager to chant the name of whatever object I pointed at. My notebook rapidly filled with Arabic words, nouns, and verbs, and I was amazed to discover that, fortunately, the grammar was quite similar to that of Hebrew. I started making up baby-talk sentences that seemed to be understood.

But this idyll did not last. On my ninth day in Dahab, when 1 returned to the store from one of the canyons outside the settlement where I had gone to relieve myself, I was shocked to find that my backpack, sleeping bag, camera bag, and cassette recorder had disappeared. What to do? In broken Arabic I managed to inform the old man and his wife. To my surprise, they said nothing and just looked at me philosophically. Did they think it was Allah's will, or what? What was I going to do? My Arabic was not good enough to consult with them about what course of action I should take. Suddenly all those vague, ominous warnings from friends and relatives flashed through my mind: "Beware of the Arabs, young lady. You are too innocent to know anything about them yet."

But the old couple was so generous. For the first time, they invited me into their modest home. They had only one spare blanket, a thin one, so they sent a grandchild to the neighbors to fetch more. The news that all my belongings had disappeared (toilet paper excludedhow lucky I was) spread like a flash flood. In thirty-five minutes thirty-five adults, and the usual masses of children, jammed the inner yard of the couple's compound. The crowd whispered among themselves but just stared at me, saying nothing to me. I felt utterly lost. Two voices counterpointed through my mind: "What on earth are you doing here?" "Fieldwork is interesting." And soon, a young man in

patched jeans and a faded Harvard T-shirt addressed me in broken Hebrew with a bittersweet, resigned smile: "You can always go to the Israeli police in Di-Zahav. They have dogs and are very good at searching our homes."

Yes, I could have done this. But at that very moment I decided not to involve any Israeli authorities in my research, just as I had determined nine days ago never to speak Hebrew to the Mzeinis. But this moment made me understand that my fieldwork could not be objective like I thought fieldwork ought to be. How could I write "unbiased" fieldnotes about a tribe under military occupation by my own country? Anyway, if the police came in, it would be the end of my research. I would be just another Israeli.

The old man offered me a place in his own hut, and a stream of curious visitors started flowing through. In the course of a week, over fifty more people came to sympathize with me and say how sorry they were that this had happened. Though they had precious little themselves, they kept bringing me small aluminum pots of food, which I insisted we eat together. One seven-year-old boy even pressed his school notebook and pen on me, because, like the adults, he knew I was there to write.

After a week, while I was away visiting people and the hut was empty, someone left my little bag of toiletries there. I was so relieved to have my toothbrush and sunblock back. Nothing was missing. Nothing. That evening some of my blank cassettes appeared. The next morning I found my camera bag just outside the old man's hut. Then came my jeans and a couple of T-shirts. By the end of the week I had everything, including the cassette recorder and the sleeping bag. And nothing was missing. Nothing.

Had I been tested? If so, had I passed at least my first exam?

After a couple of years of hearing many arguments between old and young Mzeinis, I realized that there was a generation gap on the issue of theft from foreigners. The older generation was trying to cling to the Mzeina tradition of hospitality for everyone who arrived in the Sinai. But the younger generation protested that military officers, developers, settlers, and tourists were uninvited guests who had to be made aware that they were unwelcome. The younger Mzeinis used theft from foreignersor as they expressed it, "taking,"as a way to protest their presence. At times they would even "take" from foreigners things they themselves had no use for, just to make this point. Among themselves, however, Mzeinis never stole. In my thirteen years

of fieldwork, despite my repeated inquiries, I heard of no thefts by Bedouin from other Bedouin.

"It is time to make you a taniba of our family," announced the old man a month later. I could understand him because my arabic had improved dramaticallythere were so many people to talk to all the time.

"Taniba? Eh da?"

"Say a man from the Rashayda tribe in the Sudan had a blood dispute with someone, and to save his life, he ran very far away, seeking shelter (dakhel ) with someone from the Mzeina. Let's say he is a good man struck by misfortune. We Mzeina will adopt him into our tribe. We will offer him protection. If someone harms him, it is as if he harms the whole family who adopted him. This means trouble with our `urfi (customary law), which, I want you to know, is much tougher and fairer than your country's law. So we will make him our tanib (person with a fictive kinship for the purpose of protection). In the old days when we all lived in tents, this Rashayda tribesman would have run into a Mzeina family tent, held on to the center pole made of a poplar tree, and begged to become a tanib."

So the next day, in the late afternoon when the goats and sheep returned from the pasture, accompanied by the goatherd, the old man's freshly divorced adolescent granddaughter, he selected one of the best kidgoats, a plump one. With the squirming kidgoat clasped tightly under his left arm, he led me with his right hand toward the southeast corner of the inner courtyard, the comer pointing toward Mecca. He made me hold on to the twenty-five by twenty-five centimeter square pole supporting that corner. It was old gray lumber, probably recycled from scaffolding at some development site.

"But didn't you say only a man can become a tanib?"

"Well," mused the old man, "among the afranj (Westerners), aside from their bodies, it's hard to tell who's a man and who's a woman. So we can make you a taniba."4

I was still clinging to the scaffolding pole as he slaughtered the kidgoat while murmuring the opening verses of the Qur'an. He collected some of the blood into an empty cleaned-out tin can and walked over to me. He dipped his forefinger into the blood, and, murmuring more verses from the Qur'an, drew on my forehead a design like a backwards L followed by a straight up-and-down stroke. I later discovered that this was the wasm (brand) of the old man's phratrya sign branded with hot irons onto camels' necks in case they got lost, tattooed on some women's foreheads or on the backs of the hands of

those men and women who wanted it as a sign of belonging to the phratry, and also marked on hut doors for good luck and on storage boxes for identification.

While the old man was skinning the kidgoat for his wife to cook, she spontaneously lifted the thin silver medallion on a leather thong from around her neck and put it over my head. Still grasping the pole with one hand, I lifted the silver disk in the other and saw engraved on it a Bedouin man and woman whose clasped hands held the en-folded young fronds of a date palm sprout, with a star and crescent moon above. On the other side was Arabic script I was later able to decipher as mispelled Qur'anic verses.

"This will guard your way among the Bedouin," she said softly.

The miraculous grapevine (perhaps because the spectacle could be fully seen between the palm fronds that formed the hut's walls) again did its work, and neighbors started arriving to view my forehead, and to eat the meata rare treat reserved for religious celebrations.

Finally it was time to eat. The goat was small and the people were many. The men formed one circle around their own platter of rice dotted with a few tidbits of meat, and the women formed another around theirs. But the old woman gave me a generous plate of meat with a little rice to eat by myself.

"You expect me to eat all this meat by myself?" I exclaimed to the assembled company, throwing my hands up. Not only was I a vegetarian, a cultural concept I knew the Mzeina would not understand because they so treasured meat, but the division struck me as ridiculously unfair. So I spontaneously went over to the men's communal serving plate and carefully used my right hand to scrape half of what was on my plate onto theirs, then put the other half onto the women's serving plate.

"So, now that I am your taniba, where should I sit?"

After whispers within and between the circles, the old woman instructed me, "You will first eat with the men for a while, and then go eat with us women." And then she accompanied me to the men's circle and sat down with me to eat with the men.

It began to dawn on me that throughout my fieldwork, I was going to be a gender classification problem.

