Epilogue. Smoke screens , computer screens and unanswered questions. The last time I visited Wadi Ramm, in the end of October 2001, two local events were getting national coverage and being reported in The Jordan Times, the national English-language daily. In Ramm, these events were not both getting equal attention from the part of the villagers. I was also trying to follow up on them, which led me to ponder about screens as either media that give representations tangibility and reality, or as veils that cover and conceal the real nature and effects of representations. For the third time in a row, Wadi Ramm was chosen as a venue for the Desert Cup, an international endurance competition organised by a French private firm specialising in the "creation of events". This time, 229 participants from twenty countries were running over 168 km to reach Petra from Ramm. For the rest house, it was rushing time too. Meals had to be served and accommodation provided to the roughly one hundred members of the organising team and support staff who had arrived a couple of days before to explore the terrain and mark out the route for the runners. The local and international press was there, accompanied by an assembly of officials gathered under five large Bedouin tents that had been pitched for the occasion in the vicinity of Lawrence's spring. Nobody could have missed the arrival of the Minister of Tourism and Antiquities who, at the time, was also wearing the hat of Information, and who had reached Ramm by helicopter. His "vehicle" kept flying above the area and making a lot of noise. In those days, many of the Zalabyeh males, who were idle for a second season in a row because of the sharp decline in tourists coming to Jordan, were trying to keep themselves busy with social visits or by spending some time at relatives’ encamped in al-barr. Unlike the rest house, they were taking no part whatsoever in the servicing of the Desert Cup. Neither were they fascinated by the race of which they had seen previous versions, but they were enviously looking at the powerful brand-new 4X4 that were patrolling the desert from one control station to the other. It has to be said that, apart from tourists and female conquests, cars are young and middle-aged Bedouin men's favourite subject of conversation. I suppose cars have replaced flocks in discussions just as they have taken goats and camels' place as the most important marker of social standing. That day, notwithstanding their considerable interest for the American and Japanese monsters roaming around, the friends I was sitting with in a tent had a good reasons to be shocked: "Thinking, one said, that last time the people of the village organised a camel race, the manager of the reserve came to complain that we were ruining nature (nekhreb at-tabî’a) because we were following the race by car! ". The Jordan Times, reporting on the Desert Cup, wrote that, before the race, two representatives of the Aqaba Special Zone Authority (ASZA), the administrative unit Wadi Ramm is part of, had briefed the press on new projects to preserve the environment, and attract more investors and tourists. The official in charge of investment and development was reported as saying : "We are hoping to a achieve the concept of Destination Aqaba which includes the Golden Triangle of Wadi Rum, Petra and Aqaba". His colleague in charge of environment declared: "We are trying to create harmony between tourism and environment. Besides promoting diving, snorkelling and mountain climbing, we intend to create a marine park in Aqaba and a desert park in Wadi Rum". I later leaned that authority over the Wadi Ramm reserve was planned to be handed over from RSCN to ASZA in 2003 and that ASZA had already a say in the commercial exploitation of the area. How old is that story, I wondered while reading the newspaper? Has it been going on ever since David Lean had bushes uprooted, or is it more ancient, dating back to the time when T.E. Lawrence fantasised about "Rum the magnificent"? It might even be much older, and I am not sure I am aware of all the precursors that came to Ramm and left accounts Lawrence had surely read. Layers of Westerners' representations of Ramm as a desert have fed the imagination of modern tourists, journalists, athletes, creators of events and investors. Because of the international imbalance of economic power, Jordanian decision-makers are not interested in developing alternative visions and are even doing their best to ease the transformation of Wadi Ramm into a desert for the use of tourists (is there not an inherent contradiction in this? Can a space replete with tourists be still be defined as a desert?). Is Wadi Ramm irremediably on the way to becoming its touristic representation? One sure thing is that identified impediments to this transformation into a desert have shifted from the bushes to the Bedouins. Once, the Bedouins helped remove the bushes. Now, the Jordanian authorities are ready to give a hand to push the Bedouins aside. D. Chatty calls the process “enclosures and exclusions” (1998). All the rhetoric about sustainability and conservation is in fact a smoke screen. The Jordanian authorities have no serious concern for biodiversity. What they care for is economic diversification, and opening up their national space to international investors, all plans that should be better implemented in Wadi Ramm when ASZA takes over. So why bother to conceive such an elaborate discourse on development of the local community and on nature conservation? Who is this discourse addressed to? For whom is the representation intended? Who is threatening the promoters of global capitalism to the point that they need such a heavy smoke screen to hide their intentions behind? Maybe, once they are able to ask these questions and find the answers, Wadi Ramm’s inhabitant will also find ways and means to confront development planners and prevent desertification/desertion to