“I discovered, however, that despite its proximity, the sea played little part in the Bedouin’s lives, and what appreciation of natural beauty they expressed was for the desert where, until sedentarization, their winter migrations had taken them. The members of my community all spoke with nostalgia about the inland desert, ‘up country’ (fōg), although they had last migrated seven years before I arrived. They described the flora and fauna, the grasses so delectable to the gazelle, the umbellifer that whets the appetite, the herb that, boiled with tea, cures sundry maladies, the wild hares that must be hunted at night, and the game birds that suddenly take flights from deep within a shrub. They praised the good ‘dry’ foods of desert life and disparaged as unhealthy the fresh vegetable stews that are not an important part of their diet. They recalled with pleasure the milk products, so plentiful in springtime when rains have created desert pastures, and savored memories of the taste of milk given by ewes who have fed on aromatic wormwood (shīḥ)” (Abu-Lughod 1999: 40).
While Abu-Lughod’s book is on women’s poetry in Bedouin communities, this brief description of Bedouin sentiments for the desert caught my eye and made me want to know more about the traditional ecological knowledge of this once nomadic people. Today many Bedouins live sedentary lives with permanent houses instead of their previous nomadic lives with transitory tents. However, as Abu-Lughod describes throughout her text, changes like sedentarization, new technologies and the entrance into the cash economy have not created a a discordant disruption within their societal structure. “On close inspection,” writes Abu-Lughod, “some of most conspicuous changes prove superficial. Rather than heralding the demise of Bedouin culture and society, they merely demonstrate the Bedouins’ openness to useful innovations and their capacity to absorb new elements into old structures” (Abu-Lughod 1999: 74). Still, I am curious how sedentarization has affected their relationships to the natural world.
The Edited Jottings of an Amateur Anthropologist 