When I made a calculated reach toward the serving plate with my klutzy right hand, one of the men stopped me.

"Wait. Wait. Since you write and do all other clean things with your left hand, and probably do all unclean things with your right, you may

eat with your left hand as long as you say bismallah (by the name of God)."

What a relief!

Despite all vicissitudes, fieldwork began to fall into a routine. After a year, I was fluent in the colloquial dialect of the Mzeina. After two years I could recite Bedouin poetry. By the end of the fourth year, I was even able to make up some simple verses of my own. My Yemeni grandmother was quite moved that I could converse with her in her native tongue and enjoy sharing all her proverbs and puns. Her own seven children were embarrassed to speak Arabic with her because, in the European-Ashkenazi hegemony of Israel, it is considered primitive and low class (cf. Shohat 1988).

The old man and his wife gradually became like parents to me. They first told me to call them father and mother, but after they visited my real parents in the Tel Aviv suburbs, they reconsidered. They decided that, even though my relationship with them was in terms of fictive kinship, no one could have two fathers and two mothers.

"You are her real father, so she will call you 'father,' (aba )" the old man declared to my father, using me as a translator. "I am her Bedouin father, and she will call me '[paternal] uncle' (`am )." For the Mzeinis, paternal uncles were almost as important as fathers.

In the course of my first four years in the field, I gradually discovered that what I had thought would be a major liability, my ambiguous gender classification, turned out to be a major asset, giving me transgender mobility. The men taught me how to fish, pollinate date trees, improvise fixing jeeps, and track camels by their individual footprints in the arcosis (those small pebblestones in the wadis). The women taught me how to herd, cook, spin, weave, play the flute, and babysit the children when they wanted some time off. I participated in rituals of weddings, births, baby uvula cutting, circumcisions of boys and girls, exorcisms of jinns from people's bodies and minds, ceremonial meals in memory of the recent dead, pilgrimages, funerals, date harvest celebrations, and Muslim rituals such as the Ramadan fast, `Id al-Fatr (the holiday ending the month-long Ramadan), `Id al-Adha (the sacrifice holiday ending the month of pilgrimage to Mecca), and Fadu al-Gharra (the sacrificial meal in memory of the nocturnal journey of Muhammad from Jerusalem to the heavens to receive the Qur'an). I was constantly weaving my way, gingerly, between the men's and women's spheres of action. I attended the exclusively male customary court hearings, but was not allowed into the exclusively male monthly

meetings between the Israeli military governors and the Bedouin sheikhs they had appointed.

Therefore, throughout this book I appear in both exclusively male and exclusively female contexts, as well as in mixed-gender ones. To the Mzeinis, I was genderless. Perhaps because Mzeini men had long been accustomed to tourists, developers, soldiers, and other Westerners, both male and female, I had no trouble developing strong nonsexual friendships with them. Both men and women poked fun at how easily I moved between the genders, saying "Smadar has the body (jism ) and soul (nafs ) of a woman and the logical mind (`agl ) of a man." They often told each other, "She can churn yogurt and play the flute, as well as gallop on camels and talk foreign currency rates." Both employed me as a go-between in romantic trysts. This would suggest that despite my transgender mobility, I enjoyed the trust of both men and women. In retrospect, the only person to suffer from these circumstances was myself. After my first four years in the field, four years of genderless identity, I found it a real struggle to regain a distinct sense of womanhood.5

To avoid preliminary categorization of my field data, I wrote it in the form of a diary rather than on cards classified by anthropological topics such as kinship, ritual, descent, and so forth. Each diary entry consisted of a description of the situation: time, duration, location, who participated, an almost verbatim record of what was said, facial expressions, hand gestures, and also my impressions about the situation. I wrote the diary in Hebrew and used Hebrew letters to transliterate the sounds of Arabic speech. After six or seven months, since I was always in some corner scribbling, I stopped being an attraction and people simply ignored me. This was how I acquired the appellation "Di Illi Tuktubna " (The One Who Writes Us). People even made use of my record to verify what had been said in the heat of an argument, saying "It's even written in Smadar's notebook."

Another fieldwork strategy was to visit people's houses to chat and gossip, that is, to conduct extended open-ended interviews. After conflicts or rituals, I visited not only the event's key participants, but also the observers, to chat about what happened, that is, to document "the native point of view." I dutifully collected genealogies, descent lines, kinship and marriage networks, and the many versions of the Mzeina myth of settlement in the Sinai. Only in an oblique way did this data prove relevant to my eventual thesis about the poetics of military occupation.

To move around in the Sinai, I relied mainly on rides from Bedouin

traveling from one place to another in old jeeps and pickup trucks, and later, in dilapidated Mercedes taxis. From my research grant, I also bought part ownership in a camel so I could reach most of the peninsula, still inaccessible to motorized vehicles.

In 1977 I conducted a house-to-house census in Dahab, the largest sedentarized settlement on the East Coast of the peninsula, and composed only of Mzeina. This census provided data on population size, neighborhood composition, history of structures and buildings, age distribution of residents, household composition, family assets, and marital history of individuals.

In 1978-1979 I conducted the same type of census in al-Tur, the largest sedentarized Bedouin settlement on the West Coast of the peninsula, inhabited by Mzeina and all other tribes of the South Sinai Tawara intertribal alliance. Because I found it difficult to stay in al-Tur for a long time, I completed only half the census.

To obtain information on less sedentarized populations living in encampments, I conducted population surveys in some main geographical areas of the South Sinai. In September and October 1976 I surveyed the peninsula's northeastern mountains; in January 1978 the midwestern mountains; in September 1978 the northern part of the highland plateau; and in January 1979 the southern part of the highland plateau and the southeastern and southwestern mountains.

Before each survey I collected gossip from the Mzeinis in Dahab about the encampments in the area to be surveyed. For each survey I went with two Mzeinis who were well accepted in the area. We visited two to three encampments per day. My companions from Dahab gossiped with the locals according to our prearranged plan: I gathered information about who lived in the encampment, their kinship groups, marriage and divorce patterns, the property they owned, territorial claims, sources of water and food, their occupations, migration patterns, if any, and so on.

As for official records and statisticsdue to my strained relationship with the military governor, I did not even try to request these from his office. I was therefore very lucky that one day the old Mzeini trash collector at Dahab's small Israeli army base brought me a bundle of papers he had rescued from the trash, thinking it might interest me. Though unable to read either Arabic or Hebrew, he thought it had to do with Bedouin, because the pink cover page of the top document had a drawing of a man wearing a caftan and headdress, with a camel, the proverbial palm trees, and waves of the sea. This bundle turned out to be quite a treasure: unclassified military documents regarding

the South Sinai Bedouin, dating from 1972 to 1977. The information concerned the military and civilian governing strategies used to control the Bedouin, which I will discuss in chapter 2, and the data that generated these policies, mainly the geographical distribution of Bedouin in the Sinai, their administrative division into tribal coalitions, tribes, phratries, and clans, and the main traditional and migrant labor occupations of the Bedouin. I also discovered 1975-1977 statistics on the number and residences of Bedouin in the eastern part of the peninsula, although I find these inaccurate according to my own census and demographic surveys.

