geraldine1

Place and culture in touristic Wadi Ramm,
southern Jordan: Issues of representations, social change, knowledge and power.

Géraldine CHATELARD 1

In between two Palestinian uprisings on its western flank, the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan had just enough time to sign a peace treaty with Israel in 1994 and to start implementing some of its clauses. Among other benefits, the new regional stability ensuing from the treaty was expected to allow the tourism industry to thrive and compensate for the sharp decline in revenue from external rents, in particular remittances from Jordanian workers that had had to leave oil producing countries during the 1991 Gulf war (Hazbun 2001a; 2001b). In very little time, tourism became Jordan's main source of foreign currencies (Barakat 1998; Kelly 1998). But renewed Palestinian discontent was mounting on the other side of the Jordan river and, in the Autumn 2000, the so-called al-Aqsa Intifadah turned the Near East into a tourist's nightmare once again. The numbers of arrivals in Jordan dropped by 40% compared to the previous Spring season. However short the span of time during which tourism took the lead in the economy of Jordan, this rapid development had strong and visible environmental and social consequences. This is particularly true for those rural areas that had previously been little touched by mass tourism and became the target of large state-sponsored tourism development projects, as was the case in the steppic arid area of Wadi Ramm, located some 40 km to the northeast of the Red Sea port of Aqaba, and populated by Bedouins who had only started sedentarising at the beginning of the 1970's.

In the Hashemite Kingdom, primary tourist attractions relate to ancient history as is reflected in the name of the Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities (MTA), the governmental body in charge of tourism and site management and development at the national level. At the time when it exerted its sovereignty over the Palestinian West Bank (1948-1967), the Jordanian State had developed mainly Christian religious sites in East Jerusalem and Bethlehem, above all targeting Western pilgrims (Bowman 1991). After the loss of the major sites to Israel, the Jordanian authorities refocused on the East Bank of the Jordan river and attempted to diversify the type of tourist experience the country could offer (Kelly 1998). Following a new trend of heritage-oriented tourism, the MTA put efforts into the development of the Nabatean city of Petra and attracted foreign visitors with a reasonably good choice of other archaeological sites2. In the mid-1980's, other forms of international tourism were emerging, such as adventure or nature-oriented travel3. At the time, the MTA made early attempts at following the trend by investigating the potentials of some natural areas but without serious efforts at marketing. Among a restricted circle of Westerners, and mainly by word of mouth or though specialised magazines, Wadi Ramm started to become known as a mountain climbing, hiking and camping site. A handful of specialised European tour operators pioneered adventure travel to Jordan, coupling hikes and cultural visits in Petra with treks and camping in Wadi Ramm. The MTA set up some basic tourism infrastructure there and, by reviving the story of Lawrence of Arabia, found a plausible historical context for Wadi Ramm that could make it also attractive to heritage tourists. The rapid development of the 1990's led many local actors in the public and private sectors to seek to "exploit opportunities by commodifying more of Jordanian geography and cultural heritage" (Hazbun 2001b: 2). The MTA adopted a strategy aiming both at inducing traditional visitors to extend their average 4-day stay, and at attracting larger numbers of "new" tourists by promoting more aggressively those selected areas that could appeal to nature or adventure lovers (Kelly 1998). By means of tourism projects, the Jordanian authorities were also promising economic development to rural areas in the south of the country (Hazbun 2001b), especially those populated by Bedouins who, since the 1970's, had been progressively marginalised in favour of the urban middle class (Hamarneh 1987; Bocco and Chatelard 2001).

Following the lead of the few European tour operators that were already marketing the area under the label "the Jordanian desert", the Jordan Tourism Board and local travel agencies started systematically promoting Wadi Ramm to foreign tour operators. In the meantime, the MTA had undertaken to seriously equip and develop the area for tourism. As early as 1996, most Western tour operators were including in their mostly heritage-oriented tours of Jordan short half-day visits "to the desert" by 4X4 Jeep. More groups of adventure tourists were coming for trips of several days on foot, horse or camel back. The number of climbers increased. Wadi Ramm became a must for independent travellers touring Jordan or the Middle East. In 1998, the area was declared a nature reserve and ecotourism became the core of the Jordanian authorities' development strategies for Wadi Ramm. In doing so, Jordan was merely following a trend general in Third World countries since the 1980's, fuelled by the policies of supranational donor agencies like the World Bank. They were now advocating so-called "sustainable development" and tying up financial aid to projects of nature, or rather "biodiversity", conservation (Mowforth and Munt 1998).

