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II. Producers and consumers in the tourism industry: visions, experiences and readjustement.

Southeast of Jordan, the area of Wadi Ramm is a small part of the Hisma basin described by geography text books as a vast depression extending from the border with Saudi Arabia (and beyond) to the south of the Petra basin. It composes the northern part of the Hedjaz and the Arabian Peninsula and possesses very particular geological features that laymen can best understand, and already mentally construct as a romanticised landscape, by reading an American tour operator's brochure: there, "dramatic colorful sandstone mesas rise to heights above stretches of golden or pink fine sand". 20th Century archaeological works, undertaken first by British Mandate scholars, have shown that since ancient times the area has been a major communication route linking the Levant and the Southern Mediterranean with the centre of the Arabian peninsula and Yemen. At some times, it was inhabited by nomads, at other times by a more settled population or a combination of the two. A few European travellers, Mandate officials and, more recently, anthropologists have written about the area as constituting part of the territory of the Howaytat tribe, one of the largest Bedouin groups in southern Jordan. History books mention that the tribal sections inhabiting the region of Wadi Ramm rallied behind Sharif Hussein of Mecca in the Arab revolt against Ottoman occupation during World War I. For the Western public, this episode is best remembered because of the part played by British Colonel T.E. Lawrence who gained his name Lawrence of Arabia, left a remarkable literary account of the revolt in his book The Seven Pillars of Wisdom, and was the object of the famous 1962 film by David Lean of which many scenes were shot in Wadi Ramm.

Yet, First World tourists (including Japanese) do not generally chose to come to Jordan with Wadi Ramm in mind. Rather, the famed rock-carved Nabatean city of Petra is the focus and highlight of their visit to the kingdom. As stated above, Wadi Ramm only started being systematically marketed and developed for tourism during the last decade. Beyond the circle of Westerners and Japanese who have been to Jordan or are planning to, the area is almost unknown and mention of its name does not conjure up mental images, as is the case, for instance, with the Algerian Hoggar for the French public or the Arizona desert for the North Americans. As a survey I conducted among European and North American tourists in Wadi Ramm shows (see Annex), the overwhelming majority (94.2%) get an idea of Wadi Ramm either as they peer through tour operators’ brochures in view of choosing a destination, or through travel literature once they have already decided on visiting Jordan. A minority has seen David Lean’s movie Lawrence of Arabia (9%). Yet, before preparing or taking their trip, half of those are not aware of a connection between the film and the place, while the other half remembers (or rather was made to remember through TV documentaries or travel literature) that some episodes of the film took place in Wadi Ramm. A very small number (1,3%) have actually read T.E. Lawrence’s book and may come to Wadi Ramm with specific images in mind other than the touristic ones. The various media used for promoting or marketing tourism therefore play an essential role in constructing the image of Wadi Ramm visitors have in mind when they come to the place.

Images of a silent and empty desert

In guidebooks, travel magazines, tour operators' brochures, leaflets from the Jordanian MTA, their electronic versions on the web, TV documentaries, etc., Wadi Ramm is presented in stark contrast with busy modern Amman, the capital of Jordan, or with historically significant Petra. Wadi Ramm is "a timeless and empty place", a definition that befits Western fancies of the desert. Travel literature and films give little written or spoken description of the natural environment other than deeming it a "desert", briefly detailing the area’s geological features and sometimes comparing it to the Sahara’s Tassilis or to Monument Valley which posses similar sandstone formations. But the various media generally leave it to images to speak for themselves.

In whichever media, print or film, the most frequent images of Wadi Ramm are those of the landscape. They generally are variations on the same theme and show wide, unspoiled stretches of pink or orange sand with dramatic looking mountain ridges in the background. One brochure from an American tour operator, which does not feature illustrations of Wadi Ramm, states that: "All around, there is emptiness and silence. In this immense space, man is dwarfed to insignificance". Defining and showing Wadi Ramm as a desert implies the absence of permanent human presence, an unspoiled nature, a mineral landscape and a silence propitious to spiritual elevation. In line with the booming trend of "adventure" tourism, it may also suggest wilderness and danger: "As in any desert, a British guidebook says, keep an eye out for scorpions and the occasional snake. (...) Do not challenge the desert alone, as getting lost there could become a dramatically serious matter".

In this desert landscape, close-up pictures indicating human presence are of three types. The first represents Bedouin men or boys in traditional costume, i.e. a white robe and a chequered red and white head-dress, most of the time preparing or serving coffee or playing music. The Bedouin black goat-hair tent is also frequently shown, sometimes with camels nearby. Another favourite is the Desert Police mounted on camels, wearing khaki robes and chequered head-dresses, and armed with daggers. All or some of these elements may appear in conjunction. Objects or artefacts of modern technology are systematically avoided. The second set represents Western rock climbers, hikers or campers. In this case, photos or films might include a Jeep, and modern camping or climbing equipment. Bedouins are rarely around, and if so only in the background. The last type signals ancient human occupation by showing images of rock engravings or archaeological ruins.

Through these various sets of images, the potential or actual visitor can easily distinguish several worlds, realities, and temporalities sharing the same desert space: that of an ancient people of primitive artists, builders and settlers, that of the "traditional" Bedouins, and that of the "modern" Western visitors. In all three cases, human occupation is presented as temporary: either bygone and part of history, or nomadic as with the indigenous people and the passing Western visitors. Geographical determinism is suggested: the climate shapes the land, which, in turn, dictates its rule over man’s presence. "Desertness" thus becomes the primary feature of the place. Even for those tourists who have not been exposed to visual material, the written media, the Western tour leaders and the Jordanian licensed guides have prepared the way by repeatedly calling Wadi Ramm a desert.

Discarded images of change and human occupation

Even if pictures of tourist facilities such as the rest house and adjacent camp site are sometimes featured, the same media rarely describe and never show images of the village of Ramm itself, a recent Bedouin settlement set right in the middle of the valley (wadi) of Ramm. There, roughly 1000 locals live in unfinished grey concrete houses surrounded with electricity poles, scattered litter and occasional skeletons of disused cars. Almost every house has a satellite dish on the roof and a huge antenna rises above the village to allow for using mobile phones. Some Bedouins still keep a black goat-hair tent pitched in the backyard as is common is the settlement process of nomads, but the few camels tied up around houses were bought only recently to rent to tourists. Bedouins, for their part, prefer to drive Jeeps for their private use and, when they to go about the village, they may put on Western clothes just as much as they may wear the traditional robes depending on their mood, on the social circumstances or, more prosaically, on what is clean in their wardrobe.