To supplement my laboriously detailed fieldnotes, I made audio tapes of men's coffee-grinding rhythms and joke sessions, their camel-riding songs and songs to accompany dances, fishermen's musical-jocular shouts during fishing and their drunken songs and antics accompanied by the sumsumiyya, men and women reciting poetry, women's herding shouts and songs, their flute playing and wedding songs, children's songs, and various genres of speech. I was very careful to ask permission each time I wanted to make a recording, and everyone was fully aware of the presence of a cassette recorder while recording was in progress. I was interested in recording ordinary everyday conversations, to see how they were influenced by the political context of military occupation, but I found that people tended to put on a performance in front of the cassette recorder, as they were used to doing while playing their own cassette recorders. As soon as I pushed the off button, they crowded around to hear the playback of their performance. Therefore, to record the everyday dialoguesone of the main focuses of this bookI just had to write as fast as I could what people said. I blessed the fact that, once people got used to my constant scribbling, most of the time they left me alone tucked in some corner to observe the goings-on. At times they would include me in their conversation, or I would initiate my own participation.

On the whole, fieldwork was going well. I seemed to pass the occasional small loyalty tests that popped up, recognizing them as such only after the fact, because I felt more accepted.

Then in early summer of 1977, after almost two years in the field, came final exam week. I joined a fishing trip with my uncle/father, his sons, and several other men, young and old. We had to load all our gear on six camels, because no motorized vehicle could reach the shore where the red granite cliffs made their sheer drop into the sea. It was a long, five-day trip of arduous work along the scalloped coral reef that undulated in and out from the coastline ten kilometers north of

Dahab. We lived by the ebbing tides instead of the clock, fishing between tides, every five hours or so. The leader of the group was an old man with thin threads of salt sparkling in his wrinkles. As the most experienced fisherman, he knew in spite of his cataracts how to spot groups of three or four parrot fish seven meters out under water. Standing on the beach, he would consult with the other experts to decide what group of fish to attack. Then he would shield his eyes against the glaring sun and watch two seasoned fishermen, their left shoulders sagging from the lead weights of the heavy nethandwoven cotton in two layers, a white loose weave for the big fish, and a green fine weave for the small oneswalking along the edge of the shallow turquoise reef out to behind the target spot.

In back of them was a sheer drop of thirty to fifty meters into the blue-black open sea, with Saudi Arabia on the horizon. Then the old leader would do a little dance, gracefully shifting his weight from foot to foot while waving his left hand like a semaphore signal from side to side over his head. The men with the net responded by walking gingerly together, heading north to the outside edge of the reef. As soon as the leader saw that the net men were right behind the target fish, peacefully gnawing on the corals with their red, gold, and black tails just above the water line, he gracefully raised his right hand to move in a mirror image of the left. The two net men moved to either side until the net was fully open. At that moment, the youngest in the crowd, seven young men and myself, rushed into the sea, stamping and splashing and throwing stones to drive the fish into the net. With a basket on my back, its rope handles cutting into my shoulders and forehead, I ran in my plastic sneakers on the bumpy reef, praying not to fall on a poisonous stonefishit would kill me in five minutes or less. Breathless at the net, we started killing the slippery, slithery fish by jabbing a curved forefinger from one gill-slit over to the other. Thin threads of blood diffused in the clear blue water. We hastily disentangled the dead fish from the net and flipped them over our shoulders into the baskets. We had to work very fast to get back to the beach before the sharks came after the blood.

Tired and thirsty, with blisters all over me from sun, salt, and sweat, I sighed with relief when the last day dawned.

"All I want is to load my camel and go home to pour sweet water on my aching skin," said the salty old leader, "so let's get on with the suhum (the dividing of the catch)." He meted out the fish, one by one, into a circle of enough piles to give one to each fisherman. My eyes burned even more, trying to hold back tears, when I realized from the

number of piles that one of them must be meant for me. One of the fishermen volunteered to be blindfolded and toss red and black stones, and white pieces of dried camel manure, one at a time, from the center out toward the piles. Before each toss, he asked who would get the pile the stone fell nearest, and someone would call out a name. It was completely random and very fair.

In the middle of all this, some of us noticed a military amphibious landing craft apparently trying to land on the coral and breaking off chunks of it. This ship was bizarrely out of placenormally such ships stayed out in the middle of the gulf. Was it a landing exercise? If so, why not in one of the deep, sandy hidden bays?

"Are the Jews getting ready for another war?" asked the salty leader.

"They might be practicing to attack Saudi Arabia from the northeast coast. They could take the Saudis by total surprise and get it all in less than six days."

"Yeah, maybe all the oil they took from Egypt in the Gulf of Suez isn't enough for them."

"No, no, no! America helps the Saudis, and it also helps Israel, so it won't let two of its children go to war with each other."

An hour passed in trading speculative political theories and also curses over the vandalizing of the very rare corals, when a small Israeli military helicopter landed just a couple of meters from our piles of fish. Out jumped an impeccably attired redheaded master sergeant, asking in broken Arabic, "Fishing licenses? IDs ?" All the men scurried to their blankets and bundles to find their documents. Only I had no fishing license, because Israelis did not need one for such small amounts, and I had been so sure of myself that I had even left my ID back in the encampment.

"If you have no ID or fishing license," ordered the sergeant, "bring me your camera." He opened it, ripped the film while it was still in the camera, grabbed it out, and exposed it to the sun.

"That's what you get for taking pictures of a military landing craft," he snarled. "That's prohibited."

"But she didn't take any pictures of the ship," one Bedouin piped up. The sergeant slapped him in the face.

"Take your stuff and get in the helicopter," he commanded me. "Move it!"

By late afternoon we landed in Sharm al-Sheikh right in front of the headquarters of the South Sinai military governor, and they threw me in jail. My dramatic entrance into the dingy, stifling hot cell stunned the fourteen Bedouin men already there.

"What are you doing here?" some chorused in disbelief.

"We went fishing in Ras abu-Gallum, and I didn't have my fishing license and ID."

"Welcome, welcome," one young man said. "Most of us are here for the same reason."

"Hey, Smadar, do you also have lice on your head?"

"I think so."

"If you've been in jail, and you have head lice, you are a real Bedouin."

Early in the evening the master sergeant escorted me from the cell to the office of the military governor, glowering behind his imposing desk. When I entered he murmured to the redhead, "She even smells like one."

"I hear that you are the one behind all this media coverage of the nude hippie beaches."

I realized then that the fishing license was just an excuse to get me for disclosing to a well-respected Israeli journalist this governor's extracurricular activities, selecting one-night stands from among the nude Scandinavian blondes on the beaches.

"And we here in the military government don't like journalists. And I'm sure the Bedouin don't like them either."

"Well, sir, I hope you are aware of the fact that they are Muslim, and I know that they sent you several petitions asking you to erect signs prohibiting nudity, but you gave no response."

"You know they are making money out of this too."

"But at what cost to their culture?"

"Are you on their side, or your own people's side?"

"I would rather not answer that, sir," I whispered politely, amazed that I dared to say even that much.

"Get her out of here," he barked at the redhead.

Back in the cell, I was so relieved to find my fieldnotes still in my little bundle. I asked the men if anyone had messed with them while I was gone.

"No, I don't think they care about that sort of thing," one said.

