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Part III Local visions and readjustments

Western tourists, with the mediation of professionals in the tourism industry, come to Wadi Ramm in search of exoticism and authenticity, or their staged versions, of romanticised history or preserved wildlife. Except for a minority, they expect a hedonist, and not cognitive, experience. They want pleasure and not learning. The tourist gaze on Wadi Ramm reflects a status difference between the tourists and the locals, the Occident and the Orient. It is a composite construction where various elements of representation intermingle: the desert, the Bedouins, Lawrence of Arabia, the Orient and the Arabs in general, the Third World, unidirectional evolution, underdevelopment, poverty, ignorance and pollution, etc. Each visitor comes with a different configuration of these elements — and sometimes others, less collective — in mind.

The tourist gaze, tourists’ reactions at the gaps between their expectations and local reality, and the demands made on the Bedouins to conform to certain images are all elements that have induced some of the Bedouins to start casting a new look at the place they live in and at their own culture and history. Interestingly enough, these new perceptions, and some accompanying behaviours, have not replaced other perceptions gained in other, previous or attendant, contexts than that of tourism interactions. Rather, they coexist as Bedouins have found ways of protecting their community from the pervasive presence of tourists and use humour as a means to constantly readjust to different value systems and world views. But humour does not prevent a struggle over representations from being waged now that some Bedouins show discontent with the way they are portrayed in the presentations the rest house, tour guides or tourists make of their culture. Also, some of them have managed to capture part of the market from the major operators in the tourism business, and have recently started producing their own touristic representations of Wadi Ramm and of Bedouin culture.

This last part briefly contrasts the era B.T. (before tourism) with the era A.T. (after tourism). It proposes to explore in more detail how tourist representations of the place and of Bedouin culture, that translate into pragmatic social realities, have affected and continue to affect the every day life of the Bedouins, how the latter make sense of these changes according to their own cultural categories, which versions of their culture they themselves try to convey to tourists, and the representational means they use in this process.

Economy and territory B.T.

The Zalabyeh are a fraction of the Howaytat tribe, and the village of Ramm and the surrounding range lands and mountains are all parts of their dira or tribal territory. Even though tourism is taking an ever larger part in their economy, pastoral nomadism is still their major source of income (Rowe and alii 1998). That economic system induces that space is territorialised (i.e. that social control over space is exerted) and shared between kinship units such as tribes, fractions, sub-fractions and patriarchal families. Herds — of camels in the drier areas, and of caprines where climate permits, which is the case in Wadi Ramm — have to be moved according to seasons in search of pastures and water. Classical studies of nomadic pastoralists have noted that herds are the most important mediating vector between nomads and their environment. In that system, management of the natural resources is collective and no individual can have exclusive ownership rights over land, water, fire wood, game, and so on except if he improves it by labour such as cultivation or the building of water collectors (Wilkinson 2000: 45). Use is always considered within the frameworks of exchange practices and shared access between individuals of the same tribal unit but also with neighbouring units. Such a system of reciprocity implies that the Bedouins’ territorial organisation is flexible and that borders between dira-s are more mobile than fixed (Bocco 1987).

In Wadi Ramm, this fluidity is reflected in Bedouin toponymy. Mountains, valleys and other geographical features are given specific names which may endure for generations, especially when they are attached to significant landmarks and widely used by a variety of individuals belonging to different kinship groups. But names of less significant places often change within the lifetime of an individual, or just have different names that coexist. This does not trouble Bedouins who are themselves great name givers and who feel all the more free to create new appellations as only very few are fixed in writing on available maps of which, in any case, Bedouins have no great use. The same applies to wider areas or regions in the steppe: names are not determinative but descriptive, that is contextual and relating to what happens in a place at a particular time. Thus, Bedouins consider normal that a place may bear several names, a point which is important to bear in mind when looking at how they deal with the new tourist place names, as I will do later.

As other Bedouins of the Syrian steppe and the north of the Arabian Peninsula (Lancaster 1981; Lancaster and Lancaster 1999), the Zalabyeh have always resorted to a multi-resource economy: besides raising goats and sheep for local use and to sell, they had a few camels as beasts of burden, exploited wild resources — by collecting plants and hunting animals —, sowed small patches of lands with wheat or barley when rainfall permitted, and practised small-scale trade with the closest market towns of Maan, Tafileh , al-Karak and later Aqaba. Women played an important economic role as herders but also as weavers or dry-cheese makers, all products that could be sold or exchanged for other needed items available only from town. As in any other areas of the Middle East or North Africa (Nelson 1973; Khazanov 1984), Jordanian Bedouins were never socially isolated or economically self-sufficient and cannot be viewed as having ever been autonomous societies, except, a times, from a strictly political point of view9.

Long before the introduction of tourism, a series of factors had modified the relationship of the Zalabyeh with the space they live in and appropriate as their territory. In 1927, the border between the newly created states of Jordan and Saudi Arabia was established and subsequently redrawn in 1965 (Bocco and Tell 1995). Even if it did not cut through the Zalabyeh’s dira, the border limited their access to lands and social networks they were using to the south. Since the 1930’s, numerous men in the fraction have entered the Arab Legion or the Desert Patrol and have lived in garrison towns with their families. Later, some have moved to Aqaba, Amman or Saudi Arabia to find paid jobs, generally as drivers or watchmen. A lot of them, even if still living in tents when coming back to Ramm on visits or at retirement age, had experienced settled life and urban spatial organisation long before the first houses were built in what was to become the village of Ramm. They also had clear notions of private property especially since, during the British Mandate, Bedouin dira-s had become state-owned and individual Bedouins could gain private property rights over them through cultivation (Bocco 1989). In the restricted area of Wadi Ramm, the state intervened very little in the development of the badia and the Zalabyeh kept using their dira and managing access to natural resources and collective property as before. But since the 1970's, large-scale state-sponsored agricultural projects have been launched on the territory of neighbouring tribal sections, in particular in the area of Diseh at the northeast of Wadi Ramm.

