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3 (Un)Stratified Reproduction Class, Tribe, and Culture It is difficult to make unequivocal statements about the causes of demographic inequities, but it has become a social-science orthodoxy to assert that demographic disparities between rich and poor segments of society are widespread, with poor peoples being more likely to fall ill and die than more affluent groups. The main caveat is that most of the empirical support for socioeconomic disparities in health is based on macro North-South and between-country disparities.1 Less is actually known about demographic and health disparities between local class or occupational groups within most countries and if/how those micro-level disparities have changed over time. The concept of “stratified reproduction”2 has been developed to highlight how reproduction—the bearing, raising, and socialization of children throughout the life course—is differentially experienced along lines of social class and other axes of inequality. In this chapter, I present demographic and ethnographic evidence that verifies the presence of a wide class gap between Bedouin and peasant peoples in the region, but repudiates the presence of a wide occupational gap within Bedouin society. Because social class is communicated materially and morally, the cultural contours of class will be examined alongside the demographic and economic . My analysis of class, occupation, and tribe, as reflected through practice and values, is based on participant observation in Bedouin and peasant village communities in the Bekaa region. The boundary between being an anthropologist of the Bedouin and the daughter-in-law of a peasant family began to blur as I came to terms with my ethnographic engagement in both worlds. Bedouins and Peasants: Class Relations and Cultural Differences Upon the first week of my arrival in the Bekaa in 2000, a young peasant woman from my former husband’s village pulled me aside and said, “I should tell you something . . .” She paused in mid-sentence with a serious 43 (Un)Stratified Reproduction: Class, Tribe, and Culture look of concern on her face, as if to emphasize that she was about to reveal a devastating secret. “You know, we [fellahin] do not like them [Bedouin].” Her statement is emblematic of wider peasant antipathy toward the Bedouin . Eager to lend credibility to her allegations of Bedouin wrongdoing, she recounted numerous tales that were difficult to verify and (inadvertently) conveyed the opposite message of the one intended. She once told me about how a family friend of theirs—a wealthy landowner and small-scale agroindustrialist (he owns a chicken factory)—was having problems with his Bedouin employees. An alleged dispute had escalated to the point where both sides came armed with shotguns to resolve the matter. And this was only the beginning, as further peasant attempts to denigrate the Bedouin would soon follow. On one of the days I returned to my then in-laws’ home with freshly baked bread prepared by one of my Bedouin interlocutors, a peasant neighbor came to visit. She was the same neighbor who remarked that I was spending too much time with the Bedouin and that I smelled like sheep. She walked into the kitchen, where my former mother-in-law and I were having bread with olives and labneh. “Who baked this bread?” she asked as she tore a small piece and gestured toward me. The response was not to her liking. With a disapproving look on her face, she smelled the bread and put it back down on the kitchen counter, stating that she could not eat unclean food. Peasant remarks about unsanitary, unhygienic, and “dark” Bedouin bodies are commonplace and serve to racialize Bedouin Arabs as distinct from and inferior to non-Bedouin Arabs. Cleanliness also has religious connotations in that Muslims are required to ritually cleanse themselves before prayer. Peasants frequently allege that Bedouin men who come to pray at the mosque are “dirty,” wearing shoes covered in mud. Non-Bedouin Arabs fault the Bedouin for their lack of devotion to daily prayer in general. Bedouin tattoos serve as another visible physical marker of religious blasphemy. Tattooing was a common cultural practice among Bedouin tribes in both Syria and Lebanon. Among Lebanese Bedouin, tattooing appears to have had symbolic significance as a marker of intertribal differences and as a form of cultural adornment (particularly facial tattoos, which young unmarried Bedouin women had done by Gypsy women). Hand tattooing is sometimes undertaken by women and men as a medical treatment for joint or arthritic pain. Older Bedouin women still bear facial tattoos and both...

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