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Themes in the Economy of the Bedouin of South Sinai in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  29 January 2009

Dan Rabinowitz
Dan Rabinowitz
Affiliation:
Society for the Protection of Nature in Israel
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Extract

Writers analyzing recent economic change among the Bedouin of South Sinai have not yet investigated institutions and events beyond the limits of their informants' memories. Marx, Perevolotsky, and Ben David refer, quite rightly, to the period following the Second World War as a time of economic change in Sinai. They note that in that period tribesmen tended to become unskilled laborers in new enterprises such as mining, road-building, and services, all generated by central governments that were then becoming exceedingly involved in Sinai. This trend, together with the growth of contraband in the 1940s and 1950s, modified traditional Bedouin economy by inducing a movement away from occupations based on the use of natural resources. A change in life-style followed, manifested primarily in a tendency to settle in villages such as El Milga and Abu Sileh near the Monastery of Saint Catharine, El Wad near El Tor, or Bir Zreir near Nweiba (see map).

Type
Articles
Information
International Journal of Middle East Studies , Volume 17 , Issue 2 , May 1985 , pp. 211 - 228
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1985

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References

NOTES

Author's note: This article was first prepared for and presented to the Department of Social Anthropology. Cambridge University, in 1983, as part of the requirements of the M. Phil. degree course. I am indebted for their comments on earlier versions of the text to Leonard Rabinowitz, Dan Galson, Professor Emmanuel Marx, Professor Robert Paine, Dr. Caroline Humphrey, Eyal Ben Ari, and most of all Dr. Alan Macfarlane.Google Scholar

1 Marx, E., “Changes in the Livelihoods of Nomads in our Region” Mada 23 (6) 1979, 255–59;Google ScholarPerevolotsky, A.. Subsistence Patterns of the Jebaliya Bedouins in the High Mountains Region Southern Sinai (Tel Aviv: Society for the Protection of Nature in Israel, 1979)Google Scholar and “Orchard Agriculture in the High Mountain Region of South Sinai,” Human Ecology 9 (3) 1981;Google ScholarDavid, Y. Ben, Jebalitye—a Bedouin Tribe in the Shadow of the Monastery (Jerusalem: Kana, 1981), in Hebrew.Google Scholar

2 Oral accounts for reconstructions of Bedouin history have been used elsewhere (see Bailey, C., “The Negev in the Nineteenth Century: Reconstruction of History from Bedouin Oral Traditions,” Asian and African Studies 14, 1980, 38–90). However, accounts of the nineteenth century normally entail informants repeating stories they have heard, rather than giving testimony of their own remembered experiences. Such versions tend to emphasize events rather than processes or situational observations; their use for a rigorous analysis of the economy, while not completely obsolete, is limited. A significant collection of documents in the monastery of Saint Catharine (e.g., diaries, log-books, accountancy papers, and management reports) has yet to be made accessible to scholars. A future investigation of this material, by kind permission of the monks, will undoubtedly enhance our understanding of the history of the Bedouin in Sinai. British Foreign and War Office documents, while of little help regarding the nineteenth century (Sinai is hardly mentioned before the 1880s), become increasingly useful later, especially in the 1910s and 1920s. Egyptian and Turkish administration documents from posts such as Akaba, Nakhl, El Arish, and Bir Sab'a are largely unexplored as yet. Although the two administrations have not been renowned for thorough documentation of peripheral regions or for outstanding archival awareness, future investigation of whatever material may be found in Cairo and Istanbul may still produce some relevant detail.Google Scholar

3 Seetzen, U. J., Reise durch Syrien, Palästina, etc.. 4 vol. (Berlin: Rheimer, 1854);Google ScholarBurckhardt, J. L., Travels in Syria and the Holy Land (London, 1822);Google ScholarHenniker, F., Notes on Egypt (London: John Murray, 1823);Google ScholarLaborde, L., Arabia Petraea (London: John Murray, 1836);Google ScholarBartlett, , Forty Days in the Desert (London, 1849);Google ScholarStanley, A. P., Sinai and Palestine in Connection with Their History (London: John Murray, 1877).Google Scholar

4 Wolf, J., Journal (London: James Burns, 1839) and Travels and Adventures (London: Sownders Otley, 1860);Google ScholarRobinson, E., Biblical Researches (1841). Wolf undertook his travels in the service of an association involved with the distribution of the Bible in remote parts of the Empire.Google Scholar

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6 Burckhardt tells how he was obliged to write under his Arabian robe while riding on his camel or at night when he could not be seen by his escorts. When challenged by the Bedouin once, he was told how the appearance a few years previously of European “spies,” who had taken notes of the land, had caused drought and famine.Google Scholar

7 See Owen, R., The Middle East in the World Economy 1800–1914 (New York: Methuen, 1981).Google Scholar

8 See Burckhardt.Google Scholar

9 Ibid., p. 555. The Jebaliya tribesmen are clients of the monastery, their ancestors having been imported to Sinai from the Balkans in the sixth century to serve the monks as laborers and defenders, Daily handouts of bread for the Jebaliya were practiced in the monastery as late as the 1960s.