Except in relation to the accommodation, transportation and leisure activities of the tourists, the travel media avoid showing signs of Western-style modernity and change either in the village or in the desert. Equally, they display no images of the numerous goats out of which Bedouins still make a good part of their living. In the valleys and the mountains, they are to be spotted potentially anywhere or detected by the dung and innumerable footprints they leave on the sand. In what is represented as an "empty and silent " desert numerous other signs of modern man’s presence are to be found: occasional litter, recent rock graffiti, countless criss-crossing tracks of Jeeps, Bedouin passers-by who listen to Arabic music on their cars’ radios or Jordanian tour guides who speak loudly on their cellular phones even quite far from the village. Not to mention other tourists hiking, climbing or on camel back and the distant fires of their campsites at night. On the other hand, for reasons that will be explained later, camps of nomadic Bedouins are becoming rare these days, even more so in the areas frequented by tourists.

The search for exotica, and in particular for experiencing the desert, is closely related to the processes that have produced Orientalism in writings and the visual arts (Said 1979). The operators in and around the tourism industry build upon existing stereotypical representations of the desert for marketing purposes and avoid mentions of change, modern technology and even of human presence, implicitly reducing the Bedouins to natural, unchanging elements in an "empty" environment. The few guidebooks that do mention the village lament its ugliness and advise avoidance.

The desert challenged

Despite these warnings from the professionals, and the particular framing of the landscape in tourist-aimed commercial representations that omit the village, there is almost no way visitors can avoid being exposed to at least its brief sight. Collective or individual tours to the desert generally start from the rest house located at the entrance of the village. Bedouin Jeep or camel drivers wait for clients next to the rest house and have to lead visitors alongside their settlement before "entering" the desert. Even if for no more than two minutes, this view is imposed once more on visitors as they come back to the rest house and the impression they get is rather unpleasant, as expressed in many answers to the survey.

This disagreeable feeling could probably be quickly overcome and forgotten if the tour to the desert was living up to tourists' expectations. But it is far from being always the case. For a variety of practical reasons, the main sites that have been identified by the MTA as of interest to tourists are located within a short distance from the village. As a consequence, the area frequented by tourists in the desert is not very wide (roughly 15 km x 20 km) and can become relatively crowded during the high Spring and Autumn seasons when up to 300 visitors go back and forth daily from one spot to the other by Jeeps, on camel-back or on foot, sometimes queuing up to see the most popular — i.e. recommended in every guidebook — rock inscriptions. Total quietness and emptiness are hard to find while one is never very far away from a human presence, at little risk of getting lost and frequently reminded that modern amenities are close at hand.

In strict climatic terms, Wadi Ramm is not a desert but an arid steppe (the badia, in Arabic) where annual rainfall, though scarce, allows for goat and camel husbandry, episodic dry farming is specific areas and permanent human occupation even if only on a nomadic basis (see Sanlaville 2000 for a climatic introduction to the Arabian steppe). Greenish bushes spot the sand floor and small trees grow near the mountain feet where rainwater streams down. Rainwater is also naturally collected by the sandstone rocks and wells up when reaching their granite base, thus forming a continuous line of springs with accompanying greenery along the slope of some mountains. These touches of vegetation, together with the herds and footprints of goats, are other reasons for surprise (if not disappointment) from the part of numerous visitors who expect a more strictly mineral landscape with just a few camels here and there. They keep looking for unspoiled stretches of sand like those represented on the pictures they have seen. But photos always show the same couple of dunes taken from different angles since they are the only ones of the sort to be found in the area. Some elderly Bedouins remember that David Lean himself, when shooting scenes of his movie, had bushes uprooted to match his idea of a desert.

Tourists have paid for seeing a specific landscape and experiencing a particular atmosphere. Reality falls short of meeting their expectations and many of them feel deceived. They voice their disappointment locally to tour guides, to the tourist police or to the representative of the MTA and, back home, to the travel agencies where they have bought their trips. Some even write letters to travel magazines, others express their feelings on the Internet, on their homepages or in specialised travellers chat groups. This new media, where some also post their own pictures of the reality in Wadi Ramm, is becoming a major source of information for tourists of the younger generation. One such visitor, who kept an electronic diary of his trip to the Middle East in the Spring of 2000, denounced "the fallacies of the desert experience" in Wadi Ramm and put what he entitled two "alternative pictures" on his web site. One shows the same great landscape in the background but with a large litter bag torn open in the foreground. The caption identifies the litter as produced by tourists but disposed of by their Bedouin guide in the middle of the desert. The second picture shows large and deep tyre tracks on the sand, and the author comments that one should as well not dream of "going off the beaten track" when in Wadi Ramm.

Growing disappointment with the product sold as "the Jordanian desert" may translate practically by a drop in individual travellers visiting the area while touring Jordan or by Western travel agencies removing Wadi Ramm from their programme. Even before the peace treaty with Israel in 1994, the number of tourists visiting Jordan had regularly increased every year until the new outburst of violence in Israel/Palestine that started in Autumn 2000. Before that date, there was also a constant increase of foreign visitors in Wadi Ramm, as figures of the MTA show. Nevertheless, officials in the Ministry or in Wadi Ramm, Jordanian travel agents and the local Bedouins involved in tourism that I interviewed in 1998-1999 were all aware that some Western tour operators had decided to shorten their tours of Jordan by removing the visit to the desert, a fact that could be checked by looking at their brochures. Instead, they were spending more time in neighbouring countries in packages that also included Syria, Israel or Egypt. This move had measurable financial consequences for the various Jordanian travel agencies located in Amman or Aqaba, for the tour guides, for the hotels in Aqaba where most of the tourists in organised tours are accommodated after their one-day trip to Wadi Ramm, for the rest house in Wadi Ramm that is also a major local service provider and broker, and, of course, for the Bedouins working in tourism.

