Anthropology of the Middle East and North Africa: Into the New Millennium

8. Rejecting Authenticity in the Desert Landscapes of the Modern Middle East: Development Processes in the Jiddat il-Harasiis, Oman

145 8. rejecting authenticity in the desert landscaPes of the Modern Middle east: develoPMent Processes in the jiddat il-harasiis, oMan Dawn Chatty Nomads throughout the Middle East have been viewed through a lens of romantic attachment or, latterly, uncomfortable disdain and disparagement. For decades they have been subjected to state-sponsored as well as international settlement efforts in the name of modernity, progress, and more recently environmental protection. Peoples who move have challenged the neocolonial projects of the League of Nations Mandate era as well as the post–World War II independent nation by the sheer fact of their mobility. Movement, as Ernest Gellner pointed out, made these peoples “marginal” to the state, in that they could move out of the orbit of state control (Gellner 1969; also see Scott 2009). Despite efforts by central authorities to control and extend authority over these peoples, a political order outside the state continues to characterize nomads of the Middle East, with their tribal, kin-based social organization. The Harasiis nomadic pastoral tribe have been, for centuries, the sole human inhabitants of the central desert of Oman. In the 1930s, the reigning sovereign named this desert the Jiddat il-Harasiis in recognition of the tribe’s connection with the land. This remote tribe, one of six in the region who continue to speak South Arabian languages predating Arabic, is organized around a subsistence economy based on the raising of camels and goats. Mobility over 146 Subjectivities the vast and largely inhospitable rock and gravel plain of the Jiddat il-Harasiis has been the principle feature of their livelihood, expressed primarily through camel transport and more recently through trucks. The authenticity of their attachment to this region is intimately tied to the traditional distinction in Islamic historiography between bedu in the deserts and hadar in the towns and cities. Recent decades in the Sultanate of Oman, however, have seen increasing efforts by government, international conservation agencies, and multinational extractive industries to redescribe and classify this land as terra nullius (empty of people ). Efforts to move the Harasiis out of their encampments, to settle them in government housing, and to turn them into cheap day laborers all point to the rejection of these peoples’ claims of belonging to the landscapes of the desert. This paper examines these developmental processes, both national and international , and explores the ways in which the Harasiis have responded by becoming more mobile and adapting their living and herding arrangements as well as by generally becoming unresponsive to state development efforts. A small element of the Harasiis as well as other tribal groups in southeastern Arabia have begun to reject the confines of the state and instead assert their transnational identity across international borders with Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, where their authenticity as bedu is generally recognized. Authenticity, Landscape, and Identity The desert-dwelling inhabitants of the Oman, organized in tribes, are recognized as bedu, while tribes and extended families in the mountain and coastal settlements of the country are regarded as hadar.1 This bedu/hadar distinction has deep roots in Muslim history and historiography (cf. Ibn Khaldûn 1958). In the medieval period Arab writers saw the significant forms of social categories in the dichotomy between the city and the country; or between civilization and its presumed absence. From the perspective of the settled urban historian, the pinnacle of civilization was the city with its government, places of worship, schools, and markets. The city and town dweller was hadari. The other extreme, the badia (desert), was defined by its lack of hadar or civilization and was represented by the social category of badawi or bedu. The latter were mainly the desert dwellers, the nomadic pastoral camel and sheep herders. The different landscapes of the bedu and hadar had important cultural and social dimensions in the understanding of human activity.2 The urban and settled notion of human life versus the rural and nomadic became, over time, a deeply ingrained Rejecting Authenticity in the Modern Middle East 147 idealization of social categories; these are, however, no longer clearly defined or distinguished. Furthermore, though the term hadar/hadari is hardly referred to any longer, the term bedu remains in contemporary use. For the bedu such self-identification is a statement of tribal identity and solidarity as well as of attachment to the desert landscape, which is a physical background and social and cultural foreground. This...