That whole night I couldn't sleep a wink, anxious about what they were going to do to me. My skin itched from salt and sweat and sunburn. I longed for a shower. Early in the morning, a burly policeman with a big mustache opened the cell and declared me free. I walked out into the brilliant sun with nothing but my bundle of sleeping bag, camera, and fieldnotes. A group of Bedouin men sweeping the streets smiled broadly when they saw me. One man, when he

Image not available.

The daily coastal Israeli military patrol, Nuweb`at Mzeina

discovered I had no money, gave me his whole day's pay for the bus to Dahab. "Go to your father in Dahab," he said. "I hope they kept your share of the fish for you."

I arrived in Dahab at noon, and finally had a good meal and a good "shower"cold sweet water poured from a twentyliter jerrycan into a tin can and then over my body, along with soap and shampoo. By evening the family of my uncle/father, and the families of two of my fellow fishermen, were slaughtering goats for a feast to thank God for my return.

"I saved your share of the fish for you," said my adoptive father.

"But they are yours. You never want money from me, or anything else."

"Three months from now, we are going to go to Wadi Firan to exchange dried fish for dates. Bring this fish, and people will give you dates."

From then on, I had the full trust of all the peopleevery Mzeini in the South Sinai knew the story of "the night when Smadar was in jail."

In spite of the various tests of me, which were only to be expected, from the beginning of my fieldwork I had benefited from the generous tradition of Mzeini hospitality. Although the tradition was that a person was a guest for only three days, I felt that in my case this time period was unduly extended. When I protested, many said I was not a guest because I was working daily to help both the men and the women with important chores.

I wanted to compensate the old man for having me in his hut, but he refused. I tried leaving money for him in his pocket, or in the little food can used as the family kitty, or I would leave it in the place they hid the transister radio when they were not home. But whenever I left money for him, I would find it neatly folded back in my backpack, usually inside a sock.

A great opportunity to pay him back came when his prized Seiko watch stopped, and on one of my trips back to Tel Aviv, I took it for repair to the main Seiko certified service center. After this, other Mzeinis asked me to take their watches for repair, and I gladly did it. I also paid all expenses to take him and his wife, daughters, sons, and their spouses on trips to visit my family and to pray at the al-Aqsa mosque in Jerusalem (the third-holiest site for Muslims). We also went to the movies, to the circus, and to cafes, and I bought him and his wife prescription eyeglasses. While in Jerusalem, I discovered that my old adoptive mother craved frozen chickens and chocolate cakes. Thereafter, when I traveled back to Dahab from my occasional visits to the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, I always brought her a Viennese chocolate cake from a Jerusalem bakery and picked up some frozen chickens at the local supermarket in Eilat. Also on my visits up north, I visited Mzeinis who were lonely in Israeli hospitals and really appreciated seeing me. I also bought all sorts of toys for the kids and cosmetics for the women, especially their favorite Revlon shampoo and colorful hair pins. I hoped this would reciprocate somewhat for the way the people opened their homes and hearts to me. Even after I left for Berkeley in 1979, the Mzeinis of Dahab felt free to occasionally call my grandmother and my friends in Jerusalem and invite themselves up for a couple of nights to attend Friday prayer at the al-Aqsa mosque.

In the fall of 1978, my fourth year of fieldwork, I started applying to graduate schools to continue my studies in anthropology. Many Mzeinis were baffled.

"Why do you need to travel all the way to America to write about us?" asked the old man's eldest daughter.

"Well," her mother responded, "everything else comes from America, so the book on us will too."

In late August 1979, ten days before I left the Sinai, a cargo ship bound for Saudi Arabia made a navigational error and ended up in the Gulf of Suez, where it ran into one of the coral reefs near al-Tur. To lighten their load, the hysterical Italian crew hurled overboard all sorts of esoteric gourmet delicacies: frozen Cornish game hens complete with their liversa great Bedouin treatneatly tucked inside in plastic pouches bearing mysterious Cyrillic script; from France, canned champignons, La Vache Qui Rit cheese, and purple sugar candies that looked like violets; huge apples, the size of cantaloupes, from the Po River Valley in Italy; commercial quantity cans of sumptuous feta cheese from Bulgaria; and plaid cans of Scottish shortbread. Like all the other Mzeinis, I rushed to grab these gifts from the sea for my extended adoptive family. I swam out to the ship with the men and later sorted the stuff with the women. For modesty's sake, I had swum in my clothes, but because they took so long to dry, I got pneumonia.

My temperature was over 40Chot enough to cook on, said the old man, who then, in spite of my protests, went to fetch the South African Jewish doctor, a scuba-diving accident specialist, from the nearby Israeli settlement of Di-Zahav. The doctor ordered me to take twenty erythromycin pills per day. I lay there helpless, knowing I had to be on the other side of the world in a week, while the people kept bringing me unheard-of delicacies like lobster broth with French champignons and melted Bulgarian feta. People took turns staying with me in shifts, so I was never alone. They read from the Qur'an for my recovery and brought several traditional healers who tied amulets around my neck, flicked water on me from a holy bowl, and threw smoky blankets over me to make me cough up mucus from my lungs. Finally I had only two days to pack. I had to be in Berkeley before the beginning of the academic year.

"Those Westerners feel the urge to go to America even if they are very sick," observed the old man's second cousin.

One of my adoptive brothers insisted on accompanying me to the airport in Eilat for my flight to Tel Aviv. He hired a Mercedes taxi,

and from the moment I got in, I cried and cried. At the airport I was so distraught, and my adoptive brother was so protective, that he managed to talk his way through every armed Israeli guard at all four security checkpoints, accompanying me to the very door of the propeller-driven aircraft. I was the last to climb the squeaky, rickety steel staircase to this civilian plane. Among all these suspicious military officials and security guards, watching out particularly for Arabs like my brother, he said his last words to me: "I am afraid they are going to kill you there in America. I am afraid you are going to die from all those serial rapists and murderers we keep hearing about on the radio. Will you ever get back here in one piece?" I last glimpsed him wiping his tears on the sleeve of his caftan. It was the only time I ever saw him cry.

The most precious piece of luggage I took with me to Berkeley was a large vinyl duffel bag weighing around thirty kilograms. I clung to it as Isaac Stern must have gripped his Stradivarius. Every time I changed planes, I had to have a furious argument with the airplane ground staff when I refused to check it with the luggage. I was a prime suspectstill tanned very dark olive, wearing around my neck all sorts of amulets written in Arabic that Mzeini women had given me for good luck, and destined for Berkeley.

"Open this bag," they demanded.

When everything was on the table, the security person looked at me in total shock. "What are all these notebooks, slides, negatives, and tapes about?" One even went so far as to suggest that I was trying to start a new cult.

"This is four years' worth of research materials on the 5,000 Mzeina Bedouin of the Sinai desert."

"Whaat? Who?"

"You know, those nomads with camels who live in the desert of the Middle East."

The airport officials looked at each other doubtfully. "Well, after all, she is headed for the university at Berkeley," came the usual shrug. So I got the benefit of the doubt, and with it permission to cling to my data.