Organising the Bedouin experience

As stated before, parallel to images and experiences of the desert, the various operators in the tourism industry have used representations of the traditional Bedouins as another marketed item. Describing how tourists' representations are translated into experiences of Bedouin culture in Wadi Ramm does not necessitate an introduction to the past or current Bedouin way of life. Rather, it is more useful to give some details of the various non-Bedouin brokers and middlemen that have designed the "Bedouin" product and organise the experience of visitors.

Large Jordanian travel agencies are located in Amman, or, to a much lesser extent, in Aqaba and Wadi Mousa, the town neigbouring the site of Petra. They are owned by urban Jordanian businessmen and staffed by no less urban employees, including tour guides. They either design their own tours to sell to Western corporate clients, or simply act as service providers for European, North American or Japanese tour operators. In both cases, they generally suggest, and organise if contracted, a stay in Wadi Ramm. There, they sub-contract the rest house, a government owned structure privately managed by an urban businessman from Aqaba. He and his mostly Egyptian employees provide for a variety of services over which they have a quasi-absolute monopoly. This ranges from catering food, setting up campsites equipped with toilets in the desert, organising for large camel or Jeep trips, to hiring performers for an elaborate party under the stars.
In Jordan in general, where tourists view the local population as friendly and not as bothering as in neighbouring Egypt, and where tourist villages are not yet developed on a large scale, many foreigners consider their trips to be enhanced by some contact with "others". In Wadi Ramm in particular, they are anxious to meet the real Bedouins and to feel comforted in their belief that traditions are still alive. "The warm hospitality that characterises genuine Bedouin culture " is celebrated in each and every guidebook on Jordan. This image is reinforced by the fact that, ever since the time of the British Mandate, deeming Jordan the Land of the Bedouins has been the most common stereotype applied. The Jordanian souvenir market also participates in constructing so-called Bedouin culture by marketing as such all types of handicraft (Layne 1994). Bedouin culture is now commonly shown to tourists in Wadi Ramm but it is rarely Bedouins themselves who participate in this presentation. Rather, it is the rest house who seasons the visitors’ stay with carefully selected tokens of traditional Bedouin culture: the ceremony of coffee — a well known sign of Bedouin hospitality —, a few items of handicraft, and some revels. Typically, for those tourists in large groups who spend from 2 hours to half a day in Wadi Ramm, the rest house sandwiches the desert experience between two slices of Bedouin culture. It may also help to swallow "Ugly Village" and its bad taste.

Buses and visitors' private cars cannot go beyond the village and into the desert on tracks. They have to park in a designated area next to the rest house7. There, visitors or their licensed guides pay an entry ticket and move to the rest house. Visitors then wait for their guide to arrange for transportation and other services. Alternatively, if they travel on their own, this is the place to meet Bedouin camel or Jeep drivers with whom to negotiate a tour, or a local Bedouin hiking or climbing guide. While this takes place, visitors are made to sit in a Bedouin tent permanently pitched in the courtyard and furnished with cushions and rugs, and in which men dressed in Bedouin outfits serve them tea or coffee. Tour guides explain that these are Bedouin traditions of hospitality. They never spontaneously mention that the tent is not used by a Bedouin family, that the men who serve the drinks are all Egyptian migrant workers, and that tea and coffee are not for free but included in the price of the entry ticket.

At the end of their tour of the desert, tourists are brought back to the rest house and the time comes for buying souvenirs. Until recently, guides used to lead groups towards the open-air workshop of a weaver to buy what was advertised as Bedouin rugs. Foreigners were, and would remain, unaware that the man weaving was another Egyptian while, among Bedouins, this activity is reserved for women. They did not notice either that the loom used was a vertical village loom and not a horizontal Bedouin loom, or that the patterns of the rugs were typical of those designed for the tourism market in the Nile Valley. Those who bought one of the illustrated books on sale at the nearby souvenir shop were comforted in their idea of having brought back home a traditional Bedouin item: the book features two pictures of the same weaver presented as "a typical Bedouin craftsman".

Most of the groups or individual tourists then leave Wadi Ramm, generally to move on to Aqaba at about one hour drive. But some groups stay overnight. They can use one of the two camp sites equipped and managed by the rest house. Besides the small canvas tents each sheltering one or two tourists, a large black goat-hair Bedouin tent is pitched on one side of the camp. At night, the programme might include a "Bedouin evening". If this is the case, visitors are entertained by musicians presented as Bedouin but who mainly originate from Cairo or Alexandria and play commercial Arabic tunes. Some small all-male groups have special requests in the form of "female Bedouin dancers". In this case, they ask directly at the rest house on the day of the visit. Egyptian, Iraqi or Gypsy women are hired in Aqaba to perform what in the West is called "belly dancing", often a code word for prostitution. Without the extra treat, the same dancers can also be asked to perform at pseudo-Bedouin weddings alongside the Egyptian employees of the rest house. All together and with tourists, they dance a typically urban Arab dance that no local Bedouin, and especially not women, would ever consent to perform.

It can be argued that the rationale behind this staging of mock Bedouin culture is not necessarily to deceive visitors. Rather, the purpose is to create the Oriental atmosphere of authenticity tourists have been made to desire, have paid for, expect and enjoy. This can be achieved only by presenting elements of daily life that are sufficiently different from those of the tourists’ society so as to create distance and otherness, the stuff exoticism is made of. Moreover, with few exceptions, Bedouin folk culture is not rich in visual and artistic expressions of the kind that can be easily turned into marketable items, and there is no Jordanian tradition of performing arts as in Cairo or Damascus, the centres of popular urban Arab culture. But also, many of the visitors display attitudes that place them in the "post-tourist" category defined by J. Urry (1995: 140). They know that they cannot buy authenticity, revel in the knowledge that a sort of theatre is played for them, and merely expect an unusual experience to talk about and show in pictures when going back home. But be they tourists of the modern or post-modern type, staged Bedouin authenticity reinforces their "latent" Orientalist stereotypes by blurring regional and social distinctions and unifying all people of "the Orient" under the assumption that they are not like those of "the West" (Said 1979: 2).

