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Annex: A note on methodology

In November 2000, I conducted a random survey of 151 Western visitors in the village of Ramm. At the end of their tour of Wadi Ramm, visitors were handed a questionnaire either in English or French. The questionnaire included multiple choice close-ended questions on (1) the origin and (2) the age of the respondents, (3) their way of travelling (organised or individual), (4) the length of their stay in Wadi Ramm, (5) the type of activities they had undertaken there (site-seeing, camping, hiking, taking a Jeep, riding a horse or a camel, rock climbing), (6, 7, 8) their encounters with Bedouins (how they identified them as such and in what circumstances they met), (9) the sites they had seen in the desert, (10, 11) the places they had seen in the village, if any, (12, 13, 14) their previous knowledge of Wadi Ramm and when and how it was gained (before or after deciding to visit Jordan; through guidebooks, documentaries, travel magazines, the Internet, literary works, feature films, climbers, hikers or horse-riding clubs or magazines, etc.). Open-ended questions were also asked about (15) the idea respondents had of the place prior to their visit, (16) how they would describe the place after their visit, (17) whether they would recommend others to visit it and why.

Besides statistical data collected from the survey, additional qualitative data had been gathered at different times over the previous 3 years through a number of informal interviews with tourists before, during or after their visit of Wadi Ramm.

The account of the tourism/travel media is based on the material for distribution printed by the Jordanian MTA in the 1990’s and on major guidebooks in English, French and Italian, the latter two nationalities accounting for more than half the total of visitors to Wadi Ramm. I also consulted the website of the Jordanian MTA together with the brochures of 51 French, British, German, Italian and American tour operators (some of them on-line). I did not make a comprehensive review of documentaries and travel magazines but looked at those kept by the Bedouins or the rest house in Wadi Ramm (some journalists send video-tapes or copies of magazines) and watched a dozen travel documentaries about Jordan on various western channels these last few years. I am not including in my account Japanese visitors and tourist media for lack of proper linguistic knowledge. Nevertheless, it seems to me that the same construction of representations is attempted by their guide books that feature photographs of Wadi Ramm. Besides, a Japanese speaking Jordanian tour guide assured me that the term employed to describe the area corresponds to the English term "desert". But I still remain unaware of the mythology of desert in Japanese culture

As far as ethnographic data regarding the rest house, the Bedouin and other agents in the tourism business are concerned, they were collected a different times over the last 8 years in various circumstances and in various positions. I came first to Wadi Ramm as an independent tourist in 1993, at a time when I was already living in the Middle East, knew Arabic, had studied sociology and has already met several “modernised” Bedouins. I believe this led me to come with a different gaze on the people of Ramm, even if it was still a tourist gaze on the desert. As from 1994, as I had come to reside permanently in Amman and research other anthropological issues in contemporary Jordan for a PhD, I started visiting Ramm regularly and staying in the village with a Bedouin family I had met through other, long-term foreign residents of Amman. From 1997 to 2000, I worked on and off as a tour leader for a French adventure tour operator, which led me to discover sociological aspects of Jordan and Wadi Ramm I had been almost totally unaware of previously. This job as a tour leader put me in touch with more of Wadi Ramm’s inhabitants, specifically those working with tourists. I also met foreigners who had been coming to Ramm for much longer than me, had played a role in its touristic development and were often worried about the changes they were witnessing on the ground. In 1999, I had also started coming to Ramm with a different hat, that of the anthropologist, as a member of a French-Saudi-Jordanian team studying the use of space and of resources in the area from Antiquity to present. I was charged with the contemporary period. I had been wanting to write about Wadi Ramm for a long time, and this research project prompted me to gather the notes I had collected over the years in my different capacities as a tourist, visitor, foreign resident, tour-leader, etc. and write them down again into something coherent. It was evident from the beginning that tourism, representations, social change and power were going to be the main issues of what, hopefully, will become a book. Being a foreign woman speaking the local brand of Arabic (albeit with an urban accent) has allowed me to access both men’s and women’s spheres. On the other hand, changing positions and identity in has not always been easy. Nevertheless, it has allowed me, I believe, to apprehend many aspects of the local reality and, maybe, to represent them in a more accurate way than experts’ reports usually do.