At the beginning of the 1970's, the families that had remained in, or returned to, the region of Ramm benefited from government subsidies to build concrete houses around the army fort occupied by a small garrison of the Desert Patrol. The Zalabyeh, and a couple of small families that had joined them over time as protected guests, were following a soft push by the State to settle more permanently. Schooling and house building were not declared compulsory or imposed by force: rather, they were presented as a privilege the Jordanian King was granting his dear Bedouin subjects on the road to modernisation. Even before dwelling in houses, the fraction had considered the place where the village now lies as an important landmark. Geographically, it is not situated at the centre of their dira, but the Zalabyeh and other neighbouring fractions would come there to collect water at the perennial al-Shallaleh spring, the largest in the area. As a gathering point, it was also a place to socialise or to make collective decisions, even though these activities could take place somewhere else too. In the 1980’s, land in the village was registered under private ownership and the authorities further developed the settlement. It became the focal point of the local economic, political and social life while the badia retained marginal importance as it was used only by pastors either still living in tents or having settled in the village. Today, the constraints that used to send nomadic Bedouins on the move have been alleviated: they have built reservoirs and bring water by tanks and animal feeds by Jeeps from the village. The few households that still live in tents, usually the elderly, do not move as often or as far as before and have reduced the size of their herds.

To sum up the new relation to space that has derived from political, economic and technological changes during the 20th Century, one could say that the State is now the owner of the Zalabyeh's tribal territory and decides on it development. This territory is not granted any form of official legal recognition but is encapsulated into the region of Aqaba, a wider administrative and territorial unit. Nevertheless, the State de facto recognises the existence of the Zalabyeh's dira by allowing them to use the territory according to their own system of access rights over pastures, natural water springs and reservoirs and some new resources such as tourism. This territory has gained a permanent centre (the village) and a periphery (the range lands and the mountains), and every Bedouin has had access to some form of private property. The same basically holds true for other neighbouring tribes.

It may appear artificial to determine an era before and after tourism in Ramm, as tourists have been coming ever since the time of the British Mandate and even before if one puts 19th Century European travellers in the same category (and why not include, also, fugitives, peddlers and other strangers that have always come and stayed with the Bedouins?). Yet, there was a turning point with the filming of David Lean's movie in 1962 that opened up the way for future touristic representations of Wadi Ramm. Before the end of the 1970’s, foreign visitors would find the locals living in a manner closer to what they expected of Bedouins and the area much more desert than today. Organised tours had not yet included Wadi Ramm in their programmes, there was no asphalt road or built village, and only the Fort of the Arab Legion and a small rest house stood at the end of the track, at times surrounded with back Bedouin tents. Those taking the trip had little chance of being disappointed: few Bedouins could speak English but most were happy to host visitors in their tents sometimes for weeks or months in row, as they still remember today. At the time, these visitors were called foreigners (adjnabi/pl. adjāneb). Today, any foreigner in Ramm is called a tourist (sāyeh/ pl. suwwah) even by children in the streets, and local people, when speaking of the period before the 1980’s, talk of the time "before the tourists came" (gabl ma aju s-suwwah) as they talk of the time before they built a house in the village (gabl ma ‘amarna dār bil-garyeh).

The change in vocabulary from "foreigners" to "tourists", and the breaking of time into "before" and "after", indicate that the shift did not occur when foreign visitors started interacting with Bedouins in Wadi Ramm, but when tourism started having a systematic character, became a driving force in the local economy, and impacted on social realities by being the main vector of change. One illustration of this shift is that an important economic difference between the Zalabyeh and their neighbours was created only after mass tourism was introduced in the 1980's. Before that date, the Zawaydeh fraction, living in the nearby village of Diseh, was economically more well off because it had benefited from earlier types of state-sponsored development projects while the Zalabyeh had not.

Superimposed representations of space and the environment

Zalabyeh men first got involved in the activity of tourism as Jeep drivers either contracted directly by individual tourists, or hired with some profit margin by the rest house. Many sold part of their goats or sheep to buy more Jeeps, or reverted to purchasing camels that had been traded for cars in the previous decades. Later on, some opened small shops and restaurants in the village. A few were able to by-pass the rest house and offer direct services to hikers or climbers travelling alone or in small groups. They involved members of their families to accommodate them in Bedouin tents in the badia. Nowadays, almost all male residents of Wadi Ramm between 15 and 45 years of age work with tourists at least part of their time, even if extended family households often have other sources of income, derived mainly from animal husbandry or the army. As tourism was gaining economic importance, tourists became a new vector mediating between the Bedouins and the surrounding space, and I often heard Bedouin drivers and guides equating their jobs with tourists with that of herders. Many aspects of these two activities can be fruitfully compared to understand how Bedouins have recycled their know how as herders into guiding skills. One big difference between goats and tourists, though, is that the latter, unlike the former, come with representations that they communicate to Bedouins, and that they have complex and changing demands. As a Bedouin said "Goats don't complain, tourists do". Moreover, other agents stand between the Bedouins and the tourists that interpret or direct the demands of the latter. One by-product of this double mediation has been the creation of a new relation between Bedouins and the place. This relation can best be read in place-naming, in the introduction of a new vocabulary to designate the ecological environment or milieu, and in a concern for the landscape some individuals had developed even before RSCN's involvement.