Deciphering the Field and Trying on Theories

My first year as a graduate student, I did all my course work, but spent every free moment indexing my fieldnotes. I gradually noticed that, in addition to the mass of data that made perfect anthropological sense, I had a fascinating body of enigmatic data, which I could not interpret. This data consisted of verbatim transcripts of arguments that led to the sudden eruption of solo performances, not only by people in leadership positions, like the sheikhs, ex-smugglers, and the Symbolic Battle Coordinator, but also by oddball characters like old women, madwomen, and fools like the mime who opened this chapter. Although I had not started my fieldwork with a focused proposal to study any particular aspect of Mzeina culture, I had plenty of conventional data, enough for several different books. But the enigmatic sequence of collective everyday argument giving way to solo performance of a personal narrative drew me like a magnet. I read the data over and over again, each time through the optics of a different theory, but they still resisted interpretation.

Typecasting. In the spring of 1979 I read Don Handelman's (1979) article "Is Naven Ludic?: Paradox and the Communication of Identity." In that article Handelman discussed the concept of "symbolic type"a character enacting a certain persona, at times costumed and masked, who appears during the transformation from the linear flow of regular time to the cyclical flow of ritual or play time (cf. Leach 1961), and serves as a catalyst to move the ritual or play from one act to the next (cf. Werbner 1986). Handelman based his analysis of symbolic typifications on Richard Grathoff's theory of "contextual inconsistencies, disruptions of typified patterns of social interactions" (Grathoff 1970:12) that might get resolved in play. Grathoff described sequences where the thematic, motivational, and interpretational relevance of a social situation gradually falls apartwhile still seeming to make sense, it paradoxically stops making sense, because unity of context is lost (Grathoff 1970:24-33). Such situations of anomie (Durkheim 1933:192; cf. McHugh 1968) are fertile ground for the appearance of playful characters, who reduce the context to its essence and therefore enable its reorganization. Handelman describes how this can be accomplished.

The symbolic type structures the thematic field of the situation in

congruence with its own typificationthus it reduces the relevance of other [cultural] elements to only those which are essential to its own appearance. In contrast to other analytic categorizations which appear under a multitude of terms (for example, stereotype, social type, membership category device, social role), the reality of the symbolic type is not subject to mediation or negotiation The symbolic type is its own rationale, its own substantiation of validity. Its non-negotiable attribute permits the symbolic type to rearrange "reality" in keeping with its own image. . . . Because symbolic types are the unmediated embodiments, or the reifications of patterns of abstract ideation . . . there is a sense of absolutism about them which brooks no qualification by elements of less abstract domains of being (Handelman 1979:185-186)6

Were the main actors in my enigmatic data "symbolic types" like these? When they performed their monologues, they were indeed a total embodiment of the inconsistent situation under the shifting military occupations, and therefore able to reorganize it consistently. They did not act from within a ritual frame, however. They erupted with their monologues when an ordinary discussion disintegrated and could not reach a harmonious end. They also moved loosely from being plain persons in routine situations, to being those nonnegotiable abstract total personae that constitute "symbolic types," then back again to ordinary personhood. But were they symbolic? Were they representing the tribe as a whole? Or perhaps, because the military occupation did not allow the tribe to exist as a whole, they existed only as fragments, and that was the reason there was a whole cast of them ordered in a spectrum from the dignified Symbolic Battle Coordinator, at the heart of what was left of the traditional tribe, to madwomen at the outermost margins of the tribe. But their main attribute was not in the domain of sacred action like Native American kachinas and clowns, or Sri Lankan demons (Handelman 1981; Handelman and Kapferer 1980). They were telling fantastic stories of their actual lived experience, such as the story of the Passover 1979 Rock Festival. And these people did not act according to the predetermined script of established cultural performances. Their performances were entirely improvisatory.

Renato Rosaldo has argued that "the concept of culture could barely describe, let alone analyze, flux, improvisation, and heterogeneity. . . . Culture areas . . . indeed are laced with . . . eruptions, where

anthropological and other classifications fail" (Rosaldo 1988:77). He then tells us about his mentors' warnings (which he ultimately rejected): "Ambitious young anthropologists would be well advised to avoid such zones, pockets, and eruptions because they are inhabited by 'people without culture'" (1988:79). And while I was clinging to my (by now not so enigmatic) body of data, some of my mentors and colleagues kept remarking that the Mzeina were "a Bedouin tribe without a Bedouin culture"they were not free-spirited nomads, not even historically. But was this cast of characters a temporary embodiment of the Mzeina Bedouin identity, dramatizing "simulations" (Baudrillard 1983) of what the Mzeinis believed a genuine Bedouin identity ought to be? Or were they embodying the tribe's actual identity, imposed on them by the geopolitical strife?

Going back to my fieldnotes, I discovered I had recorded many traditional stories, poems, and proverbs about heroic or foolish deeds of a pantheon of picturesque textual characters like Sheikhs, Fools, Madwomen, Symbolic Battle Coordinators, and Old Women. Did the charismatic creative individuals who attracted my scholarly curiosity have anything to do with this folkloric repository? If so, how could a person gifted with theatrical talent rise up from the heat of an argument, become such a persona and enact a performance, then become a person again, without referring to any of the traditional stories, but telling his or her own story of contemporary personal experience in the traditional form? And were these just stories? Perhaps the performers were allegorizing fragments of experience from their daily lives into oral texts that connected the tellers' here-and-now to the pantheon of traditional characters' stories reflecting the history of the tribe.

Allegorizing . Allegories are texts telling an individual story to convey a lesson for the whole group, a private story that attempts to represent the collectivity as a whole (De Man 1979:199; Jameson 1986:69).7 Allegory, therefore, is a fragmentary form of inscription simultaneously serving two purposespoetic expression, and didactic-political lamentation of the heroic past, now almost disappeared but to be reincarnated at some point in the eternal future (Benjamin 1977:162; Jameson 1986). It is therefore a "symbolic representation of a moral and political kind" (Benjamin 1977:168; cf. Fineman 1981:29, 31), "heal[ing] the gap between the present and the disappearing past, which without interpretation, would be otherwise irretrievable and foreclosed" (Fineman 1981:29). Allegory combines the

parts to form a consistent whole (De Man 1969). It salvages the ruins of the past by using "figural language" (De Man 1979:188) to fuse them artistically into a unified story. The word allegory itself is composed of allos , a Greek word meaning "other," and agoreuein , "to speak in the agora, " to speak openly in the marketplace or assembly. "Agoreuein" connotes public, open, declarative speech (Fletcher 1964:2). One would expect allegories to be stories that the Self tells about the Other (De Man 1979:191).

The convention in anthropology has been that the Self represents the West, importing to Third World cultures its own scientific methods of inquiry, and the Other is in the Third World and commodified into exotic text (J. Clifford 1986; Said 1989). In this book, however, I have chosen to let the voices of the colonized speak as the Self, revealing their perception of the West as the exotic Other. This presents a paradoxical reversal.

Northrop Frye (1973) has pointed out the connection between allegory and paradox, and has designed a "kind of a sliding scale" of literary formsthe allegorical is the most explicit, while the paradoxical is the most anti-explicit and elusive (Frye 1973:92, 103). How can the Mzeinis make allegories by transforming the paradoxes of their livesyearning to be free-spirited nomads while living among daily realities like foreign military bases on their desert, police searches with dogs, encroaching foreign settlements, nude hippie tourists, and Passover rock festivals?