The Middle East's limited part in the global economy of tourism4 is met by a comparable neglect in edited volumes or in such specialised academic journals as Annals of Tourism Research. If one excludes Egypt, the major Arab destination country in the Eastern Mediterranean, Israel/Palestine has been the object of the bulk of research while Jordan has just started getting some attention, with studies that either explore the economic potentialities of tourism development (Barham 1998; Kelly 1998), or look at practical socio-economic or socio-political effects (Shoup 1995; Hazbun 1998, 2001a and 2001b; Brand 2000; Brand 2001). Putting Jordan in perspective in the more general context of tourism in the Middle East, W. Hazbun has recently questioned the theoretical assumption that globalisation erodes state control over national territory. From the perspective of political geography, he concluded his paper by stating that:
"(...) the physical and cultural space tourists now inhabit in the Middle East is not the product of an unchanging natural or historical landscape, but instead it is an ever changing political construction, the product of struggles between state, societal and transnational actors over the control of transnational flows, the use of space, and the nature of cultural representations". (Hazbun 2001a: 15)

Since the ground-breaking work of J. Urry (1990) on the "tourist gaze", numerous anthropologists have dealt with issues of representations in tourism. In their overwhelming majority, they have been concerned with three main topics and/or with their interconnection: the construction of the touristic image of the place of destination, the clash between tourists' representations and their actual experience, the process by which reality in the place of destination (as it is expected to be experienced by tourists) is modified to have it fit its touristic image. On the other hand, there have been much less attempts at studying how individuals in a host population react to the globalised, stereotypical, touristic representations of the place they inhabit and of their culture as these representations bring about local social change (see Evans-Pritchard 1989; King, Pizam and Milman 1993; Erb 2000; Joseph and Kavoori 2001; several essays in Picard and Wood 1997).

Taking the approach of social and cultural anthropology, the aim of this paper is to look at how various representational systems and modes interact with each other when the logics of international and national tourism development come to meet the vernacular versions of place and identity. This process is studied by describing, analysing and criticising the struggle between competing representations of place and local culture in Wadi Ramm, an area not as desert as Western visitors expect it to be, inhabited by a Bedouin community not as "traditional" as portrayed by the tourist media and whose inhabitants harbour their own ideas about place and group identity.

In the first part of this paper, the main concepts used are defined, the theoretical approach is discussed, and I justify some aspects of the representational mode I have chosen in the ethnographic parts of this work5. The second part reviews the main images that are used to market Wadi Ramm, how they are constructed as representations, disseminated, enacted by middlemen (guides and other service providers) and the reasons why they do not always fit tourist experiences. I also give details on the social and environmental engineering (development projects) Jordanian public or semi-public institutions have undertaken to match reality (as experienced by tourists) more closely with the touristic representations they promote. In a last part, I ask how imported images, interactions with tourists and middlemen, and engineering influence the Bedouin inhabitants' own perception of place and collective self, and the representations they make of these, now, commercial items for tourist use. I look at how the Bedouins' adjustment of perceptions and behaviours to touristic representations affect their social relations also in non-touristic contexts. I read this mainly though their attempts at constructing touristic and non-touristic interactions as two separated spatial and ethical spheres. Finally, I assess the limitations Bedouins face when trying to resist or modify tourists' and institutional agents' representations and to convey different visions of what it means to be a Bedouin in Wadi Ramm.

All along, I am concerned with the constant interplay between representations and social reality, that feed, fight and shape each other, a metaphor illustrating that touristic representations are not just nice images to look at in a tour operator's brochure, but that they are power-laden and instruments of a social change that, in guise of development projects, can become a form of neo-colonial domination.

I. Tourism, Bedouins and ethnography: systems of representations and power relations

Representation and power in tourism

Tourism can be defined as a particular form of capitalist industry which does not only sell commodities but worlds of meaning and experience marketed by creating specific, idealised representations of the place of destination, and in particular of it's cultural and natural features. The "gaze" is at the centre of the tourist's experience, as J. Urry (1990; 1995) convincingly argued, and tourist destinations are chosen to be gazed upon because there is an anticipation of intense pleasure, either on a different scale or involving different senses from those customarily encountered. R. E. Wood (1998) further points at tourism as oriented towards the experience of difference in a domesticated, packaged form, and primarily structured and evaluated by aesthetic criteria. As C. Ryan has shown in the Australian context (2000), even ecotourism, which claims to enhance tourists' awareness of ecological issues, often constitutes more of a hedonist than cognitive experience, a fact I. Munt had already provocatively questioned in the title of his 1994 article: "Eco-tourism or ego-tourism?".