It is hard to tell if the current touristic place names that appear on maps and guidebooks in English were first invented by Arabic speakers such as MTA officials or the local Bedouins, or if those just repeated names given by early foreign visitors. The only sure thing is that these names were generally unheard of before tourists started coming in larger numbers, a fact corroborated by the Bedouins, by other informants who knew Wadi Ramm before the 1970's, and by ancient written documents or maps. Touristic place names in English all have their Arabic translations that are in common use by MTA officials, rest house employees, Jordanian travel agents and tour guides, and, of course, Wadi Ramm's Bedouins who speak about taking groups to bīr lōrans or gasr lōrans (Lawrence’s well or castle), and give appointments to tour guides near al-`umūd as-sāba’ (The Seven Pillars) or under al-burj as-sghayyer (the small rock bridge). But when referring to the same places between themselves in a context unrelated to tourism, Bedouins use non-touristic names. By a slip of the tongue, one may utter the touristic name in the wrong context. It can pass unnoticed unless the conversation refers to a time B.T., in which case the speaker will be corrected and reminded jokingly that such a name is irrelevant, ¾? anachronistic, so to say. This correction tends to disappear among members of the younger generation that have grown up in the village and have worked with tourists ever since they could lead a camel or drive a Jeep, that is rather young as they do not need a license to drive off the asphalted roads.

Zalabyeh women, for their part, do not guide tourists and are not in contact with other Jordanian agents in the business. They may just receive foreigners as guests brought in by male relatives but even then interaction is limited due to language differences and/or to local concepts of women's shame. Thanks to schooling, a handful of young women in the village now read English, but even those have no motive for peering at maps or guidebooks in that language. Consequently, even though most Bedouin females are aware of the new touristic place names heard from male relatives, they cannot relate them to any personal or collective experience and do not use them even when discussing between themselves their husbands' whereabouts with tourists. In Wadi Ramm, representation of space as it is manifested though place names has both a generational and gendered dimension, reflecting that different groups in the community have various levels of contacts with tourists and therefore view and appropriate space in a different manner.

The same holds true for concepts relating to the wider milieu. As-sahra, which means the desert in Arabic, is not synonymous with al-bādia, the arid or semi-arid steppe. But the former has been sold to tourists. Bedouins, eager to speak the same language as the intermediaries in the tourism industry and in no position to impose their vision of reality, now — at least verbally — take tourists "to the desert" (fis-sahra). Yet, for Bedouins, as-sahra is not the general environment in which they live when in their encampments or in the village. Even the term al-bādia is not of very common use among the Bedouins. It pertains more to the vocabulary of the development planners of the 1950's or 1960's. Bedouins do not express opposition between the place of dwelling and the outside by saying that one "goes out into al-bādia", but by opposing the encampment or the village to al-barr, meaning the place where there is no domestic unit or beit. This is another relative/descriptive concept: as soon as a place in al-barr is inhabited by a Bedouin family that has pitched a tent or beit, the area around the tent ceases being al-barr. The place reassumes that appellation when the tent is folded and moved somewhere else. As easily as he jumps from one category of place name to another according to the context of interaction, a Bedouin may tell his wife that he has taken a group for "a tour of the desert" (rihleh fis-sahra) and continue the conversation about his relatives who are "encamped in the 'undomesticated'" (elle saknīn fil-barr).

Surely, when speaking with tourists in English, the same man will praise "the beauty of the sunset in the desert", a phrase he will not have to adapt when talking to his peers as Bedouins rarely pause to marvel at the twilight. Despite what looks to tourists as Wadi Ramm’s extraordinary character, Bedouins find al-barr no subject of wonder and no place for adventure, even though they express some nostalgia about "dwelling in the tent". For the Bedouins, al-barr is neither empty nor timeless: it is peopled with other Bedouins in their encampments or who have left recent or more ancient traces; it evokes pasture lands and paths, seasonal migration routes, wells and springs, hunting spots in the mountains, animals and plants that each have their specific use, name and habitat; when they think of it, Bedouins remember secret passages where children use to play hide-and-seek, old places of encampment where neighbours had a lovely daughter, and many other features with a cultural or social significance. Individuals can name canyons, valleys, sand dunes, or cracks in the mountains within the territory of their fraction, and with even more accuracy next to the seasonal encampments of their own families. Many stories can be told about particular places and people, and many events recalled that make of al-barr a social environment and endow it with historical depth. This is why it is impossible to follow dictionaries that translate al-barr by "the wilderness". The wilderness and the desert belong to the same semantic field; they have both been socially constructed as spaces empty of civilised men's presence and ahistorical, precisely what al-barr is not.

It can be argued that those Bedouins who have grown up in a built settlement and do not have regular social activities in al-barr are now separated from it and that their familiarity with that milieu is disappearing. But al-barr still lives in the collective representations that one generation of nomads has passed to the next (partially) settled generation. In the imaginary of the settled Bedouins, al-barr is linked to a certain idealised style of life one used to lead there — simple, honest and communal. In Wadi Ramm, most of the young adults feel nostalgic about life in the tent, in large part because they believe that village life and the new economic competition are detrimental to harmonious social and family relations and to personal autonomy. When they want a break from village life (including everything related to tourists), Bedouin families pack a Jeep and head off to spend a night or two at relatives' who still live in a tent or, simply, spend the evening around an open air fire in a place where they have memories. By doing so on a regular basis, especially off touristic season when men have more spare time, young adults perpetuate the Bedouins' special relationship with al-barr and pass it on to their children, otherwise raised in the village. Just like the tourists romanticise the desert, settled Bedouins too idealise al-barr but not because of an inherent beauty or purity in the landscape, or because they want to be closer to nature or to God. Bedouins like al-barr for its social meaning not for its aesthetics, simply because they do not view it as something external to them or unusual, as an object of desire. Foreign visitors come to Wadi Ramm from all over the world and marvel at the arid landscape of the desert where astounding shades of red dominate. Those who have the opportunity to visit a Bedouin family at home can have no other reaction but to mock a sight they call "kitsch" because they cannot make any other sense of it: posters hang on the walls, even in some tents pitched in the desert, showing pictures of Swiss chalets in a landscape of forest and rivers.