Stephen Greenblatt (1981) suggests that allegories are themselves paradoxical. His argument would seem quite applicable to the desperate efforts of the Mzeinis to preserve their culture in the face of continual occupation. He maintains that

Allegory arises in periods of loss, periods in which a once powerful theological, political or familial authority is threatened with effacement. Allegory arises then from the painful absence of that which it claims to recover, and, . . . as the paradox of an order built upon its own undoing cannot be restricted to this one discursive mode, indeed, . . . the longing for an origin whose loss is the necessary condition of that longing is the character not only of all discourse but of human existence itself. (xviii)

I argue that the narratives constituting the characters' allegories entail the paradoxes both of the Mzeina and of each individual teller of such narratives. I further argue that such allegorical narratives can temporarily solve the very paradox they constitutethe paradox of

being a cultural text that contains criticism of itself (cf. J. Clifford 1986:119-120). As curious as it may sound, in being a paradox, the allegorical narrative solves itself as a paradox by the very fact of the narrator's explication and redefinition of the paradox for his or her audience. (I will return to this point and amplify it in the concluding chapter, after all the characters have told their allegories.) Therefore these allegories serve as shining examples of how to live with and even exploit the Mzeini paradoxes of life under occupation, in order to relive, if only in story, their identity as Bedouin characters within the tradition of free-spirited nomadism.

Returnings: Fieldwork By A Diasporic Mzeina

Between 1979 and 1985, while I was in Berkeley for graduate school, I kept in contact with my Mzeini adoptive family and many friends by mailing them cassette tapes. In these tapes I described for them the San Francisco Bay Area, the Golden Gate Bridge, the university, the American way of life, andhow could I forget?the history of San Francisco's Haight-Ashbury district and Berkeley's People's Park. So many nude hippies floating around the South Sinai beaches traced their genealogy to the flower children of San Francisco and Berkeley that the Mzeinis were familiar with the names of these cities long before I moved there. In the tapes the Mzeinis sent me, they filled me in on all the gossip about births, marriages, divorces, celebrations, deaths, and the new political realities after the Egyptians took over Dahab in April 1982. Still fearing censorship by the Secret Police, the Mzeinis talked about the new occupier by using the same code language they had used previously to discuss the Israeli occupier. The cassettes just made me want to get back to the Sinai.

Seasoned after two years of formal graduate training in anthropology, I went back to the field in 1981 armed at last with a theoretical hypothesis to test against my already large reservoir of data about the mysterious eruptive solo performances.

"Smadar has come back from the dead!" people exclaimed. "So many Westerners who visited here went to America and were never seen again. But here you are. Thank Allah!"

Meanwhile, half of the field itself was under the rule of a different country. Egypt had recovered the western half of the Sinai from Israel under the Camp David Accord.

But everything still made sense in terms of the Grathoff-Handelman-

Kapferer hypothesis, and on both sides of the temporary border. The "symbolic types" did exist. They did impose their own "liminality" (Turner 1969:94-96) and thus ritualized the banality of everyday life when the conversational flow got stuck, and their performances symbolically protested both the occupying powers, Israel to the east and Egypt to the west. But the people performing these characters were not exactly the "symbolic types" described by Grathoff, Handelman, and Kapferer. They were telling allegories rather than acting out symbols. They were not total metaphors representing the tribe (Fernandez 1974), but rather, metonymies of itfragments that stand for the whole. And as in the case of allegories, these people told their own personal stories to help the tribe reconstitute its Bedouin identity, fragmented by the military occupations. Their repeated efforts were only partially successful, however, because Mzeina tribal identity under occupation was "conjunctural, not essential" (J. Clifford 1988:11). So, due to all these considerations, I hypothesized that the Mzeini characters were allegorical types, rather than "symbolic types." What fully convinced me that my hypothesis was sound was the fact that the characters who were criticizing Israel on the Israeli side of the border had their counterparts across the line who were already criticizing Egypt. Although the occupier had changed, the process of allegorical emergence had not.

The new situation of the Sinai presented new fieldwork problems. After April 1982, when Israel returned the rest of the peninsula to Egypt, the Egyptian government closed the Sinai to any kind of long-term research. From 1985 on, the authorities allowed me to conduct fieldwork for only a month at a time (cf. Lavie and Rouse 1988). Although all the allegories presented here were told under Israeli occupation, I personally witnessed under Egyptian occupation other allegories of the same genre, told by the same cast of Mzeini characters. I do not include any of these here (although I do include many other details about the Egyptian occupation) because I was unable to collect enough allegories told by the various men and women enacting each character type to conflate several of them into a single narrative representative of the type. I felt the textual strategy of conflation was necessary because the personal narrative of each individual-as-type was politically vulnerable and needed the protection of disguise by others of its type. (I will describe the process of conflation in a later section of this chapter.)

In December 1985 I was excited to return to the field with my spouse, Forest Rouse, whom I had met in Berkeley. By that time the

South Sinai was under Egyptian control. I was struck by the fact that the Israeli soldiers and police had been replaced by over three times as many Egyptian police, who were busy monitoring the sparse native population and the few tourists who still came, in spite of police meddling, to lie on the beach and climb Mount Sinai to meditate on the sunrise.

"Isn't the South Sinai now a demilitarized zone?" I asked the local head of the Dahab Police Station.

"Yes," he reassured me. "We don't have any soldiers here like those Israelis didonly military-trained police."

As soon as I introduced Forest to the Mzeinis, I noticed that people started treating me with much more formality than previously. Did this have something to do with the fact that Forest was a genuine foreigner who did not know the language at all and was hesitant with the basic customs in spite of the crash course I gave him and my continued promptings? Or was it perhaps that I was now not only a married adult, though still childless, but also had entered my thirties and had a few gray hairs, a sign of maturity?

After our three guest days, all the pleasantries ended and I could start my fieldwork routine. But I found it curiously difficult to update basic information on subjects like migration and labor patterns. The moment I asked typical anthropological questions, people said, "But you already know all that. You have been here many years. Besides, now you are married." On the other hand, now that I was married, many close friends, women and men alike, were quite curious about the inner workings of my marital relationship and initiated long meandering conversations in which we compared our personal experiences of marriage.

My marriage, however, had not resolved my gender classification ambiguity. At first, out of deference to custom, I avoided the mag`ad, because women of reproductive age were not permitted in the men's club. I was surprised when a boy arrived with a specific request from the older men for me to continue attending the mag`ad as before, and my spouse was welcome also.

The excitement about my marriage and concern about Forest's bout of dysentery overshadowed our usual political musings and bitter criticisms of the past and current military occupations. In subsequent field trips in 1987 and 1988, the same fascination continued with the comparative analysis of personal relationships, but the Egyptians had imposed so many new development programs, rules, and regulations

on the Mzeinis that they were eager to fill me in on all the changes as well as on their detailed interpretations of them.

After thirteen years of ongoing fieldwork, either in the field or through prolific correspondence by audio tape (and still continuing through direct-dial international phone calls), I had a real problem: how was I going to turn this immense mass of data into a text?