The tourist gaze, in its anticipation phase, is constructed, developed and sustained through a variety of non-tourist practices, in particular the consumption of such written or audio-visual media as films, newspapers, TV programmes, tour operator's brochures, web sites, magazines, records and videos (Urry 1990). Pictorial or written media all frame reality in one way or another, therefore simplifying and often stereotypifying it. Moreover, they create representations that do not always correspond to what tourists experience on the ground and want to take back home in the form of their own filmic or pictorial representations. Disappointed customers may then come home complaining about the gap between the product they have bought and the one they were sold. If widespread, dissatisfaction may have a negative impact on the tourism economy in the place of destination by preventing other visitors from coming as the reputation of a good or bad "holiday spot" is also largely created by word of mouth or, today, the Internet. The various agents in the tourism industry thus have a vested interest in making sure that the experience they sell corresponds to the tourists' expectations, that is to the mental representations those have of their destination before they take the trip. If this is not the case, an adjustment has to be made, either by re-framing the existing reality to present aspects that were previously excluded from the various media and to make them desirable, or by acting on aspects of reality in the place of destination so as to render them more congruent with their touristic representations. In the latter case, the tourist gaze assumes an obvious performative dimension, i.e. a capacity to translate phenomenological aspects into pragmatic and topographic realities.

While M. Mowforth and I. Munt argue that "tourism is a way of representing the world to ourselves and to others" (1998: 1) because it has become one of the main channels shaping Western world views, D. Harvey also suggests that the "eye is never neutral and many battles are fought over the 'proper' way to see" (1989: 1). In the activity of tourism, competing representations, and interpretations, of the visited place and population are at play not only between various actors within the First World but also with agents in the destination countries of the Third World. To quote M. Mowforth and I. Munt at length:
"(...) tourists interpret and represent their experiences in ways that may be fundamentally opposed to the experience of those being visited; and these interpretations and representations will differ between different types of tourists. Even the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund have a particular geographical imagination of the Third World. Their representation of tourism and sustainability may also differ sharply from those of local communities in the countries where the policies of these supranational institutions are applied" (1998: 7).

Acknowledging the performative dimension of representations and the dynamic of competition between different representational systems leads to consider the power relations between the various actors involved in the tourism encounter. It can be argued that, in the context under study, power relations between some of these actors are fundamentally unequal because of the huge economic imbalance between, on the one hand, Western tourists and the local Bedouins, and, on the other hand, Jordanian public institutions and various transnational agencies such as large international tourist firms or the World Bank. This imbalance results in unilateral dependency of the Bedouins upon the rents extracted from the tourists, and of the Jordanian State upon resources generated by private and World Bank investments in the tourism sector. S.-O. Cheong and M. L. Miller (2000) may make a "Foucauldian observation" by remarking that in tourism, like in any other social interaction, power flow is not one-sided and that tourists also depend on the Bedouins for a number of touristic activities in Wadi Ramm, just as the World Bank relies upon the political role of Jordan to keep some measure of stability in the Middle East conducive to international business. Yet, I would answer that, by and large, neither Western visitors nor the World Bank need Jordan to sustain their existence as tourists or as an international financial institution. The Bedouins are more dependant, whose social fabric would otherwise be disrupted as they would have to migrate to town in search of hypothetical jobs at a time when roughly 25% of the Jordanian labour force is unemployed in the aftermath of the IMF-imposed Structural Adjustment Plan, and after the economy has had to absorb the man-power that came back from the Gulf following the 1991 war (Brand 1992). As for the Jordanian regime, that has made economic redistribution a condition of its survival, it has very few other alternatives than to rely on international donor and development agencies to promote economic growth in a country devoid of natural resources, under-industrialised and shaken by the sharp decline in remittances and aid since the late 1980's (Ibid. ; Luciani 1990).