With tourism, the landscape and the view (both translated by the same Arabic word al-manzar, "the place being viewed") have assumed a financial value by becoming marketable items: visitors pay to be taken to the "sun set place", to camp where they can admire sunrise, and to be guided on top of rocks or mountains where they can take panoramic pictures. The value of the landscape increases with its cleanliness, i.e. with the absence of visible pollution or traces of "technologised" human occupation. In order to sell their landscape, Bedouins have to repeat the discourse on its beauty and uniqueness. Demonstrating the qualities of good salesmen, a few young men are now sincerely convinced that no such "desert" as Wadi Ramm is anywhere to be found. Bedouins have also heard disappointed tourists complaining about the garbage left around encampments, graffiti on the rocks and other damages to the environment. They have realised that they get less money from visitors if they take them to spend the night in a place they find dirty or where the view is spoiled by too many Jeep tracks. Logically, they have become aware that if they want tourists to keep coming and pay good money, they should provide them with a view where man’s presence is as little visible as can be.

Well before RSCN’s involvement, protection of the environment had become an issue in Ramm, albeit under a different vocable. Already by the mid-1990's, there was a recurrent debate going on between those who supported "improving the view" and those who did not see why they should change their habit of throwing Coca Cola cans over the window of their Jeeps. The first ones who had started to care about the view were a small group of young men who had managed to individually set up regular business as guides or service providers with some European tour operators specialising in hiking or climbing tours for small parties. By-passing the rest house or the rota system introduced by the Bedouin tourism co-operative, members of that group were getting an income well above that of the Bedouin drivers who waited for their turn at the entrance of the village. Tourists they were working with usually came without a licensed Jordanian guide, a fact that allowed the young Bedouin service providers un-mediated interactions and exchange of views with the tourists and/or their tour leaders, at least in English, a language they picked up quickly. Following the rest house, these same young men were the first ones in the village to buy fax and answering machines, and had direct access to managers in the headquarters of the tour operators they worked with in European cities. Another important point is that some members of this emerging socio-economic group had been to Europe. At the end of the 1980's, four of them had been selected by a British professional mountain climber upon the request of the Jordanian MTA and sent to the UK for training. In later years, the same ones or others that were quick to understand the economic opportunities offered by "adventure" tourism, went to European capitals as guests of tour operators to discuss business. Either because they had travelled to Europe or because they were keeping a high level of direct business or friendly contacts with Westerners in Wadi Ramm, this group of young informal entrepreneurs were subjected more than others to the discourse on protection of the environment and became convinced of its relevance. They were the promoters of a new set of environmental practices in Wadi Ramm: they started not disposing of litter in the desert, telling tourists not to uproot plants, and passing this attitude to others around them especially those they employed as drivers, cooks, or guides or to their own children and spouses. It is to conform to tourist representations of a desertic, aesthetic landscape (and to tourists’ desire to be represented on pictures in this environment) that Bedouins have developed a new interest in the "beautification" of the view. Those who have fuelled this dynamic are those who can take business initiatives and do not depend exclusively from middlemen, who derive a good income from tourism according to local standards, who can still relate to the steppe as a milieu producing economic resources (as one once of them put it schematically and jokingly: "Al-barr used to feed the goats who fed the Bedouins, as-sahra now pleases the tourists who feed the Bedouins"), and who feel that their knowledge of the milieu and professional know-how as service providers is valued by clients and contractors.

RSCN's ecotourism project was designed with other types of representations in mind, giving priority to wildlife (conceived of as natural and essential) and not to the landscape (conceived of as cultural and superficial). Therefore, the new attitude described above is totally ignored by international experts, although it can be passed on to other members of the community by a process of diffusion typical of the dynamic of endogenous social change. It will most probably come to a standstill if Bedouins feel they have no say in the future of the area and less share in its use. Yet, in previous decades, when overgrazing appeared to be the most problematic issue to solve in the steppe, some anthropologists came to realise that pastoral tribes in the Arabian Peninsula had always had notions of "protected" areas (Draz 1969), a reality that contradicts the current developers' vision of Bedouins as "a threat to biodiversity" who need "to be taught about nature conservation". More recent works have confirmed that modern Bedouins have a knowledge of their environment which does not go against proper conservation practices, provided a certain balance is found between available resources and needed income (Hobbs 1989). This balance has been disrupted in recent decades because of state influence and the introduction of technological devices. Currently, Bedouins are in a process of readjustment of their practices towards the milieu and, if they were given the chance and the time, they would by themselves adjust their level of use and exploitation of the steppe to the new needs of adventure or eco-tourism. But this would mean that development projects take into account how knowledge and know-how are acquired and transmitted locally (that is by adopting and reinterpreting global knowledge too), and give Bedouins agency instead of turning them into mere subordinates. This would also mean that national or international development planners come with a measure of coherence in their long term vision for Wadi Ramm, and stop shifting priorities as soon as a new fashion hits the tourism market. After all, the slogans of the Green movements of the 1970's took about a whole generation to materialise in Western cities into, for example, the now common habit of sorting out garbage for recycling. Ecological sustainability is often better achieved slowly. But the agenda of Jordanian development planners and decision-makers is dictated by the temporality of supranational funding agencies which are themselves set to the pace of international investors. The sustainable growth of financial institutions is better insured by creating ever changing fashions and not by waiting for a generation.