On The Politics of Writing Culture

Ethnography is a movement from "subjectively meaningful experiences emanating from our spontaneous life" (Schutz 1962:211) in the field into academic textranging from scribbled fieldnotes to polished, published articles and books. Culture itself can be conceived as a movement from experience, or "what has been lived through" (Brunet 1986:3) in daily life, to social textand here I mean by "text" the most elaborate predesigned formal rituals, scriptures, and other highly stylized, rigidly followed "structural units" (1986:7). Edward Bruner has argued, however, that "there are inevitable gaps between reality, experience, and expression, and the tension among them constitutes a key problematic in anthropology" (1986:7). I argue that this tension, which governs the very movement of both culture and ethnography from experience to text, exists because the movement is both creative and political (cf. K. Dwyer 1982:xviii, 272). The political aspect of the movement tries to tame the creative, but the creative tries to evade the political.

Anthropology is characterized by two "styles of creativity" (Wagner 1981:26). Anthropologists invent not only their scholarly texts, but also the culture they study. Fieldwork itself is "a creative, productive experience" (Wagner 1981:17) in which the culture of the Other is being evoked in text "as a mirror image of our own" (1981:20; cf. Marcus and Fischer 1986:1). As Roy Wagner eloquently argues,

Invention, then, is culture, and it might be helpful to think of all human beings, wherever they may be, as "fieldworkers" of a sort, controlling the culture shock of daily experience through all kinds of imagined and constructed "rules," traditions and facts. The anthropologist makes his experiences understandable (to himself as well as to his society) by perceiving them and understanding them in terms of his own familiar way of life, his Culture. He invents them as "culture." (1981:35-36)

Wagner, however, has overlooked the politics embedded in the process of creating both Culture and Ethnography. For him, "society creates itself sequentially and episodically, as a cosmological harmony" (1981:122), while Bruner argues that because "ethnography is embedded in the political process, dominant narratives are units of power as well as of meaning" (1986:19). The very origins of anthropology are related to Western colonialism, and much anthropological fieldwork is still conducted in politically volatile areas afflicted by its aftermath (Asad 1973; Berreman 1981:77; Fabian 1983; Marcus and Fischer 1986:34). Furthermore, the discourse of social science itself is part of corporate academic culturethe scholar must maneuver within an academic convention of depoliticized objectivity (K. Dwyer 1982:272; Rose 1986, 1987:24-25, 83). Therefore the nature of the anthropological project has been nostalgia, aiming to preserve "the pastoral," the way of life that was, the vanishing primitive, and save it in the text (J. Clifford 1986:112). As C. Wright Mills observed, however,

The very enterprise of social science, as it determines fact, takes on political meaning. In a world of widely communicated nonsense, any statement of fact is of political and moral significance. All social scientists, by the fact of their existence, are involved in the struggle between enlightenment and obscurantism. In a world such as ours, to practice social science is, first of all, the politics of truth. (1959:178)

One might deduce from the above that the creative process immanent in both culture and the ethnography that invents it is leashed by the fact that both are embedded in global political processes and the academic politics of textual representation. Perhaps not only Wagner (1981) but other ethnographers who view culture from an interpretive perspective have overlooked this political embeddedness (Marcus and Fischer 1986:84) because "culture works very effectively to make invisible and even 'impossible' the actual affiliations that exist between the world of ideas and scholarship, on the one hand, and the world of brute politics, corporate and state power, and military force on the other" (Said 1983:8).

Ethnographic Rhetoric. How was I going to textualize my field experience? Three major problems impeded the movement of my field experience into ethnographic text. One was the fact that, because I opposed the military occupations, I found it impossible to maintain the "scientific objective gaze." Along with this, I also found that I had

to impose some measure of self-censorship on the textualization process for the safety of the Mzeinis who opened their lives to me (cf. Myers 1986:140; Swedenburg 1989). The second problem was that, when one produces a rigorous text about another culture, one has to assume a structured distance between the field subject, the scholarly writing process, and the peer reading and reviewing of the final text (Strathern 1987). But I was interested in "underscor[ing] . . . the ongoingness of life and the open character of ongoing actions . . . [in experiences] arising directly out of the flow of life, with little or no explicit preparation" (Abrahams 1986:49, 63). I wished the text to maintain this feeling of immediacy, flux, open-endedness, and fragmentariness and occurred when it was still in the experiential stage.

The third problem was that I did not want to speak only in my own scholarly voice. Since I had the final authority over what went into the text, I wanted to find a way to engage my voice with the voices of Mzeini men and women, while avoiding the poetically powerful exoticizations typical of the Western multivocal depictions of Other worlds (Fischer 1988:7; Hill 1987:94). I also wanted the text to be written in such a way that it could be translated back into Arabic, its language of origin, and be read by those about whom it was written (cf. K. Dwyer 1982; Price 1983:21-26; Rose 1987:5).

The solution to the voice problem was to transcribe, whenever appropriate to my purpose, a polyphony of voices, including my own, directly out of the raw material of my diary-style fieldnotes. In all chapters except this one, the historical review, and the conclusion, I chose to transcribe very strictly, as theater-script-like polyphonic dialogues, what the women or men said to better show the interactive, conversational process leading to the emergence of the allegorical personae. When necessary, I accompanied these lines by stage directions straight from my diary, to describe the pace, tone, mood, and gestures of the participants. In the shorter vignettes, however, I simply transcribed the speakers' words in quotation marks, and set them as dialogue within conventional narrative and descriptive prose. Since "the ethnographer is a midwife, as it were, who delivers and articulates what is vernacularly expressed" (Marcus 1986:180), I felt that these textual strategies would preserve the immediacy and flux of the original lived experience. I interrupted the dialogic flow only to explain the Mzeinis' everyday assumptions that might be unfamiliar to readers.

I translated and transcribed into English many of the stormy conversations that preceded the allegorical emergences of the seven characters who are the focus of this book. But I kept my ethnographic

authority by carefully selecting what lines of dialogue were to be included in the text. To protect the Mzeinis' identities, I changed the names of people and sometimes the names of places, but not times or dates, because many of these had political or religious significance, especially around the time of the Camp David Accord, or Muslim holidays. I also conflated fragments of several different dialogues on the same subject, to make it even harder to trace particular quotations to particular individuals. In addition, five of the seven characters' allegories consist of two or three conflated fragments from performances by different individuals acting the character's role at different times. In spite of these measures taken to protect the Mzeinis, every phrase spoken in the dialogue was spoken by an actual person.

In the case of one character, when I wanted to describe an organizer of the Sinai narcotics smuggling period (1952-1972), I felt quite insecure in selecting details, because I feared that some ex-smugglers might suffer retribution. So I hiked to the ex-smuggler's oasis, weighed down by a backpack full of all my indexed notes about smuggling. Together we conjured up out of my field data a fictional smuggler, an invented character who had in him many elements of a typical ex-smuggler, even though he was heavily censored by our joint effort. I include this composite as one of the seven characters to be described, interpreted, and analyzed in this book (cf. Schutz 1962:40-47).

During my 1987 visit to the South Sinai, I read large portions of the ethnographic text in progress to some of the Mzeinis who had participated in the events and asked them to criticize it and tell me if they had any reservations about it. In 1988 I read to the Mzeinis some different and nearly finished chapters of my work, but anonymously, along with other Israeli texts about their lives, in order to elicit their critique (Lavie and Rouse 1988). Comparing my work to the other ethnographies, the old man said, "All these people write about us, about what they think we are, except onethe one that just writes us, exactly as we talk, and laugh, and gesture [with our hands], just as we are." From his wily smile and a process of elimination, I deduced that the one that just wrote them was I.

