Notes on the fantastic journey of the Hajj, his anthropologist, and her American Passport

Abstract

Many Israeli representations of the Sinai have sought to preserve (or recreate?) a pastoral idyll of biblical wilderness in the midst of 20th‐century military occupation (1967–82). This article argues that such works are shaped by the Israeli discourses of Judaism, Zionism, and Arabism—discourses of diaspora, displacement, and marginalization. Coauthored by an old Mzeini Bedouin, an Israeli ethnographer, and her American spouse, the article aims at deterritorializing the boundaries of the Bedouin as a scholarly trope in such works by discursively retracing his mutated lived experience out of the final Eurocentric text. The “native” is thus positioned as literary critic of his Eurocentric textual representation. [ethnographic authorship, ethnographic creativity and the discourse of subalternity, displacement and diaspora, Israeli and Egyptian nationalisms, South Sinai Bedouin (Mzeina tribe), fieldwork and family]