History, identity and hospitality as issues of prestige and power

When I asked some of the elders among the Zalabyeh about their memories of Lawrence, they took a half-secretive, half-amused tone. Their fathers may well have known him, they said, but memories were not passed on from one generation to the other. They themselves had never heard his name "before the foreigners came to make the film in the 1960’s". They were hired to play extras, but they were not very interested in "what's his name?" (Peter O’Toole) who was playing Lawrence. Approaching then young King Hussein, who came during the filming, is recalled as a much more significant experience. On the other hand, they were interested in the actors playing Emir Faysal and the Shaykh of their tribe, Awdeh Abu Tayeh. Those, their fathers knew and fought on their sides. "Lawrence, it is well known, was a liar", they say. And in fact, nobody in Ramm would ever boast of having an ancestor who knew the British Colonel, except when talking to tourists or journalists who "always ask the same questions, so we give them the answers they want". This is what Bedouins call a "white lie" (kedhb abyad), which, like in English, is supposed not to be detrimental to the person lied to. Bedouins create fictive links with the hero so as not to confess the breach in the transmission of memories that would testify to the historically secondary nature of the character, demystify him, and displease the visitors. This last concern is not so much borne out of a particular regard for the tourist as a guest. More prosaically, it is a way of avoiding the hassle of dealing with tourists' disappointment. Some Bedouins go as far as inventing episodes of their grand-father's life with Lawrence while they take journalists or tourists to photograph a section of the railway the two characters of the story supposedly blew up together. This little game can be financially rewarding, but it does not enhance the local reputation of Lawrence, a sort of puppet one can manipulate as one pleases. Indeed, not someone worthy of becoming a local hero, "and why should he? Nobody we know has ever met him, really".

When Bedouins are alone together, they sometimes laugh about the credulity of foreign visitors. They also make fun of each other’s pretences, especially the younger ones who can embark on real contests to decide on who made up the biggest story or got the best money out of one. But make believing about Lawrence is irrelevant in the competition for historical prestige between individuals and kinship groups, which serves to assess symbolic status among Bedouins and in a large number of social and political processes in the Jordanian society at large. What counts then is the proximity of one’s ancestors with the real leaders of the Arab Revolt, those whose descendants have some power in today’s Jordan, either as leaders of influential social groups or, better, as rulers of the kingdom (Layne 1994; Schryock 1997; Chatelard 1999).

Eager to divert the economic benefits of tourism in their direction, Bedouins have quickly understood the use they could make of easily marketable cultural markers. Their main targets are independent tourists and the small groups of hikers and climbers that come to Ramm without a guide and want to avoid the rest house they find too crowded. As the example of the rest house shows, almost everything can be sold to tourists under the label Bedouin. Dynamic young men in Ramm have opened Bedouin restaurants, Bedouin supermarkets and Bedouin souvenir-shops. Some keep a Bedouin tent in the desert just for tourists, furnished with the usual Bedouin rugs and cushions, where they serve Bedouin coffee or tea (sometimes presented laughingly as Bedouin whiskey). Touristic Bedouinity has become thick and pervasive to the point of literally ethnicising the Bedouins, following a process similar to the Southeastern Asian cases of "touristic ethnicity" studied by Wood (1998). Foreign visitors frequently ask if Bedouins are Arab and Moslem, and if their language is Arabic. Since one can undoubtedly answer yes to all three questions, what differentiates a Bedouin from another Arab has to be made clear for tourists. Selected external tokens of Bedouin identity are there to make differences obvious and delineate a group that can be easily identified.

But whether one considers the decoration of the tents pitched to host tourists or the objects sold as handicraft, it is obvious that those at the hands of the Bedouins are closely similar to those presented by the rest house. This is due to the fact that the manager of the rest house conforms to the Orientalist vision Westerners have of the Bedouins and, in turn, that the Bedouins take their inspiration from the services provided by the rest house because it appears to be successful if judging by the fact that it makes good money. Consequently, the touristic image Bedouins give of their own culture and identity does not differ markedly from the one presented by Egyptians or urban Jordanians and is definitely in line with what tourists expect before coming. The same goes for the musical evenings Bedouins organise for visitors. The type of music they play is a mix of Bedouin folk songs, commercial Saudi or Gulf (khalīdji) pieces and Egyptian or Lebanese standards. Instruments they use are not typically Bedouin. In fact, what is presented here is everyday Bedouin musical culture. Instruments coming from the city such as the ‘ūd (lute) are today preferred to the old Bedouin rabbāba (one string guitar) good only for old men, and what Bedouins listen to on their radios are mainly commercial songs from Saudi Arabia. Once again, the way in which they entertain visitors is not very different from the style of the all-Egyptian pseudo-Bedouin musical band that works for the rest house. (This I say with all due respect for these migrant workers whose livelihood strategies and uneasy position as Arab strangers/foreign labourers in Wadi Ramm deserve careful attention too.)

A very important cultural marker that allows tourists to identify Bedouins is the dress. For the Bedouins, as elsewhere, the costume has a symbolic meaning and is connected to issues of collective identity, group prestige, respect and honour. The way in which it is being adapted to fit the tourism interaction tells a lot about where the tourists stand in the local system of social ranking, but also reveals the tensions at work between the rest house and the Bedouins. While most Bedouin men over 30-35 years old tend to wear robes at all times when in Wadi Ramm, many of the younger ones casually wear Jeans, T-shirts and jackets except when they take part in a formal social event either involving only Bedouins or where Bedouins and non-Bedouin Arabs interact. Then, they systematically put on their robes and head-dresses as a sign of group belonging which also strongly indicates a difference of honour/status between Bedouins and non-Bedouins. Some of these young men also consciously wear Bedouin robes when they go to work with tourists. Here too, it is a sign of group belonging, but unconnected to issues of honour and status, and displayed only to please the tourists and, for the more cynical ones, to yield better profits. In any case, it is optional as one can still drive tourists around wearing jeans. Among the entrepreneur group I mentioned earlier, some employ Arabs of other origins that have come to Ramm following the growth of the village. Unlike what happens at the rest house, those Arab strangers do not dress as Bedouins when they take part in the musical evenings Bedouins organise for "their" groups of tourists. In front of tourists, a Bedouin can chose not to wear the traditional costume, but an Arab stranger should not wear it and pass for a Bedouin, that is pose as an equal when Bedouins consider him inferior. This is why Bedouins do not appreciate seeing the Egyptian employees of the rest house disguised as a Bedouin band. If a tourist dresses up as a Bedouin, "Ma'lech", it does not really matter because he is not pretending to pass for an authentic Bedouin. The tourist can be left to wear the Bedouin head-dress as this act does not threaten social hierarchy and order. On the contrary, it can even be an occasion for laughter. Bedouin humour too is becoming post-modern.