This is ever more the case as everything is done to have tourists coming in organised tours avoid contacts with the actual, current material culture of the local Bedouins, a mix of underdevelopment and high technology typical of many regions in Third World countries. The modern Bedouin way of life does not correspond to the representations Westerners have of the people of the desert as nomadic, living in harmony with nature, and lacking modern artefacts. Containment is therefore organised to keep tourists moving from the rest house directly to the desert, from special tourist camp sites to sites deemed of interest and back to the rest house. Tourists who have attended what is presented to them as Bedouin performances praise Bedouin culture as lively and entertaining and hospitality as unequalled. Between the middle and the end of the 1990's, several Anglo-Saxon and North American tour operators had increased their requests for Bedouin parties and some, who used to stay only a half day in Wadi Ramm, had started remaining overnight.

In the footsteps of Lawrence

During the Arab revolt against the Ottomans (1916-1917), T.E. Lawrence was the British liaison officer with Emir Faysal. The latter was leading the military campaign under the more ideological guidance of his father, Sharif Hussein of Mecca. In 1923, Abdallah, the second son of Hussein, established the rule of the Hashemite dynasty over then Transjordan under British Mandate. Lawrence left a brilliant account of his role in the war in the form of a unique piece of literature The Seven Pillars of Wisdom. On a couple of occasions, he came to Wadi Ramm with the troops of the Emir. There, part of the large tribe of the Howaytat Bedouins, lead by shaykh Awdeh Abu Tayeh, rallied under the banner of the Arab revolt. Wadi Rum, as Lawrence called the place, greatly impressed and inspired him. His most famous description is now reprinted in almost every guidebook on Jordan: "Rum the magnificent....vast, echoing and Godlike... a processional way greater than imagination... the crimson sunset burned on its stupendous cliffs and slanted ladders of hazy fire down its walled avenue...". Released in 1962, David Lean’s movie about the life and deeds of "Lawrence of Arabia" was partly filmed in Wadi Ramm the previous year. The film greatly contributed in popularising the myth of a Western man who claimed to have given the Arabs victory over the Turks and who was torn between his duty as an English officer and his love for the Arabs. In the film, images of the desert (never-ending, unbearably hot, dangerous but all the more fascinating) and of the Bedouins (tricky, fierce but noble at heart) all act as counterpoints to enhance the character of the British hero. The simple juxtaposition of his name with Arabia evokes a world of mystery and adventure.

For mainstream Jordanians, Lawrence of Arabia is at best unknown. At worst – and this is the contention of Jordanian historians –, he is a liar who tried to remove the Hashemites from the front-stage and assume the leading role. In any case, he is no mythical figure as among Westerners and his book, translated into Arabic, is hard to find in Jordan. Nevertheless, when early official attempts at developing Wadi Ramm were made in the mid-1980’s, the story of Lawrence, the popular movie, and their connections to Wadi Ramm were not lost on Ministry officials or on French and British consultants at a time when Jordan's tourism strategy was still primarily oriented towards marketing heritage sites. Then, the desert as a landscape and the Bedouins as secondary characters where conceived as the mere context within which to represent the story of Lawrence. In the last years of the 1980's, MTA officials selected from the multiple objects that could be picked out of the landscape a number which were not natural but cultural features (or could be easily endowed with cultural meaning) and that were distinctive enough to become icons for the story of Lawrence. Those were given names, and later made into visual representations in guidebooks, magazines and films that, together with tour guides, provide information about those objects, and place the objects and the information within an interpretative framework.

Photos of the historical Lawrence or of the movie character are reprinted in some of the locally produced books on sale at Wadi Ramm while foreign guidebooks frequently include a section on the hero. These last years, many Western TV crews have come to shoot scenes for documentaries on the life of Lawrence and the American National Geographic Magazine devoted a lengthy article to his biography, displaying numerous photos of Ramm. Journalists, photographers and filmmakers also contribute to the local economy. In the late 1990's, it was rare to see a month pass without at least one of them being around, escorted by officials or guides from the MTA, and paying for the services of the rest house or the local Bedouins who staged camel races or large-scale feasts. Dearly in need of landscape and local characters to represent the story of Lawrence, they would not be allowed to film in Saudi Arabia where a good part of his narrative took place. The northern Jordanian desert, on the other hand, is rather flat and not as picturesque as Wadi Ramm. The place has therefore become systematically associated with the British Colonel to the point of occulting other locations while, according to his own account, Lawrence only spent a few days in Ramm over a period of activity of two years with the Arab revolt.

Wadi Ramm has become a sort of Lawrencian theme park where sites were invented to serve as stations of a pilgrimage in his footsteps. Today, the railway north of Ramm, a section of the Hedjaz railway built by the Ottomans at the turn of the 20th Century to link Damascus to Medina, and which appears to some visitors rather misplaced in the surrounding landscape, is being photographed by others who are explained that Lawrence led expeditions to blow it up (the place mentioned in the book is much further to the south). The Bedouin well of Abu ‘Eineh, used by David Lean in one of the scenes of his movie, has been renamed Lawrence’s spring and is presented as the place where the British major would camp when in Ramm in total contradiction with the indications left in his book. An unimpressive piece of crumbled wall, thought by archaeologists to date back from Ottoman times and known to Bedouins as al-Qusayr (the little castle), is now called Lawrence’s castle. Finally, the northern face of Jebel Umm ‘Ashrin, bordering the valley of Ramm to the east, has been christened The Seven Pillars of Wisdom. Its shape does evoke pillars, but it is hard to count more than six. Jordanian tour guides explain that the seventh is like wisdom impossible to attain, and that this is the reason why Lawrence, in entitling his book, was inspired by this particular mountain. The forewords in the book give a totally unconnected explanation for the title, but very few visitors are aware of it.

Representing episodes of Lawrence’s adventures in Wadi Ramm allows for visitors to identify with the literary or movie hero by re-enacting episodes of his life, and for local tourism operators (travel agencies, rest house and Bedouins alike) to increase profits. Caravans of tourists on camel back, wearing beige outfits and the Bedouin head-dress, wander in the area from one Lawrencian site to another, a view reminiscent of some colonial scenes. Since officials of the MTA have strategically located the sites associated with the character at some distance from one another, a comprehensive pilgrimage induces the visitor to spend more time in Ramm and more money in transportation, accommodation and food.