Despite this statement on the structural imbalance of power between the agents in Wadi Ramm, I follow Bowman who warns that "By presenting the 'host' as a victim to whom the 'guest' does things, one perpetuates the modernist assumption that non-western peoples are objects upon which western projects are inscribed" (Bowman 1996: 83). To solve the apparent contradiction between these two interpretations of power and domination, De Boeck (1994) proposes that the key binary categories in post-colonial theorisation like hegemony and resistance, or the state versus the civil society, be complemented with aspects of localised strategies of adaptation, accommodation and collaboration as dynamic interaction acting both at the local and global levels. This approach seems particularly adapted to tourism as it is an activity substantially shaped by brokers or middlemen (Cohen 1985) who are located both in, and across, the First and Third Worlds. Their necessary mediation implies a rethinking of the relation between such binary categories as the tourists and the locals, donor agencies and recipient states, international investors and rentier economies.

As Bowman shows in detail in the case of tour guides in Israel/Palestine (1991), brokers come to play a major role in shaping touristic representations of a place, mainly in constructing or sustaining the gaze and in making sure that tourists' experiences meet their expectations. These brokers are numerous and their mediation is more or less direct, i.e. more or less obvious for tourists. Those whose action is less directly visible are public sector agents such as planners, politicians, decision-makers in the government-operated tourism sector, private sector investors and large international firms, supranational agencies such as the World Tourism Organisation, the World Bank, the UNESCO, etc, but also the producers of touristic written and pictorial media. On the other hand, tourists in organised tours, who account for most of the visitors to Jordan, have a transactional relation with a tour operator at home, and sometimes have direct contact with employees in a travel agency. During all their tour, they are accompanied by a tour leader, generally of their own nationality and in any case not a local of the country visited. For the tourists, the tour leader personifies the tour operator and provides group leadership, but the best part of his/her role is to deal with the local service providers during the tour and solve problems. Tour leaders are a first category of direct brokers mediating between tourists and the country they visit. They themselves depend on other levels of mediation: in Jordan, most tour leaders speak English, not Arabic, and heavily depend on their local, Jordanian licensed guides to act as middlemen (there are very few women in the profession) in a series of circumstances where the vernacular language or cultural codes are needed. Most of the time, it is through that multi-level mediation that tourists enter in contact with other brokers such as bus drivers, hotel and restaurant staff, vendors in souvenir shops, etc.. Jordanian law requires that a licensed guide accompany any tour group above 9 people that makes use of commercial transport (coaches or mini-buses). The vast majority of tourists who visit Jordan therefore get their main verbal/enacted representation of the country they visit though licensed guides who produce a variously rich and coherent narrative of geography, history, culture, religion, society, economy and politics. This is if the guide speaks their language. Otherwise, the tour leader will have to mediate a more or less comprehensive translation in which s/he will have scope to interfere with the system of representation. As in European 19th Century literary accounts of travels to the Levant (Moussa 1995), multi-level mediated communication, and not direct involvement in social interaction with the local population, then becomes the main way in which tourists apprehend local reality.

In Jordan, as I will try to make apparent later, a number of binary power relations between direct and less direct brokers, and between brokers and non-brokers (in particular between some Bedouins and some tourists, or Bedouins as a group and government institutions) are less unequal and less rigid than the ones described above. It is precisely because of this flexibility that negotiation is feasible and that local representations of place and identity can/could be mediated to global actors such as the international tourism media or the World Bank. Bedouins, I will argue, have some scope for contesting the external imposition of social and ecological changes derived from tourists’ or World Bank's representations but only to a limited extent and not through direct confrontation.