What is at stake, behind the staging Bedouins perform of their own culture for the purpose of tourism, are issues of identity and power invisible for tourists. Most probably, tourists cannot tell the difference between what the rest house presents as Bedouin culture and what Bedouins show to the tourists. Bedouins even say they know that what makes the real Bedouin is not his costume nor his folklore. The point lies elsewhere, in the feeling they have of controlling what is shown of their culture. For them, this is a matter of pride and self-respect, just as not involving "their women" in the tourism encounter and not bringing false Bedouin women from outside to please the tourists. I never met a Bedouin man in Wadi Ramm who did not resent the quasi monopoly of the rest house over tourism, even if he acknowledged the fact that the Zalabyeh had a lot to learn. Generally, men also disapprove of the way rest house employees stage their culture, especially in the case of so-called Bedouin parties. Today, a very revealing process is underway whereby those Bedouins who have gained recognition as the most successful in the tourism business confront the manager of the rest house to have him stop "giving a wrong image" (sūra ghalta) of Bedouin culture. How this was allowed to happen, in a relationship that is strongly unequal, is also a matter of representations.

On the one hand, urban Arabs look down on the material aspects of traditional Bedouin life seen as primitive. Bedouins, for their part, have enough self-esteem to consider that their "traditions and customs" (‘adād u taqalīd) are a part of their history and identity they should not be ashamed of. But they would not normally chose to underline practical aspects of traditional daily life to assert the value of Bedouin identity in front of urban Arabs. Rather, they would stress such qualities as honour or generosity. On the other hand, both Bedouins and urban Arabs aspire to material and technological modernity seen as an attribute of the West (things are different when one comes to social or moral values). Now, Western tourists, who possess technological modernity at home, show appreciation for and give an economic value to these aspects of traditional Bedouin life urban Arabs despise (such as nomadic life in the desert, hand-made artifacts, etc.). The tourist gaze on the Bedouins allows the latter to confront the Arab city-dwellers involved in tourism with more self-confidence when it comes to representing Bedouin culture. A couple of years ago, the President of the Wadi Ramm tourism co-operative successfully approached the manager of the rest house to have him stop selling Egyptian rugs in guise of Bedouin handicraft. Up to now, though, the President has failed to convince the manager that he'd better organise parties more decent than the current ones where loud music, belly dancers and alcoholic drinks are provided. The manager of the rest house has travelled to the West and has been to night-clubs there. He thinks that this is the way most Westerners like to enjoy themselves and that he just needs to provide a little exotic touch. But, to please the President of the co-operative, whom he needs badly to provide services to tourists, he is ready to stop advertising these parties as Bedouin and just call them Arabic or Oriental. He is even ready to have the Egyptian performers exchange Damascene-style outfits for the Bedouin ones. One reading of this I can make is that elements of Bedouin material culture are becoming disentangled from the all-encompassing, unifying Orientalist canvas. But looking at the intentions that fuelled this change shows that, by having Arab migrant workers remove their Bedouin dress, the President of the co-operative is just putting them back into their place: at the bottom of the social ladder. Whatever the interpretation, the mere fact that a Bedouin individual, mandated by other members of the community, is in a position of making demands on the rest house — and not the other way round, which has systematically been the case before — indicates that the tourists’ vision can become an effective tool in the competition between local actors in the tourism industry. It testifies to the fact that representations can contribute to modifying power relations, albeit not, in this case, to the extend of inverting them.

When it is not confiscated and staged by the rest house, the Bedouins themselves extend their famous hospitality to tourists. If they show interest, individuals or small groups are likely to be invited into an inhabited Bedouin tent or even into a house in the village. There they can just have some tea, share a meal with their hosts or stay overnight. Hospitality is never a gratuitous act but is part of a wide-ranging system of reciprocity, mutual aid and competition for individual or collective prestige. Tourists, who normally cannot partake in this system, are nonetheless eager to experience hospitality and ready to pay for it. Bedouins, for their part, like to reset the touristic intercourse in a context familiar to them, that of the relation between a host and his guests. By doing so, Bedouins feel that they control the relationship and acquire a dominant position. They also adapt the tourists’ visit to have it meet the standards of a proper host/guest exchange: as hosts, they offer hospitality not so much in their own name or in that of their tribe (as they would do in most inter-Arab contexts), but in the name of all Bedouins; as guests, tourists are welcome — though rarely directly asked — to give some money in exchange. It is as if, as G. Albergoni (1990 : 200) has noted, Bedouins could not reduce exchanges to economic transactions but should always accompany them with a social etiquette in which rituals of hospitality play a great role. Just as barter exchange continues to be expressed in the vocabulary of presents exchange, service to tourists is disguised as hospitality. This is why Bedouins prefer to receive tourists accompanied with a guide/mediator. This dalīl can be another Bedouin, another Arab, or even a foreigner who knows the local practices and the "étiquette of bargaining", and whose role is similar to that of the dellāl in the Arab market place F. Khuri has analysed (1968). By refraining from entering into direct commercial relations with tourists, some Bedouins think they are preserving their superior social ranking because middlemen are considered individuals of a lower category who can talk about money. This attitude is changing among the younger ones who do not hesitate to discuss prices with independent travellers. The new generation now masters both the vocabulary and rituals of Arab bargaining and the commercial logic of the tourism exchange.
Bedouins do not feel they are selling hospitality. They contrast their way of hosting tourists with the way the rest house deals with them. They refuse to be at the disposal of tourists, as are waiters or tour guides whom they consider to be servants or employees who take orders from a boss. Even those who have small shops or restaurants do not work there, they hire Egyptian, Sudanese or Iraqi immigrants or non-Bedouin Jordanians. According to the "tribal ethos", not all types of occupations are deemed suitable for Bedouins, especially if they imply servility or dependence (Albergoni 1990: 212). Bedouins like to think that all they provide to tourists (a Jeep, a camel, a cup of tea, a meal, accommodation or entertainment) is given on an exchange basis because they willingly want it to be so, not because they need it or are ordered it. In their view, hospitality is a generic label covering all the range of services they offer. It conceals the commercial and neo-colonial aspects of the tourism encounter where power lies in the hands of tourists. But as long as Bedouins do not feel they are dominated, they retain their pride and honour.