Not all travel agencies target nature lovers or tourists who want a flavour of adventure. According to figures from the MTA, the average tourist to Jordan is middle-aged, comes in a group of 25 participants and is interested in historical sites: not the ideal profile to convince Western tour operators to include "the desert of Jordan" in their programme. The character of Lawrence thus assumes another important function: he contributes to populating the area and giving it some historical depth. He shares this role with a small Nabatean site near the modern village and numerous rock inscriptions and drawings, some dating back to Prehistory, some left by the pre-Islamic and Islamic tribes living in or passing through the area. In fact, the whole Hisma basin is extremely rich in archaeological remains, only a few being shown to tourists. Wadi Ramm has become a "place of culture" which makes it a more acceptable stop for those tourists whose interest is exclusively in historical heritage. For those visitors, "timelessness and emptiness" need not be stressed and the desert experience is limited to a minimum with little risk of disappointment.

Jordanian tour guides too feel comforted by this attempt at historicising the area. With time, most of them have understood that Westerners have a fascination for the desert and some have even comprehended the cultural motives behind it. But they generally do not share it, a fact that makes it hard for them to fuel excitement among their groups. In their overwhelming majority they originate from the city and consider the Bedouins backward and the desert no place for enjoyment and wonder. With a few notable exceptions, they are neither trained nor interested in describing the natural milieu and Bedouin society. Tourists sometimes turn to Bedouin drivers, who are ever more numerous to speak enough English for explanations, and ask them about life in the desert. Tour guides, who have no admiration at all for the Bedouins, do not appreciate being pushed aside. Jordanian tour guides who hold a national licence are never of Bedouin background and, when inside the desert in Wadi Ramm, local Bedouin drivers and guides deprive them of their important function as pathfinders. Cohen defined the pathfinder as "a geographical guide who leads the way through an environment in which his followers lack orientation or through a socially defined territory to which they have no access" (1985: 7). If not for the story of Lawrence, tour guides would also be stripped of the second part of their role, that of mentors who construct the meaning of what tourists look at, and make coherent sense of their various experiences (Ibid.: 9). Because being in Wadi Ramm deprives them of their main function of mediating between tourists and the human and historical reality in the place they visit, licensed guides have grasped the occasion offered by the MTA who has inscribed Wadi Ramm in various historical contexts and provides them with adequate training as far as ancient history is concerned. As for Lawrence's story and whereabouts in Wadi Ramm, it seems that this training is rather limited, and that guides actively contribute their own invented traditions. A line of continuous occupation is being drawn which extends from Prehistory to the British hero and the Arab revolt and makes modern Bedouins easy to include in the narrative while leaving them no time to speak for themselves.

Maps for visitors

Mapping Wadi Ramm further contributes intentionally to the processes of inclusion and historicisation. The MTA has designed tourist maps of the area to provide visitors with means of orientation. They also discourage them to go beyond certain geographical limits, at least on their own. Maps are other ways of framing reality by carving separate territorial entities out of a spatial continuum and endowing each territory with a particular character. This is done, among other means, by drawing limits, selecting specific natural or human features to represent, and naming places (Anderson 1991). Looking at some of the maps of Wadi Ramm produced over the last few years is extremely revealing of the changing images Jordanian officials want to give of the place. The more recent ones, coming as part of brochures or leaflets with accompanying texts and pictures of the sort described above, cannot be interpreted in isolation but should be seen as yet another discursive element in a complex system of representation associating textual, schematic and pictorial components.

The Royal Geographic Society being under the supervision of the army, detailed survey maps are extremely difficult to obtain in Jordan and are not available to tourists. At the beginning of the 1990’s, one could find a map called Ram (not Wadi Ram) in some bookshops in Aqaba, but I once searched in vain for a copy in Amman. This simple fact was already a sign that, at the time, Ramm was first and foremost viewed in connection with its administrative centre and not as a destination to be accessed directly from the capital. The map, which has today disappeared from book shops, was in English and intended for tourists or foreign residents but it was not called a tourist map: major geographical features had local names and no site was singled out as of interest to foreign visitors. Rather than solely a map of the valley of Ramm, it was covering the whole area between the village of Ramm, Aqaba and the Saudi border 40 km to the south, therefore connecting Ramm to a wider region which is not only an administrative, and possibly military, district but also a social and economic entity for the local Bedouins. Like other such maps printed in the 1970's, it was designed after army maps drawn by British Mandate officials at a time when the emphasis was not on developing tourism but on controlling the territory and the nomads in border areas. It had no accompanying photos or commentaries and was therefore visually quite unattractive. But it performed its main task: allowing visitors — after officials or the military — to reach the fort of the Arab Legion established in Ramm in the 1930's and the government rest house erected at the occasion of the filming of David Lean's movie. Ever since that date, Ramm had started to become a secondary destination for local Western expatriates or for foreign tourists coming with Lawrence in mind. On the map, two routes were indicated to reach Ramm from Aqaba: the, then, recently asphalted road that branched from the main Amman-Aqaba road, and the ancient, more adventurous track across the desert. Mountains were represented with contour lines, a feature of little use to most foreign visitors but which gave an appearance of accuracy and reliability to the document and conveyed an illusion of man’s control over natural features, a concern rather typical of the military.

In 1994, when the local representative of the MTA was asked to design the first tourist map of Wadi Ramm, he had to decide on framing the area he was to draw by giving it boundaries. Since the drafting of the previous map, things had changed a lot in Ramm as many nomads had settled and built houses next to the army fort. There was now a small village with shops, electricity, a large school, a mosque, and a refurbished rest house. The Ministry official himself had been posted there a few years before to introduce and supervise more changes in terms of tourism development. According to the new system already in force in 1994, visitors had to use the official entrance at the end of the asphalt road and pay an entry ticket. A tourism co-operative, set up independently by the local Bedouins, had established a rota among Jeep drivers and camel owners in an attempt at equally redistributing benefits and preventing tourists from wandering about the desert without paying for the services of the locals. Vehicles had to be hired next to the rest house.