become a non-touristic reality too. The day following the Desert Cup, unaware of the scope of the planned projects for Wadi Ramm, more idle young men were gathering around a building in the centre of the village. Taking the opportunity of the ministerial visit, the management of the reserve was opening Wadi Ramm's first information technology (IT) centre "designed to spread public awareness on environmental issues like nature conservation and protection of wildlife in the area", according to the story that appeared in The Jordan Times (11.07.01). The General Director of RSCN declared to the journalist that interviewed him: "We want to incorporate environmental education into the schooling of children in Wadi Rum and other villages, like the Disi village, through the Internet". Why not, I thought, also have these children's grand-parents come to school to talk about the use of wild plants in Bedouin medicine, or to teach them how to recognise animals’ tracks10? These are entire portions of collective knowledge that are being lost whereas they are directly connected to the local environment. And they do not need computers to be transmitted, even if there is probably nothing wrong in teaching IT to children in Ramm. Is it that I have a romantic view of environmental education, or is it that the development discourse is incoherent? Are the managers of RSCN aware of this incoherence? Do they just unconsciously share in a system that reproduces neo-colonial domination? Or do they overlook it because they owe their position and social standing to that very system? And what about other Jordanian officials? The newspaper also reported that the five computers with Internet access at the IT centre could be used freely by the inhabitants of the village. But anybody who thinks that RCSN is leading the way in opening up the doors of electronic communication to the Bedouins is grossly misled. The President of the Bedouin tourism co-operative has had to insist, use all his power of persuasion and his connections with the MTA to convince RSCN to let Bedouins have free access to the computers. He himself has a teenage son already quite versed in the use of Internet and other electronic devices such as mobile telephones. He also knows that Internet can become a powerful business tool for Bedouins to market their services directly. At the time the IT centre opened, at least three Bedouin households in the village were already equipped with computers and Internet access. More young men were taking, or had taken, some training in Aqaba or taught themselves surfing the web in an Internet café. Some had learnt with tourists. Many of them had e-mail addresses and were keeping up a regular electronic correspondence with Dutch or German girlfriends they had met in Wadi Ramm. Two of the young men I know had satisfied their sense of curiosity by typing "Wadi Rum" and were amazed at what the search engine had retrieved in cyberspace. One of them had entered into a heated discussion — "In bad English", he told me, "but I don't care"— with the tourist I mentioned above as having posted alternative pictures of Wadi Ramm. My young friend was arguing that tourists too throw litter around and that Bedouins have the same right as anybody else to have cars. "We are in the 21st Century, even in Wadi Ramm", he wrote. The first computer owners in Wadi Ramm are again the same members of the entrepreneur group who, some time ago, were concerned about "cleaning up the view". But Internet users are more numerous than those and, thanks to RSCN and to Jordan Telecom (a branch of France Telecom) who has offered the computers, there will be more young people to come who will have things to say about the way Wadi Ramm and their community are portrayed in the tourist media and who will have the means to answer back to disillusioned visitors. Computer owners even have plans to create web sites to advertise their services directly to potential clients overseas. Some knowledgeable tourists have offered their technical advice. Considering the very rapid pace of technological change in Wadi Ramm, sites can be expected to be operational in the coming months. Via the electronic media, Bedouins are now offered a chance to transmit their own representations of Wadi Ramm and of their culture on computer screens. It remains to be seen if these images turn out to be similar to the ones already presented by the various tourist media controlled by Western agents or Arab urbanites. Most probably, for obvious economic reasons, Bedouins will have to keep submitting to the dominant Orientalist representations of themselves and of the desert to the point of reproducing them. But they will feel they have some degree of control, and they might even have more than a feeling if they discover that Internet is not just a business tool but can be turned into a global networking engine. Touristic representations of the place and people visited cannot be considered plainly as commodified or commercial representations with an interpretative or symbolic content. They are also powerful propellers of social and ecological change, and essential elements in the process of local identity formation, of making of place, of perpetual re-invention of culture. In stating this I share the conclusions of several studies on the effect of tourism on host societies in the Asia Pacific (Volkman 1990; Wilson 1992; Picard and Wood 1997; Erb 2000), that all point to culture as an unboundable, continuous and innovative creation at one and the same time, therefore dismissing such antagonist notions as authentic v. inauthentic cultural practices, or tradition v. modernity (Smith 1982). But I also contend that representations are primary factors in the contest over power and recognition in a world where the logic of economic globalisation of the ultra-liberal type can only be fought with the tools it has helped create.

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