Of boundaries, old and new, and of struggles over them

Like the various experts or the anthropologists, Bedouins have their own ideas about the effects of tourism on their society. They say they appreciate economic benefits and improvements in their everyday life made possible because of a higher purchasing power. They are generally curious to learn more about how tourists live at home and enjoy exchanging views and ideas. Some elements of Western culture appeal to them. Others are not considered in line with their own value system, which they qualify as Arab and/or Islamic. This is why Bedouins do not object to a certain containment of tourists as it is practised with large organised groups at the initiative of urban Arab or Western tour-operators. In this way, only a limited number of escorted tourists enter what Bedouins want to keep as a separate sphere to prevent the vulnerable members of the community from being exposed to unsuitable Western values.

In the village and in the desert, specialised zones have appeared intended for the purpose of tourism. Within a radius of 10 km around the village, in the area where most touristic sites are concentrated and where campsites have been set up for foreign visitors, pastoral nomads in the era B. T. used to pitch their tents in larger numbers than in regions farther away from the al-Shallaleh spring. Nowadays, tent dwellers try to find places where they will not be bothered by tourists peering through their tents and taking photos or by the loudspeakers installed for parties at night. In practice, the area shown as desert on the tourist map has come to be used by tourists more than by pastoral nomads. In the village itself, Bedouin restaurants and shops for tourists have all been located on the edge of the housing zone, right across the street from the rest house and from the parking lot where Bedouin Jeeps and camels wait for their turn. Even more than in the desert, this concentration of activities has created a specialised area. The practice of a cordon sanitaire around tourist activities is frequent in a number of developing countries. It is usually interpreted as a way for development planners and the tourism industry to protect tourists from bothersome locals, and to prevent the underdeveloped reality of the natives from interfering with staged authenticity (MacCannell 1973; Opperman 1993; Mitchel 1995; Slyomovics 1995). In other words, it makes exoticism possible by a process of segregation.

In Wadi Ramm, young and middle-aged Bedouin males move in and out of the touristic "bubble" rather freely and do not complain about a segregation which little affects them. On the contrary, most of those I talked to on the subject said they would not mind if the separation between touristic zones and Bedouin dwellings was stricter. They said they did not like to see unaccompanied tourists wandering about the village or around the tents and taking pictures of women that might appear in books or magazines (this concern relates to the same conception of shame and honour as those of the Egyptian Bedouins L. Abu-Lughod analysed in her 1986 monography). Conversely, these Bedouin men do not want their wives, children or elderly parents to be in close contacts with tourists in the specialised zones where the set of values that govern interactions is not ethical by local standards. What is lawful (hallal) and unlawful (haram) between Bedouins is not what is lawful and unlawful between Bedouins and tourists. The same applies for another set of antagonist values with less religious connotation and more references to customary, patriarchal ethics: what preserves or increases honour (sharaf for men/'ird for women), or what brings shame ('eyb). Playing music while tourists are drinking beer and wine is certainly not very moral. Neither is close contact (very intimate in some occasions) with Western women. Some types of commercial deals tour operators have with Bedouins would not be accepted as ethical within the Bedouin community either. Bedouins differentiate very clearly between two spheres: that of the values in the context of tourism, and that of the values at home. Keeping specialised zones is a way of materialising the boundaries between these two value systems in the local geography. Specialised zones need specialised Bedouin personnel and only those received among the initiates can cross the line. Bedouin women and the elderly, on the other hand, take no part in the interaction with tourists while youngsters have to be considered mature enough to assess what is good with tourists but bad at home.

By creating a space for tourists within their own geographical and ethical world, Bedouins develop strategies to adapt to change. They want to draw the best financial and social benefit out of tourism while preserving their value system. Similar attempts have been recorded in other Third World host communities (Picard and Wood 1997; Erb 2000; Joseph and Kavoori 2001). To what extent they succeed needs to be explored more thoroughly. The simple fact that there is a flow of persons, money, information, know how, etc. that circulates from one ethical and spatial sphere to the other jeopardises Bedouin's endeavours to keep them tightly separated. Nevertheless, when going back home to their families after a day's work with tourists, Bedouin males do have to readjust to a different reality. To smooth the process of re-adaptation, they may meet for a chat on the 4X4 parking lot, or visit each other at home. If adult Bedouin women or old people are nor around, all opportunities are good to seize to mock tourists’ behaviour or credulity, to use self-irony, to laugh at oneself staging touristic Bedouinity or acting as a tourist. In a way similar to Native Americans who use parody to put Anglo-American tourists "into their place" (Evans-Pritchard 1989), Wadi Ramm's Bedouins use humour to adjust to different value systems. By staging it, humour allows for distancing oneself from the commercial world of tourism where the main value is money, and for regaining one’s place in the tribal world of the Bedouins where honour and pride are said to matter more than wealth.