In the course of the writing, I noticed that my authorial voice was gradually splitting into two antiphonal voices, speaking for two distinct parts of my Self. First was Smadar, the ordinary human woman, participating in the lived experience of the Mzeina. It was possible for Smadar to gradually merge herself into the tight-knit family and friendship networks of the Mzeinis because since infancy she had been surrounded by scores of aunts, uncles, cousins, and friends of the

family on her Yemeni mother's sidean Arab social construct with fluid boundaries around people's selves. I could not conceive of my basic relationships with the Mzeina as professional "informant-researcher" relationships, because to me the Mzeinis were dear (adoptive) relatives and friends (cf. Joseph 1988:34). I refer to this Smadar throughout the text by using the personal pronoun "I." Then there was the Western-trained anthropologist, observing the activities in the field as if from a distance and comparing them to other parts of her data and to other cultures she had read about in anthropological books and articles. In hindsight I can trace the anthropologist's self not only to my academic training but also to my father's Northern European roots. Being from a small family himself (most of which was exterminated in the ghettos of Lithuania), my father brought me up to appreciate rugged individualism and rigorous critical inquiry. Throughout the text I refer to my individuated scholarly self as "the anthropologist." Sometimes in the text, Smadar and the anthropologist converse with each other. At times, the anthropologist instructs Smadar how to conduct herself and her research to optimize the rate of data return, but at other times, Smadar has to remind the anthropologist that there is much more to the "field" than fieldwork.

Another problem in textualizing the field experience was verb tense. Traditionally, anthropological data, interpretation, and cross-cultural analysis are all written in the present tense. But since what was true of the Mzeina in 1975 or 1985 may not be eternally "true" of them, I have chosen to use the past tense whenever I provide anthropological interpretation or analysis. All the dialogic narratives, however, and some other narrations of the field experience, are in the present tense because I want the theater-like script to preserve the immediacy of the field. On the whole, I hope this ethnography "will be a text of the physical, the spoken, and the performed, an evocation of quotidian experience, and palpable reality that uses everyday speech to suggest what is ineffable, not through abstraction, but by means of the concrete. It will be a text to read not with the eyes alone, but with the ears in order to hear 'the voices of the pages'" (Tyler 1986:136).

Mzeina Allegories of Bedouin Identity Under Occupation

The Mzeini paradox of identity was that they could not maintain an independent Bedouin identity beyond the fragments incarnated in allegory, because they were disenfranchised on their own land by continual military occupations. This paradox of identity rarely surfaced in ordinary daily conversation, but if it did, the conversation quickly turned into a heated debate. The ironic paradox was articulated only in the presence of those charismatic creative individuals who might fuse themselves, as persons, with the persona of one of the seven allegory-telling characters. Perhaps the creative individuals served as catalysts for such articulation because each of them was, in him- or herself, a metonymy, reifying the paradoxical tribal reality under occupation. Perhaps they also served as safety valves, because they could playfully act out the tribe's pent-up bitterness about the harshness and absurdity of Mzeini daily life.

Whenever the paradox of Mzeini Bedouin identity was indeed thematized, a second set of paradoxes invariably emerged. Characters belonging to the center of social acceptability, such as the Sheikh, the Symbolic Battle Coordinator, and the Ex-Smuggler, paradoxically found that, due to the external political-economic situation, they could make only marginal contributions to the daily flow of Mzeina life. Their stories expressed the fact that storytelling itself was the most effective form of power they could exert. On the other hand, oddball characters like the Fool, the Madwoman, the Old Woman, and The One Who Writes Us, who were on the margins of Mzeini social acceptability, paradoxically were able to enact allegories that palpably expressed the central issues of Mzeini identity under occupation.

When these two sets of paradoxesthe Mzeina vis--vis the occupation, and the character's centrality/marginality vis--vis the Mzeinaarose, a person who might enact an allegorical persona sometimes chose to remain silent, and the group might even disperse. At other times, however, such a person would spontaneously speak up, fusing him- or herself with the persona of his or her character-type, and the allegory-telling voice emerged from those fragile interstitial moments of bitter silence that often follow a heated debate. As a liminal persona, who paradoxically conjoined the Bedouin Self with the occupier's Other, the person-cum-persona was able to transcend world politics by means of local poetics, and thus succeeded in forcing

the audience to confront hard truths that recomposed the way they conceptualized the political situation outside the framework of the performance. Playfully transforming a quotidian event from his or her own life into an allegory, the teller recounted it following the conventions of the traditional Mzeina "once-upon-a-time" genre of tales, and thus became an interlocutor with the tribal pantheon of Sheikhs, Symbolic Battle Coordinators, Madwomen, Fools, Old Women, Ex-Smugglers, and Anthropologists from the reservoir of communal memoryallegorical types belonging to the tribal folkloric genres that differentiated the tribe's history from that of its occupiers.

Michael Meeker has suggested that "the Bedouin narrative provides a more insightful analysis of the character of the tribe . . . than can be found in the writings of anthropologists" (1979:92). I agree, and after reviewing the recent history of military occupations of the Sinai in chapter 2, I present in chapters 3 through 9 the narratives of the Mzeinis' daily lived experience, which I shared with them in a "we relationship" (Schutz 1962:253, 316), from my awkward position of being caught up in a culture I was rigorously trying to observe.

Each chapter from 3 to 9 starts with a brief anthropological interpretation of the institutional and situational paradoxes forming the background of the character's emergence into his or her allegorical performance. Several vignettes follow, the main one of which is the script of an argument that leads to an individual person's taking upon him- or herself the allegory-telling persona of his or her particular character-type. Each of the vignettes reveals how deeply the experience of being occupied has permanently penetrated even the most intimate spaces of Mzeini private lives. For the Mzeinis, being occupied has become an inner state of mind and soul.

Chapter 10 is an abstract theoretical analysis of the dynamics of typecasting and allegorizing associated with the performances in the previous chapters. Using examples from these, I discuss the poetics arising out of the military occupations that shape Mzeini Bedouin identity. I conclude by arguing that the narratives told by these seven characters may be seen as a processual rise and fall of Bedouin identity in the form of allegory. I hope to show how the seven allegories revealed and temporarily solved the paradoxes immanent in both the structure of each character-cum-persona, and in the Mzeina political relation to their occupiers. I further argue that each character's allegorical performance, because it imposed a nonnegotiable "ritual process" (Turner 1969) on the audience, provided a set of specific answers to existential and organizational dilemmas characteristic of Mzeina

life under occupation. This reconstruction of tribal tradition through allegorical performance salvaged the Bedouin identity of the Mzeina from the cultural infringement of Israeli and Egyptian political and economic forces, which tribesmembers could confront directly only at great risk to their lives. The Mzeinis spontaneously transcended their suffering from global political strife by creating local improvised performances that bravely criticized both their occupiers and themselves, thereby enacting, by and for themselves, their own poetics of the military occupation.

Continues...

Excerpted from The Poetics of Military Occupation: Mzeina Allegories of Bedouin Identity Under Israeli and Egyptian Rule by Smadar Lavie Copyright 1990 by Smadar Lavie. Excerpted by permission.
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Edition details

• Publisher: University of California Press
• Publication date: 1990
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0520068807
• ISBN 13: 9780520068803
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 410