Contentious Realities: Politics of Creating an Image Archive with the Negev Bedouin in Southern Israel

Abstract

This paper discusses the politics of creating an image archive amidst local Bedouin historicity in Southern Israel. To do so, it summarizes an archival initiative conducted during my fieldwork in Rāhaṭ, Israel between 2011 and 2013, which broadly examined the presence and values of images in their society. I suggest that members compete over historical resources in attempts to augment limited cultural capital in the Negev, making efforts to collect and exhibit ‘shared’ histories contentious. This is particularly the case when local societies consider archival images rare artefacts and thus objects to be owned and protected. This paper concludes that control over archives and image objects, and the past, present, and future ideals to which they are used, is far from uniform amongst peripheral peoples in the Middle East. Visual evidence and the histories and presents it serves are indelibly localized within the prevailing status negotiations and current spatial divisions between Bedouin members in the Negev.

Keywords:

• Image Archives
• Historicity
• Internal Politics
• Negev Bedouin
• Israel

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Correction Statement

This article has been corrected with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Notes

[1] The definition of image archives is broadly defined as “any set or collection of historical photographs, brought together with some purposeful intent, if only for storage” (Banks and Vokes 2010, 338).

[2] The Arabic transcriptions are adapted from the transliteration practices set out by the International Journal of Middle East Studies.

[3] There is ambiguity about the definition of the word “history”. In English, the term signifies the past as people have experienced it and representations of it as recorded. The same holds true in Arabic, “before the late 19th century, ta'rikh seems to refer only to a kind of writing or knowledge, but in modern Arabic ta'rikh (English history, German Gechichte) is equivocal, comprising both events per se and … representation of these events” (Davis 2011, 14).

[4] The term “heritage” in this paper refers to “living heritage” such as physical ceremonial sites such as tribal cemeteries and intangible “customs” such as wedding songs, oral poems, and collective memories (Peckham 2003), while history will refer to representations of the past as recorded.

[5] These villages, often termed as “unrecognized villages”, are located throughout the rural peripheries of the Negev, where an estimated 90,000 Bedouin reside. According to Israeli state administrators, these people illegally live on government land. Consequently, the state disqualifies them from governmental services or infrastructure.

[6] Israel later built and recognized the townships of Shaqīb al-Salām (est. 1979), Bi’r Hadāj (est. 1982), Ksīfa (est, 1989), ‘Ar‘arat an-Naqab (est. 1982), Lagīya (est. 1985), Ḥūra (est. 1989), and Tarabīn al-Ṣāne‘ (est. 2012).

[7] During the Military Administration, the state proceeded to transform specific tribes (‘ashā’ir) into official demographic groupings or tribal units (shevatim) (Marx 1967). Every member received assigned membership with one of the official tribes in the Negev, which were listed on their Israeli Identification Card along with their legal residence (which was typically the house of their shaykh).

[8] John Comaroff and Jean Comaroff (2009) argue that these identity politics encourage people to situate themselves in opposition to each other to compete for resources, however, they are also protect the state from potentially threatening alliances.

[9] The names of the individuals mentioned in this article have been changed for anonymity.

[10] It should be noted that several larger lineages have maintained their customary economic and political power, in addition to their tribal territories, in the Negev. This is particularly case with lineages residing in Lagīya, Ksīfa, and Ḥūra.

[11] It is argued that images' ability to communicate messages are necessarily co-dependent on other modes of oral and textual communication or poly-media highlighting the connectivity of communication wherein visual media forms a part of a wider media networks wherein usage of any one is dependent on its relationship with the other (Madianou and Miller 2011).

[12] See Deborah Poole (1997) and Christopher Pinney (2003) for similar arguments.

[13] Residence in Rāhaṭ has become more diverse as younger members of various backgrounds have moved to the north neighbourhoods in the last decade.

[14] The transmission of local knowledge becomes systematic when people are consistently exposed to high concentrations of technologies invested with authoritative credibility. “A socialized memory of this kind is not peculiar to Western conceptions of time but it does have a particular, if changing, relation to literacy … which marks it with many of the features of an ‘inscribed practice'” (Rowlands 1993, 141–151).

Additional information

Funding

The Wenner-Gren Foundation under the Dissertation Fieldwork Grant and the Palestinian American Research Council under the Dissertation Fellowship supported the funding of this research.