Tourism has not created new social boundaries between groups in the Bedouin community. Rather, it has reshaped or reinforced existing ones between such groups as adult women and men, male children and young adults (ash-shabāb), the elderly (al-kbār) and the younger adults. It has also changed the power balance between these groups. In the era B.T., women used to take an active part in the household economy, together with young children and the elderly who could perform a variety of tasks linked to animal husbandry or the making of products to be sold. With the growing importance of tourism in the local economy, and with the process of sedentarisation, pastoralism is loosing its importance as an economic activity. For those nuclear families who live in the village, young adult males are now the main (if not exclusive) breadwinners and, because they are the only ones to move from the touristic sphere to the non-touristic one, they have acquired a knowledge no other group shares with them. This knowledge differential results in a power differential. Most young village women have been deprived of their role in the domestic economy and now constitute a category seen by men as ignorant (djahilīn) of what goes on outside the house. Men are not keen to remedy women's ignorance or eager to let their spouses earn some income (for example, by working in the workshop set up by RSCN or by weaving rugs to sell to tourists). They prefer to maintain the power and knowledge gap and use it as a tool of domination in their marital relations. Yet, they talk of a day when they will send their, now, baby daughters to university. For the time being, those who have older daughters think more about marrying them. For their part, the elderly are duly respected, but consulted only when it comes to taking decisions that have to do with tribal law or other domains that Bedouins see as traditional (pertaining to 'adād u-taqalīd). To a certain extend, even if pastoralism still plays an economic role in which members of the older generation living in tents or in the village are involved, the younger ones in the village now see this activity as traditional.

Most relations with state institutions have also stopped being mediated by the old men that used to be considered shuyūkh (leaders). But if young adult males have taken most instances of collective decision away from the elders, they have not been able to agree on leadership among themselves. This is in part due to the fact that the various public or semi-public agencies that are involved with Wadi Ramm's Bedouins in matters of local development have not always selected the same local partners and interlocutors. This is also a feature of the current process of social adjustment the Zalabyeh are undergoing. While they know what are the bases of traditional leadership and agree on it, they are searching for the basis of a new type of leadership adapted to the changing social conditions. In the meantime, various visions will keep struggling and various individuals trying to seize the opportunity to be recognised as leaders by state and other public institutions. But leadership should emerge from consensus within the community, otherwise it is not a leadership Bedouins will follow. At the moment, a very deep factionalism is impeding the emergence of a non-contested leadership among the Zalabyeh and weakening their position in front of RSCN or other institutional agencies that have a freer hand to carry out their projects with minimum Bedouin consultation and consent.

Even if, today, most of the land belongs to the Jordanian state, even if the MTA was the main actor in promoting Wadi Ramm, and even if RSCN is now increasingly controlling the use of the land, the members of the Zalabyeh fraction still consider that all visitors (Jordanians and tourists alike) come to their village, receive their hospitality, admire their landscape and visit sites on their land. All that is shown on tourist maps, guidebooks, in documentaries, and other media, all that is described as a tourist zone or a nature reserve in development projects is a representation of their territory. Dira-s are not shown on maps, be they meant for tourists or for the local people; they even have no official existence in the modern land law of Jordan. Still, in the mind of the Bedouins, they sometimes assume more importance than the territories mapped on official documents. The Zalabyeh have mentally integrated the various representations of their territory created by the State. Even if the border is not always materialised, they know they are forbidden to cross into Saudi Arabia as they wish. They also know where their village — defined as such on the land registers — starts and ends and the limits of the various individual plots. They know when they enter the nature reserve and are not supposed to hunt anymore. Unlike most government officials or rangers of the reserve, they also know when an unwelcome member of the neighbouring tribe crosses over the boundaries of their dira.

In the area of Wadi Ramm, tourism has become an important element used in the competition for economic and political leadership among Bedouins of the same fraction but also between neighbouring fractions. Locally, the Zalabyeh have benefited from tourism development much more than any of their neighbours and are now more well off and better connected in Amman than their direct competitors, the Zawaydeh, settled in the village of Diseh, 15 km to the east of Ramm. In the era B.T it was quite the other way round as Diseh was a larger, more ancient settlement which had benefited from state-sponsored agricultural projects at a time when visions of development were different from the current ones. The Zawaydeh are now trying to redirect part of the flow of visitors towards their village: they have set up their own tourism co-operative and offer Jeep and camel tours at a cheaper price, thus attracting more and more tour operators (Brand 2001: 580). A privately owned rest house was built recently and more investments are planned. The problem is that tourists want to see what is pictured in their guidebooks or what is presented on their maps as sites of interest. If they want customers, Zawaydeh drivers have to comply with tourists’ requests at their own risk. Entering the area described, photographed and mapped as "Wadi Rum" also means entering the Zalabyeh’s dira.

Now that competition in the framework of tourism takes place between two neighbouring fractions, tribal visions of the territory reassume primary importance and tribesmen resort to customary law (and to old men) to solve conflicts ensuing from encroachments. If tribal boundaries are just as flexible as before when Bedouins look for pasture or water, these same boundaries are becoming very fixed with tourism mainly because the Zawaydeh cannot reciprocate the use they make of the Zalabyeh’s territory. Eventually, this problem might be solved as the MTA has started identifying sites of interest to tourists around Diseh. Tour operators, guidebooks, maps, TV documentaries, etc. now have to construct a marketable representation of Diseh and make it as desirable a place as Wadi Ramm.