Taking all these factors into account in his new map, the Ministry official represented only a section of the area shown on the previous 1970's document. He centred his on the valley of Ramm. Within a radius of 20 km, he included all the sites of interest to tourists he himself had played a major part in identifying/inventing in the previous years. By doing so, he separated the Bedouin village of Ramm from its commercial and administrative centre in Aqaba and from a large part of its rangeland extending down to the Saudi border. On the other hand, other recent Bedouin settlements were included to the north. The whole area thus mapped, which covers about ten major wadi-s between mountain ridges, has been given the generic name Wadi Rum, the spelling adopted in most Jordanian publications in Latin script8. Other local geographical names do appear but the general impression remains of the whole area being called Wadi Ramm whereas, for the local Bedouins, the valley of Ramm is just one among a number of valleys in a wider territory that does not bear a fixed general name other than that of their own tribal section or of the administrative district it belongs to.

This document was intended to complement guidebooks, which, at the time, were not dwelling much on Wadi Ramm because the Jordanian Tourism board was just starting to market it systematically. Sites of interest were given a number and a symbol referring to a list and a key legend at the bottom of the map. There are sixteen occurrences of a small tower indicating a ruin (such as "Lawrence’s castle"), an antiquity (such as the "Nabatean temple") or an inscription. Three blue dots mark springs or wells (including "Lawrence’s spring"). Other sites indicated by a key are climbing spots, sunset and sunrise sites (i.e. the best locations to see them from), sand dunes, natural rock bridges, stations of the Desert Police, camp sites for tourists and the health centre. The Hedjaz railway passing north of the village is also marked. The leaflet represents most sites with a colour picture and provides some historical details about the pre-Islamic tribes and the Nabateans who settled there two thousand years ago. Finally, a table gives distances from the village to the sites whereas, at the back of the map, a list of trips by Jeep, camel or horse is suggested. Since the track all the way down to Aqaba is not shown anymore, tourists who drive their own 4X4 vehicles and who do not want to risk getting lost are compelled to reach Ramm from the well indicated asphalt road and stop at the official entrance point where they pay fees. On the other hand, tracks leading to major touristic sites are clearly indicated.

In contrast to the previous map, Wadi Ramm appears as a region of its own separated from Aqaba and as a site of historical interest with numerous signs of ancient and modern human occupation. The neighbouring areas, out of the frame, seem to be of a different nature, totally desert and wild (that is with no historical remains, no current human occupation and hazardous). Independent visitors hesitate to venture there without a local guide while those in organised tours are made to believe that they have seen all sites of interest. The map-maker, an architect by training, knew how to draw plans but had no previous experience with mapping a natural area. Typically, he entitled his map "Wadi Rum Tourist Plan" and gave it no relief other than the outer shapes of mountains. His map is merely indicative and obviously not meant for visitors to find direction on their own as the area looks flat and unreal and the map unreliable. The map was quickly made available for sale in major hotel bookshops in Amman, Aqaba and Wadi Mousa.

In 2000, the MTA designed yet another "Wadi Rum" leaflet, the latest one in circulation at the time of writing, though other projects are currently underway. New photos have been included showing more desert landscape than before and accompanied with a text stressing the need to protect the environment. In the same time, there are fewer details on history or practical information, in part because a lot of those provided by the previous leaflet have become redundant now that they have found their way into guidebooks in a section on "Wadi Rum" that expands with each updated edition. But the main reason for the change in focus from practicalities and heritage to environment is to be found elsewhere. The document is typical of the new vision development planners have for Wadi Ramm: they now want to promote ecotourism and have turned the area into a nature reserve in 1998, giving it new boundaries, slightly different from those of the tourist zone but still centred on the same valley. The new map therefore shows the nature reserve even if it is simply called "Wadi Rum". Designed after a satellite photo, it makes mountains and the sand floor look more real and the area wilder.

As will be explained below in some details, one of the aims of the project of nature reserve is to minimise permanent Bedouin presence in the area, a reason which might explain why other villages have disappeared from the map and why many geographical names have been omitted as if representing what Wadi Ramm ought to be once the project is fully implemented. Sites related to the Antiquity or to Lawrence are still indicated but it is doubtful that this signals more than the officials’ willingness to maintain the historical or romantic character of the place to cater for all possible categories of tourists. Guidebooks and tour guides, just as they have found a way of including the contemporary Bedouins in a narrative that starts with Prehistory, will have the rhetorical means to remove modern occupation from the picture, if need be.

Ecotourism and the nature reserve

That need may arise soon enough if the more extreme proposals put forth in the current ecotourism project for Wadi Ramm are implemented. In the tourism industry, ecotourism is a relatively new trend supported by a shift in the developmental credos of such supranational institutions as the World Bank. From the point of view of international planners and experts, ecotourism is defined as "responsible travel to natural areas that conserves the environment and improves the well-being of the local people" (Honey 1999: 6). Taking a look at some of the documents produced by the promoters of this new version of tourism in Wadi Ramm, and at some of the practical actions implemented, reveals much of the preconceived representations foreign experts and Jordanian planners have of the Bedouins, of their relation to their environment, and of the future of tourism development in the area. While it is not my aim here to review at length the implications of ecotourism for the Bedouin society in Wadi Ramm, a few issues are worth discussing as they are closely linked to the question of the image and representation of the site as "wild" and "unspoiled" by man's presence that have been so problematic in the area since the advent of mass tourism.

Promoting Wadi Ramm as a destination for ecotourism, as is now being done, implies that an initial step had to be taken by declaring the area "protected". This was officially done over 540-square kilometers when, in 1998, the Royal Society for the Conservation of Nature (RSCN) started implementing a plan which had already been under study for some time. The RSCN is a Jordanian non-governmental organisation (NGO) that was established in 1966 under royal patronage and that is able to raise its own funds. On the other hand, it has an official mandate as the national body in charge of nature conservation (Brand 2001). Until the end of the 1980’s, the RSCN had to manage with a small budget to set up protection, conservation and animal reintroduction schemes in a few selected areas. Ever since international donor agencies have put protection of the environment on top of their agendas, RSCN’s budget has increased dramatically. One of its latest projects targets Wadi Ramm where, with World Bank financial support and counselling, it has been charged both with nature conservation and the development of income generating projects for the Bedouin community linked to the expected development of ecotourism.