10 Robinson, p. 202.Google Scholar

11 Perevolotsky, 1979, p. 43.Google Scholar

12 Burckhardt. p. 478.Google Scholar

13 Henniker, pp. 229, 250, and 260.Google Scholar

14 Palmer, p. 74.Google Scholar

15 Perevolotsky, 1979, pp. 68–69.Google Scholar

16 Palmer, p. 72.Google Scholar

17 Henniker, pp. 217–219; Palmer, p. 155; Ritter, p. 397.Google Scholar

18 Palmer, p. 140.Google Scholar

19 Ibid.

20 Henniker, p. 217. This account of bridewealth is by no means conclusive. Palmer cites 500 to 600 piasters (approximately 12 pounds sterling) as the price for a bride that was set in negotiations he witnessed between a man and a prospective son-in-law.Google Scholar

21 Burckhardt, p. 583.Google Scholar

22 Palmer, p. 72.Google Scholar

23 Ibid., pp. 69–70.

24 Ibid., p. 70.

25 Henniker, pp. 211, 263; Palmer, pp. 63, 133, 206, 211–12; Burckhardt, p. 461.Google Scholar

26 Buxton, E., Between Two Continents (London: John Murray, 1894).Google Scholar

27 Palmer, p. 134.Google Scholar

28 Henniker, p. 243.Google Scholar

29 Stanley, p. 25; Palmer, p. 77.Google Scholar

30 Stanley, p. 25. Stanley then goes on to attribute the absence of Accacia trees from the valleys near the monastery to excessive charcoal production by the monks. Recent geobotanic studies, however, show such an assertion to be false. The key factor is, rather, the Accacia's poor resistance to cold (see, Plant Ecology of the High-Mountain Region of the Sinai, Tel Aviv, Society for the Protection of Nature in Israel, 1978, in Hebrew). Levy refers to an elaborate code of protective practices used by the Bedouin of South Sinai in a successful attempt to regulate and control the use of Accacia trees for firewood and charcoalGoogle Scholar (Levy, S., “The Process of Settlement of the Tribes of South Sinai,” in Lachish, I. and Mechai, Z., eds., South Sinai Researches, Tel Aviv: Society for the Protection of Nature in Israel, 1982, pp. 42–44, in Hebrew).Google Scholar

31 Exchange rates between English, Turkish, and Egyptian currencies kept changing in favor of the pound throughout the nineteenth century. I assume a rate of 50 piasters per pound.Google Scholar

32 Owen, After, p. 68.Google Scholar

33 Ritter, p. 395. This implies an annual subsistence bill of 4.5 to 6 pounds per household, an unrealistically low figure. Either the exchange rate for the French franc, in the then French-occupied Egypt, was considerably more favorable to the FF, or prices were considerably lower.Google Scholar

34 Stanley, p. 25.Google Scholar

35 Burckhardt, p. 465.Google Scholar

36 Ibid.

37 Ibid., p. 593.

38 Henniker, p. 236.Google Scholar

39 Robinson, p. 196.Google Scholar

40 Ritter, p. 396.Google Scholar

41 Lepsius. p. 290; Henniker, p. 253.Google Scholar

42 Palmer, p. 66. The monks of Saint Catharine's were thus obliged to give notice to the Bedouin living far afield whenever a caravan of pilgrims was about to reach or leave the monastery, so that more Bedouin could come and claim their share. On such occasions the monks would send a Bedouin messenger, equipped with a monk's shoe, to the well of Bir Nasib in the west of Sinai. On arrival at the well he would make a footprint in the sand—a codified message for the tribesmenGoogle Scholar (ibid., as well as Bedouin informants' communications, 1977–1979).

43 Burckhardt, p. 491.Google Scholar

44 Robinson, p. 205.Google Scholar

45 Ritter. p. 76.Google Scholar

46 Palmer, p. 72.Google Scholar

47 Henniker, p. 250.Google Scholar

48 Palmer, p. 53.Google Scholar

49 Ibid., p. 157.

50 Ibid., p. 77.

51 Ibid., p.78.

52 Palmer, pp. 76–77.Google Scholar

53 Ritter, p. 298.Google Scholar

54 Perevolotsky, 1979.Google Scholar

55 In central Sinai, especially in the plateau of El Tih, charcoal production was practiced in the 1970s, the produce being sold to traveling merchants from the town of El Arish. It is doubtful, however, whether this was a significant aspect of the economy. Levy (p. 179) quotes an old Bedouin as saying that charcoal production in his lifetime had been practiced solely as a last resort, in periods of acute drought and famine.Google Scholar

56 Foreign Office papers, FO 141/635/171. Letter from E. A. Smith (Sinai Mining Company) to the British High Commissioner in Cairo.Google Scholar

57 A similar process occurred in Japan after the Second World War. There, villagers who had previously made a living supplying firewood and charcoal to the cities were forced to seek new livelihoods as soon as modern forms of energy—oil and gas—were introduced (E. Ben Ari, personal communication, 1983).Google Scholar

58 Oral accounts of old Bedouin imply 1918 or 1919 as the date at which the first motor vehicles were seen in Western Sinai, though prospecting for manganese had begun there in 1910 and the construction of the mines in 1913. Wealthy Egyptians were taking motor trips from Cairo to Saint Catharine's as early as 1924 (personal communication from a participant). Italian chauffeurs were available for hire in Suez in the 1930s for similar excursions.Google Scholar

59 Perevolotsky, 1979, 1981.Google Scholar

60 Perevolotsky, 1979, p. 46.Google Scholar

61 Marx, 1976.Google Scholar

62 Perevolotsky, 1979, p. 57.Google Scholar

63 Ibid.; Marx, 1976.

64 Sweet, L. E., “Camel Pastoralism and the Minimal Camping Unit,” in Vayda, A. P., ed., Environmental and Cultural Behavior (Garden City, N.Y.: Natural History Press, 1969).Google Scholar

65 Among others, see Barth, F., “Capital Investment and Social Structure of a Pastoral Nomadic Group in South Persia,” in Firth, R. and Jamey, B., eds., Capital, Saving and Credit (Chicago: Aldine, 1964);Google ScholarGulliver, P. H., The Family Herds (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1965).Google Scholar

66 Marx, E., The Bedouin in the Negev (Manchester: University Press, 1967).Google Scholar