Representation of the Bedouins, agency and humour

If the anthropology of tourism in the Arab Middle East is still in its early stages, ethnographies of Bedouin societies have a long tradition behind them. Ever since the days when Europeans started venturing inside the Levantine mainland and Arabia, Bedouins have always been part of the picture (Pouillon 1996). Being recurrent characters in Orientalist writings, Bedouins have been subject to scrutiny and documentation by Western travellers, scholars, and colonial officials with an ethnographic aim and, often, a political agenda: recording differences, categorising, and then controlling (Said 1979). In turn, these descriptions have fuelled Western popular representations of the Bedouins that have shifted from the cruel to the noble savage as entire areas were "pacified" by colonial rule (Brahimi 1982; Moussa 1994). Up to the 1950's, Bedouins and other nomads were described and studied by focusing on particular selections of cultural features, such as nomadism, land use, feud, kinship and leadership organisation maybe because these features are more easily written down, sketched or mapped, and certainly because they are all related to land and social control that states or regions under colonial rule were attempting to exert in Bedouin-populated areas. More recent scholarly works on the Bedouins have been concerned with issues of change and modernisation brought about by the advent of the independent states that have tried to control nomadic people by forcing them to settle less through coercion and more through development projects (see Mundy and Musallam 2000 for an updated bibliography). Despite numerous scholarly accounts and analysis of the ecological and technological changes in the steppe, and of the socio-economic transformations affecting Bedouin communities, it seems that people who have historically been represented as "primitive" or "exotic" continue to be read within this context when new modes of popular representation are employed, be they literary, filmic or pictorial. Bedouins are therefore still largely viewed by non-specialists as nomadic and unaffected by social change or technological modernity, all the more because this primitiveness is now infused with positive qualities in the post-industrial First World. In coming to a Bedouin area, supposedly a desert, tourists hope to find a lost paradise unspoiled by Western industrial and technological civilisation.

Like Europeans or North Americans, most non-Bedouin Arabs also harbour a vision of the contemporary Bedouins as primitive. But this image is loaded with contempt and loathing, and Bedouins are thought to live in areas that look like hell, not paradise. In the Arab Middle East, still running after "progress" and "development", post-industrialised views are not a general sociological trend but eccentricities expressed only by a few, self-proclaimed "Westernised" members of the "urban elite". On the other hand, Bedouins are not exotic because there is not enough distance between them and non-Bedouins. Both groups are close neighbours in contiguous and interpenetrating geographical spaces, they have always been in social interactions, and there is social mobility between groups, though usually unidirectional when nomads settle, move to town and lose their Bedouin identity after two or three generations6. Most settled Arabs even say they have Bedouin ancestry, but ancestry is the keyword here. Actual Bedouins are considered somewhat of a socio-developmental anomaly. In the Middle East, since the most ancient times, central powers and settled urban populations have conceived of nomads as a threat to civilisation (Briant 1982). In that line, the 20th Century ruling elite and the urban middle-class have appropriated the vision of British and French Mandate officials, adapting it to the nationalist credo, and have "declared nomadic pastoralism a backward way of life antithetical to social and national development" (Mundy and Musallem 2000: 1). From the late period of Ottoman rule to modern independent Arab states, the aim of the central powers has been to control territory, settle the Bedouins and, at a later stage, modernise them though education and projects of economic development devised by international experts who shared the same vision (for the late Ottoman period see Rogan 1999; for modern Jordan see Bocco 1989, 1990, 1995). Now that at least three generations of Jordanians have been subjected to state-driven urbanisation and schooling, the vast majority of them can be considered as being from urban or other form of settled background. To most of these people, Bedouins who still live in the steppic areas, the badia, are not romanticised characters but an uneducated, backward social group to be modernised.

As a consequence, modern pictorial representations of the Bedouins in a country like Saudi Arabia, for instance, are rare and attempt to conceal overt signs of what are considered improper behaviours and values not in line with the state-promoted vision of Islamic orthodoxy and the accompanying version of soci-economic modernity (Pouillon et Mauger 1995). In Jordan, on the other hand, printed images of the contemporary Bedouins are frequent in a variety of contexts as this group of the population has come to embody part of the national character of the country (Layne 1994). But these images are stereotypical, emphasising only what are viewed as the positive values inherited from the nomadic Arabs: in particular, hospitality, generosity and honour, that is a social and ethical legacy any Jordanian citizen can claim for him/herself through imagined Bedouin ancestry, and not by actual belonging to what s/he deems an "underdeveloped" group.