1 The author is a Jean Monnet Fellow at the Robert Schuman Centre for Advanced Studies, European University Institute, Florence. Thanks to Mauro Van Aken for his critical reading of a draft version of this paper, to be published in Latte Abdallah, S. (sous la dir. de) Représentation et construction de la réalité sociale en Jordanie et en Palestine, Beyrouth : CERMOC, 2002.

2 On recent aspects of tourism in Petra, see Shoup 1985, Hazbun 1998 and Villeneuve 2001.

3 After the huge growth of conventional package tourism in the 1970's and 1980's, more elitist brands of organised travel developed as from the mid-1980's. What Mowforth and Munt (1998) label "new tourism" encompasses a variety of practices that often appear in combination. Heritage tourism is geared towards historical sites, arts and archaeology, but also less ancient, more popular vernacular architecture, folklore and handicraft. Nature tourism involves travelling to places "unspoiled by human activities" to experience and enjoy nature. Wildlife tourism is more concerned with the observation of animals in their native habitat. Ethnic tourists prefer to look at "traditional" human communities "unspoiled by modernity". Finally, adventure tourism involves a degree of risk taking, often accompanied with an athletic outdoor activity (climbing, trekking, etc.). Whereas these various brands of "new tourism" are only defined by the recreational activities of the tourist, ecotourism, or "green" tourism, on the other hand, purports to benefit both nature conservation and people in the host country (Honey 1999: 6). Even if they are specialised, major tour operators try to diversify their public by offering tours that combine different practices in various proportions. In Jordan, for example, adventure tours always include a good part of heritage tourism, while heritage tourists may spend a night in Wadi Ramm, an experience presented as adventurous.

4 The region only receives around 2% of world tourists (exactly 1.9% in 1997 according to the World Tourism Organisation).

5 For details on methodology, see the Annex at the end of this paper.

6 This is not to say that history and social change go in one direction, from nomadism to urbanisation. On the contrary, all studies of the longue durée in the Middle East, or other areas of the world where nomadism is a recurrent social form, point at long-term, alternate cycles of nomadism and sedentarisation. But this view is that of specialised scholars, and is not held by others either in the West or in Arab countries. The current cycle people experience/record/recall is a move towards ever more sedentarisation and urbanisation.

7 As for 4X4 vehicles, the policy of the Jordanian authorities has shifted over the last few years. Bedouins from the region have always been allowed to drive freely in the area. Visitors, either foreigners or coming from other areas of Jordan, could use the tracks with their privately owned or rented vehicles until 1999. Then, as the area has just been declared a nature reserve (see below), these outsiders were required to leave their cars on the parking lot and hire local Bedouin 4X4 and drivers. In Spring 2001, due to the drop in visitors at the national and local levels, this policy was reversed and visitors were again allowed to enter the, now, reserve with their own vehicles. But independent tourists who hire their own 4X4 remain rare and the bulk of visitors does not evade the episode of the rest house in its experience of Wadi Ramm.

8 This spelling was inspired by T.E. Lawrence’s and was subsequently reused by British Mandate officials. Lawrence himself states in the introduction of his book that he deliberately transcribed Arabic names according to his fantasy to show that existing systems of transcription were inadequate, but also that Arabic pronunciation varied from one person to the other. In total agreement with this, I felt free to adopt another transcription, which stresses the double m as in the Arabic pronunciation, and transliterates the vowel with a in an attempt to prevent non-native English speakers from calling the place Wadi Roum, a spelling that has become common in French and Italian guidebooks. Tourists talking of Wadi Roum have induced Jordanian tour guides who speak French, Italian or German to adopt the same pronunciation so as to avoid explanations: they are not aware of the history of the transcription and most of them hate to face a question they cannot answer. On road signs and local maps in English, one can see Ramm spelled Ram, Rum, Rumm, Roum, and occasionally Rhum though rarely Ramm.

9 On the territory of contemporary Jordan, no central state power exerted its rule from the end of the 16th Century to the last decade of the 19th Century, even though the area was nominally part of the Ottoman empire (Rogan 1999).

10 In previous years, as RSCN was setting up another nature reserve on the central plateau of Jordan now marketed to eco-tourists as Dana Nature Reserve, animal biologists and botanists came from Europe and North America to conduct research on Dana’s area ecosystem. These studies, of which RSCN holds copies, were never used to enhance the image of local people’s knowledge even though they made wide use of that knowledge, on botany and traditional medicine for example.