While the various preliminary studies I could consult that were conducted by the World Bank, or the reports produced by the RSCN adopt the now classical rhetoric on "sustainable development of the local community" though "ecotourism" and the building of "environmental awareness" among the Bedouins (Gilmore Hankey Kirke 1996; Rowe, Ra'ei and Zalabia 1998; RSCN 1998), many elements of the project and of its implementation reveal a dilemma which planners have found a disturbing way of solving. On the one hand, many activities the Bedouins carry out — such as hunting, animal husbandry, the use of Jeeps in the desert — are seen as threats to biodiversity and damages to the landscape and, therefore, as impeding the growth of ecotourism. On the other hand, these same Bedouins are the official targets of economic development who, in the long run, should financially and socially benefit from the new project. Therefore, various experts have come with recommendations that the Bedouins should become less present and less visible in the nature reserve and should conduct their activities linked to tourism behind the "ecological" screen provided by RSCN's management.

This discourse always functions at two levels, echoing the dual nature of RSCN's mandate as both a independent conservation NGO and a quasi-governmental development agency working in close association with various Jordanian ministries. Measures recommended to limit Bedouin presence in the area are justified by a concern for the preservation or the ecosystem and, at another level, by the need to improve the aspect and image of the area to attract investors and tourists. RSCN's final report on tourism development and environmental conservation in Wadi Ramm, which presents the overall philosophy of the project and provides the major guide lines for its implementation, stresses the importance of creating "an overall environment" for the area to reach its "full market potential" (RSCN 1998). "Environment" here does not only refer to nature or social organisation, but also strongly to business and aesthetics.

Some points in the report have already started being implemented on the ground while others are still pending. After setting boundaries for the reserve, hunting was forbidden in the entire area and even beyond. Eventually, Bedouins should be forbidden to graze their goats and camels in specific zones because of damages to the flora and to the wild character of the reserve. In the future, some wild animal species that have disappeared in the last decades because of hunting, such as the ibex, should be reintroduced in view of restoring biodiversity but also to provide a sight of wildlife for tourists. To compensate for the loss in revenue ensuing from the limitations on animal husbandry, the reserve should hire some Bedouin rangers while some local women are already being employed in an RSCN-managed workshop that produces handicraft for tourists. It is revealing to note that the artefacts they make are described as "nature oriented" and do not have any connection to what Bedouin women consider their traditional craft (another example of how people’ knowledge is ignored, of how they are turned into ignorant ones who have to be taught, and of how they are disempowed by development projects that pretend to empower them).

The project goes beyond limiting the access of the Bedouins to natural resources and turning them into employees of the reserve. Following the recommendations of a preliminary study prepared by a UK-based consultancy firm for the Jordanian MTA (Gilmore Hankey Kirke 1996), it is proposed to incite the Bedouins to leave their current village, which is deemed too visible in the middle of the valley. Expressing negative aesthetic judgements about the actual settlement, experts state that it has to be either removed or evacuated and turned into a tourist village. This should be achieved by relocating most tourism activities around a new visitor centre currently being built 6 km to the north, at the entrance of the valley. The move is expected to create a dynamic that will push Bedouins to spontaneously leave their old village for the new, more aesthetic, houses the World Bank will built for them. In the meantime, the shabby aspect of the existing Bedouin settlement should be improved by burying electricity and telephone wires, fixing and cleaning the streets, and painting the houses reddish-pink to match the colour of the landscape. Once a sufficient number of Bedouins have moved away, houses will then be turned into tourist accommodations, a local market or "suq" with handicraft shops and other tourist facilities.

Rules have also been made for tourists to follow and are listed on a leaflet available at the shop RSCN has opened next to the current rest house. These include not collecting rocks or picking up plants, and camping or climbing only in designated areas. But nobody enforces the rules, RSCN's rangers being too busy chasing Bedouin hunters. Besides, several Jordanian travel agencies and foreign tour operators have expressed their concerns to the MTA about a planned limitation of the number of visitors and a restriction of their movements. Operators in the tourism industry are not ready to reduce their activities in Wadi Ramm as the demand for adventure tourism is increasing. Considering that RSCN is in reality not independent from state institutions, there is little prospect that rules for tourists will ever be taken as seriously as those aimed at the Bedouins. What is happening today in Wadi Ramm is fact comparable to the current attempts of the Egyptian authorities at policing illicit activities in the tourism industry in Dahab. As L. Behbehanian has shown (Behbehanian 2000), this Red Sea resort in the Sinai has become associated with sex and drug tourism and a decay of moral value, therefore suffering from a negative image among multinational corporations who are reluctant to undertake major tourism investments there. In Wadi Ramm, the decay is presented as environmental and the state authorities are trying to re-assess sovereignty over land use, while the argument of nature conservation becomes yet another way of "protecting the interests of powerful multinational sectors of the tourist industry" (Ibid.). The concept of sustainability, it seems, applies more to the financial interests of the international tourism industry and of urban Jordanian operators, who are all well connected with the political decision-makers in Amman.

Yet, it is true that the natural environment has suffered in Wadi Ramm. As in other arid and semi-arid areas in the Middle East, the relationship of the Bedouins with the environment has been modified with the use of industrial materials, Jeeps, feed and water brought from outside. The logic of the market has induced the Bedouins to increase the size of their herds at the same time as pasture land was shrinking due to state-sponsored agricultural projects. This has lead to general overgrazing and a serious degradation of natural resources (Barham and Mensching 1988; Dutton and alii 1998; Rowe 1999). But tourists too have levied their tribute: tracks of Jeeps would not be so numerous if it were not for foreign visitors, firewood is becoming rare as tourist like to have large bonfires in their camps at night, modern graffiti can be attributed to foreigners as much as to Bedouins.

