Camel Ownership as a Passage to Adulthood in Omani Bedouin Culture

Abstract

ABSTRACT The development of adolescent humans through child–pet interaction and attachment is the focus of the current study. The context is the Omani Bedouin culture, which is inseparably linked to camel culture. This culture promotes the importance of nurturing relationships between camels and their cameleers. We suggest that proximity to and contact with camels from an early age helps camel-owning Bedouin children to navigate their journey more smoothly from childhood to adulthood. The study is based on informal conversations, collected over 1 year, with Bedouin children and their parents who have all grown up with camels in Al Wahiba, a Bedouin people of the Sharqiyah, Oman. By analyzing such narratives, we aimed to demonstrate the depth of impact that this contact with camels has on the cognitive, emotional, and social development of Bedouin children. The data suggest that child cameleers experience emotional, social, and cognitive benefits from contact with and attachment to camels. The findings from the parents of these adolescents also suggest that the children demonstrate higher levels of cognitive and emotional maturity and seem to socialize and become integrated into the community more easily compared with their siblings who do not own camels. The novelty of the current study is that it sheds light on how the socio-cultural context embedded in the Bedouin culture affects the degree and nature of a child’s attachment to a pet camel and how that affects development in adolescence. The research took an inclusive approach by including both human and nonhuman agents (camels) in the analysis, and we discuss the findings in a post-colonial context.