CEU Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2022
| Author | Hegarty Morrish, Patrick |
|---|---|
| Title | Camels, Pastoralists, and State-making: the Banu Sakhr of Transjordan in the Early Twentieth Century |
| Summary | In historical and anthropological scholarship, the Banu Sakhr Bedouin tribe of north Arabia is associated with a peaceful transition from relative independence in the late-nineteenth century to integration within the nascent state of Transjordan by the later 1930s. By focusing on the entanglement between humans, animals, and ecology, the primary contribution of this Thesis is to question this view, arguing instead that the dual process of state-building and of the encapsulation of the Banu Sakhr into that state was both more brutal, and occasioned more profound change in the social system of the tribe. This argument is developed by first characterising the Banu Sakhr social system in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries as centred on camels, animals which, whether by providing subsistence, enabling mobility between pasturelands, or functioning as the unit of exchange within and between tribes, unlocked stabilising strategies that facilitated the persistence of the Banu Sakhr in the harsh desert ecology. Moving to the Transjordan mandate in the 1920s and 1930s, the extension of state control, and the increasing integration of the tribes within the state, when combined with drought and economic depression, is found to have resulted in the undermining of these stabilising strategies, whether the loss of political independence, livestock resources, or the ability to migrate across borders to customary pasturelands. In turn, the diversification of livelihoods forced upon the Banu Sakhr by encapsulation in the state resulted in deep social change, as camel herders became agriculturalists, labourers or shepherds. This narrative of change, originating in connections between ecology, animals, social structure and political development, engenders a second and more general contribution to the historical and anthropological literature of twentieth-century north Arabia: a model of state development rooted in study of the environment, and of Bedouin society as interlinked with the granular details of taxation, border controls, and violence. |
| Supervisor | Al-Azmeh, Aziz; Dafinger, Andreas |
| Department | History MA |
| Full text | https://www.etd.ceu.edu/2022/hegarty_patrick.pdf |
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