Attempting to change the image of the place to develop big business, international experts and state institutions all seem to forget that the current ecological situation and visual aspect of Wadi Ramm are the products of previous projects of socio-economic development that have been imposed on the Bedouins. In the past, concerns were more political and less economic, and the rhetoric was about security in the steppe and modernisation of the Bedouins and not about sustainability. From the 1950's to the 1970's, the modernisation approach posited that Bedouins had to become settled and to detralibalise through state-sponsored agricultural projects and education (Bocco 1990). In Wadi Ramm, the State provided the Bedouins with cheap cement and electricity to prompt them to set up a village at the end of the 1970's. More recently, governmental agencies brought in the telephone and running water. Other public institutions subsidised water and animal feeds for goat-breeders in the badia and the authorities never previously tried to limit the use of 4X4 vehicles(Rowe and alii 1998). In the 1980's, it is the State again that instigated tourism development in its current form. Then, Bedouins were asked to convert to the global economy of heritage and adventure tourism by pretending to be still "traditional", that is preserved from the very changes various national bodies, with the help of international development agencies, had previously managed to introduce. At the end of the 1990’s, as in other areas of the Middle East that are the targets of nature conservation projects (Shatty 1998), Bedouins are considered a threat to the natural environment and have to be removed.

As R. Bocco remarked in his analysis of previous development programmes in the Jordanian steppe (Bocco 1990: 115), RSCN’s project for Wadi Ramm is the product of a system of representations embedded in an era and a context. Since the 1980's, ecotourism has found a public mainly among the First World middle-class responsive to the discourse of ecopolitics or socio-environmental movements (Mowforth and Munt 1998: 162). In their own rhetoric, experts and planners foster the development of ecotourism as a means to provide a response to both the environmental crisis and to the debt problems of "developing" countries by linking nature protection to income generating for the local people, thereby being more "sustainable" in the long run than other economic activities that impact negatively on the environment (Honey 1999: 17). Today, experts do not emphasis man's control over nature any more, but pose that human actions corrupt nature. Yet, they do not challenge their persistent assumptions that man is divorced from nature, that First World conceptions of management are superior, and that, in the words of Hobart (1993), locals are ignorant. Therefore, they continue to launch projects of social and ecological engineering that demonstrate their absolute contempt for non-Western inspired world views. A logical outcome of this vision in Wadi Ramm, as in several other locations in the Third World, is that a project that purports to turn an area into a playground for ecotourists, while overtly advocating the economic development of the indigenous people, is likely to result in the displacement or lesser forms of exclusion of those very people from the areas deemed worthy of protection.

The complacence of the Jordanian decision-makers is no less questionable than foreign experts' vision of the human and ecological realities in a so-called "under-developed" area in a "developing" country. Yet, it can be argued that policy-makers in Amman are bound in many ways by the approach of development experts and agencies and merely demonstrate concern for their country's image in the international arena. Especially since the 1989 UN-convened Rio Summit on Environment and Development, major international donor agencies have made aid and other forms of material or financial subsidies increasingly dependent on a country's willingness to implement development projects that include an aspect about nature conservation and sustainability (Mowforth and Munt 1998: 23). The Jordanian power elite, like many others of its kind, is left with no choice but to adopt the language of donor agencies, an evidences of the growing hegemony exerted by international financial institutions on social and political processes in countries of the Third World. This also illustrates the performative character of representations: translated into the written and spoken language of development, they have the power to create self-realising social relations and dynamics.

RSCN project clashes with the Bedouins’ representations of the environment. These are, today, as much a product of their long-lasting use of space as pastoral nomads as a result of the new relationship they have developed with it through permanent settlement and involvement in the tourism industry, that is through other development projects that were imposed from outside but that they have managed to reinterpret locally, a process experts too often see as a failure or a perversion of their original plans. Currently, at least one third of Wadi Ramm's economy depends on tourism, according to Rowe and alii (1998). Provided that the new project is fully implemented, Bedouin drivers will have fewer customers and those who have opened small restaurants and souvenir shops at the entrance of the village will have to close down. Nobody believes that hiring rangers and putting women to work for tourists will compensate for the economic loss. Nobody, either, would willingly move away from his house and from the village where symbolic as much as financial investments have been made, and which look fine — if open to improvements — according to Bedouin standards. Moreover, forbidding Bedouins to graze their goats inside the reserve will deprive them of access to a large section of their traditional tribal territory (dira). They will have to reduce the size of their herds or negotiate access to other, neighbouring tribes’ dira-s. As a whole, local resources will become scarcer than before, fuelling competition for access to employment and land within the local tribe in Wadi Ramm and with neighbouring tribes, and possibly resulting in out-migration to larger towns. Even if other solutions are provided to the issue of over-grazing, by bringing feed to enclosed goats and camels, as has been done in another nature reserve in Jordan (Irani and Johnson 2000), it will not change the nature of the proposed projects. Bedouins are never treated as equals and their voices are never listened too.
In the 1970's, nearby Israel had established a paramilitary "Green Patrol" in the Negev, officially to preserve nature and in practice to forcibly evict Bedouins living outside urban townships (Falah 1989). The Negev Bedouins, falling into the UN-designed category of "indigenous" people, have suffered social discrimination and territorial segregation that they had no means to fight due to their position of weakness in the Israeli power structure (Abu-Saad 2001). Unlike in Israel, Bedouins in Jordan are not a disempowered social group or indigenous minority. On the contrary, they have their own channels of access to the political establishment, usually through patron-client networks and the mediation of well-connected tribal leaders who are part of the establishment. Even if it is a relatively new concept in their everyday vocabulary, Bedouins in Wadi Ramm have now their own definition of "nature" (at-tabi'ah), which they consider as part of their territory and as an economic and social resource. This is why they believe that they should at least have a say and certainly a share in its use and in its transformation. Jordanian officials, especially in the Ministry of Tourism, have not turned a deaf ear to the complaints of Wadi Ramm’s inhabitants who disapprove of many aspects of the project. As a result, the resettlement plan has been frozen, at least for now, various implementation phases have been postponed, and some recommendations have been rephrased in a more subtle way. But there are wide-ranging financial interests at stake. On the one hand, Jordan badly needs tourism to support its weak economy and is hostage to the demands of Western clients and investors for whom nature and wildlife are commercial items. On the other hand, Jordan has to polish its image of a country complying with international (Western) standards as regards environment hoping to be rewarded with the incumbent financial and political benefits, which have little if anything to do with protection of nature. Caught in between, the Bedouins might well have to pay the bill by being the alibi the Jordanian authorities can give when asked about the practical steps they take to foster nature conservation. Bedouins, who were once viewed as uncivilised, are now considered too civilised. Faced with such contradictory demands, it is doubtful that they want to conform to the "noble savage" stereotype again.