Part of the current paper is an attempt at producing an ethnography of a Bedouin community that does not represent Bedouins in a stereotypical way, neither romanticising them nor treating them as objects to be developed. If one is to criticise the power-laden relations between, on the one hand, systematic, universalistic, rational, Western (or Western-inspired) knowledge and representations and, on the other hand, loosely codified, contextualised, non-rational forms of local knowledge and world visions (these being ideal types), then one should be careful not to compose an ethnography that objectifises the local agents and contributes to the "growth of [their] ignorance", as Hobart has warned in his anthropological critique of development (1993). I was therefore concerned with not producing another item of hegemonic knowledge such as the various World Bank sponsored reports or pieces of tourist literature. These represent Bedouins as ignorant and backward (with a negative or positive interpretative contend), and make them appear as legitimate objects of socio-economic engineering or of neo-orientalist, romanticised thoughts. Both are instances of domination which inscribe projects and desires upon Bedouins as an objectified social group. Bedouins' own representations of the space their inhabit and of their collective identity merit as much attention as the representation systems of economically more powerful strangers, even if it is easier for me to present the views of the latter group, of which I am an old time member albeit somewhat of a defector too (on the position of the tourist/anthropologist see Crick 1985, 1995; Bruner 1995). I have therefore set for myself the task of discussing critically how the relationships between various representation systems work in practice in Wadi Ramm, at least as I understand them to. Producing myself a representation of this relationship, my main concern was to try not to be another of these anthropologists who "(...) finally tell a story no indigenous people is likely to understand though it is a story not only about them, but about the way in which an initially ignorant stranger experienced their life" (Feyerabend 1991: 143).

Concerned with the cultural practices of the people I depict, I have excluded from my selection of pictorial representations photographs where Bedouin women could be identified. Bedouins, and other populations in Jordan that are subjected to the tourist gaze, resent tourists taking photos of, or filming, adult women. It is not so much the representation itself that bothers the locals, but the possibility of their public display in books, commercial documentaries or other media. The mainly Western photographers that take these images and sell them may think that they are not being disrespectful of the Bedouins because photos will be shown in a totally unconnected social context, to a "modern" public that does not personally know the individuals represented and that does not share a "traditional" value system where public appearance/representations of women affect family honour and shame (Abu-Lughod 1986). The problem with this attitude is that it is based on Western representations of social change as a unidirectional process. Individuals that are intellectually bound by such an approach cannot come to terms with the idea that Bedouins who live in what appears to be remote (i.e. non-industrialised, non-urban, etc.) areas of the world, who have such a backward reaction to photography, and who are still concerned with notions of honour and shame, may also get copies of the publications that feature photos of Bedouin women, access regularly the electronic media, own cameras with which they take female members of the family in pictures, and even teach their wives and sisters to use the camera or the Internet. By ignoring that even Bedouins living in the "desert", if only some of them, are now part of those who produce images and are members of the public that can look at guidebooks, watch satellite TV and surf on the web, most Western visitors (tourists or professionals in the tourism industry or media) refuse to acknowledge that all human societies do not follow the same itinerary on their way to social change. In Wadi Ramm, industrialisation and even literacy do not seem to have been compulsory stages for the Bedouins to fall under the worldwide pervasive influence of modern technology and be included in a globalised world. Today, “moving images” do not only “meet deterritorialized viewers” (Appadurai 1997: 4), they also encounter, and are created by, semi-nomadic Bedouins.

As any ethnography is a way of "writing culture", in the words of J. Clifford and G. E. Marcus (1986), stylistic choices made to compose the written narrative are no less innocent than pictorial images. In these last years, anthropologists have become more and more aware that a diversity of representational modes and devices is needed in response to various critiques of conventional ethnographic representation. Bowman argues that social and cultural anthropologies which claim to examine other cultural systems from "within" and subsequently to translate those world views into terms which render indigenous interpretations comprehensible to the "outside" without effacing their alterity, should generate ethnographies of tourism which allow readers to "see" what tourism and its effects look like to the people who host and accommodate it (Bowman 1996). The ironic tone adopted at times in the following text is an attempt at rendering one of the ways in which Bedouins in Wadi Ramm coexist with the statement of post-industrialised Western culture. As far as I could observe, humour and self-irony are permanent features of the rural Bedouin society in Jordan. Bedouins make wide use of these rhetorical devices when they feel that their honour (and therefore their social standing/status) is threatened by forces that are too powerful to resist directly. In Wadi Ramm, Bedouins use humour when touristic representations shake their own vision of social reality, a reaction which recalls that of the Native Americans described by D. Evans-Pritchard (1989) who analysed how members of that group expressed identity and alterity in front, or behind the back, of the Anglo-American tourists who visit their reservations. Another comparison can be drawn with the amused reaction of the Sinai Bedouins S. Lavie has confronted with their ethnographic representations as produced by Israeli scholars (The Hajj, Lavie and Rouse 1993).