This is a juggernaut of a book, consisting of thirty-seven papers, some photographs and an extended introduction. Such a compendium is, perhaps inevitably, enormously varied and somewhat uneven. Many of the contributors to this volume will be well known to students of pastoral nomads in the Middle East; they include: Frank Stewart writing on Bedouin customary law; Bruce Ingham on Arabian dialects; Donald Cole on the Al Murrah of Saudi Arabia; William and Fidelity Lancaster with an impressive survey on rural tribesmen of Bilād al-Sham; Soraya Altorki and Donald Cole on land and identity among the Awlad Ali of Egypt; and Lila Abu-Lughod on their love poetry. Many of the other papers will also be of considerable interest to specialists and others who take a serious interest in the region.

An excellent place to start reading is Emanuel Marx's paper on the political economy of pastoral nomads. Marx carefully disentangles all the old definitional, and theoretical, confusions between nomadism (to do with movement), pastoralism (concerning livestock) and tribalism (about politics and kinship). He begins with the now widely accepted notion that pastoral nomads are a “specialized sector of urban civilization” and that people become “pastoral nomads only in a limited sense and at particular times”. Yet Marx insists that “pastoral nomadism” as a concept remains useful once “the rapidly changing economic and political environments in which pastoralists operate is given even greater analytical weight” (p. 78). A number of the papers here are perfect exemplars of Marx's insight.

For example, Alan Rowe writes of how Bedouin in north-east Jordan responded to changes to state agricultural policies after the government removed the heavy subsidy on livestock feeds that had sustained growth for over a decade. In particular, he outlines coping strategies, concerning stocking, labour organization and other aspects of household livestock management which draw on the inherent flexibility of the Bedouin system. In his second paper, also on Jordan, Rowe looks at the relationship between mobility and conservation policies which focus on biodiversity. He explores how pastoral nomads, like other politically marginal indigenous peoples who depend heavily upon direct access to natural resources, become vulnerable in international and national efforts to establish protected environments.

Jeremy Keenan adds further important theoretical building blocks to Emanuel Marx's argument: he insists that “Nomadic pastoralism is a mode of subsistence (i.e. a form of production), not a ‘mode of production’, and as such may be found in many different modes of production”. Thus ranching, which differs little in its material basis from nomadic pastoralism, is compatible with feudal, early and advanced capitalist relations of production (p. 683). In this study of sustainable nomadism among the Algerian Tuareg, Keenan further argues, like Emanuel Marx, that “Nomadic pastoralism, by its very nature, is transitory” (p. 684) and that “nomadic pastoralism has always been dependent on forms of supplementation – raiding, caravan trade, slavery, agriculture, hunting, wage labor, tourism, smuggling, state subsidies and so on” (p. 685) and that their social relations of production have never been static, not in the pre-colonial period nor in the present.

In a second paper Keenan argues that sedentarization “is rarely, if ever, a voluntary process, but rather the result of coercive external pressures, either environmental or political, or a combination of both, which are nearly always resisted, sometimes subtly, sometimes more overtly” (p. 916). He shows, again with respect to the Kel Ahaggar Tuareg, that women have been more profoundly affected than men. They have come to feel excluded from juridical and political processes and, in response, “an increasing number of women are deciding to live ‘independently of men’ and re-establishing themselves in the nomadic milieu” (p. 934).

There are three other excellent papers on Tuareg in the volume: Hélène Claudot-Hawad writes powerfully of Tuareg based in Niger, Mali and the refugee camps in Burkina Faso; Géraldine Chatelard compares Tuareg and Bedouin strategies to exploit the fashion for desert tourism; and Sara Randall and Alessandra Giuffrida consider sedentarization and herd loss, and whether or not “other consequences of conflict and the prolonged period in refugee camps are critical factors in undermining the nomadic lifestyle” (p. 432). These five Tuareg papers deserve to be treated together to raise a range of important comparative questions including those about pastoral nomadism in times of war.

The majority of the case studies, however, concern Bedouin groups from the central Middle East (Arabia, Syria and Jordan and Israel/Palestine), though the geographical stretch of the volume extends from Mauritania (Pierre Bonte, Mariella Cervello), to the Sudan (Barbara Casciarri's second admirable paper in the volume – a subtle and ambitious discussion of “State ‘Tribal Federalism’ politics in the mid-1990s”). But there is nothing on non-Muslim pastoralists, or from the Horn of Africa or Turkey, and only a solitary paper on Iran (Julia Huang on the Qashqai). The topical reach of the papers is also patchy, but almost as broad. A number of the papers are historical, there is one on the decorative arts (Annegret Nippa) while Michelle Obied's interesting paper on Lebanese village shepherds makes a virtue of its focus on a sedentary community. (Yet there is no paper on gypsies or any other itinerant group.)

Of the three papers about the Negev Bedouin in Israel, one focuses on education (Aref Abu-Rabiʾa), another on election fraud (Cédric Parizot) while the third illustrates clearly Emanuel Marx's understanding that so long as due attention is paid to the wider economic and political context, there is a great deal of life in the concept of pastoral nomadism yet. Steve Dinero looks at the forced resettlement of the Bedouin by the Israeli government over the last forty years and questions government claims about the benefits of social change for women. Rather, he adopts an alternative feminist framework to look at how gendered activities can become “an expression of anti-colonial/anti-Western resistance at the national or even international level” (p. 885). Through careful sociological work, he shows how an increase in polygyny, a practice abhorred by feminist modernizers, creates and sustains differences in class, piety and a commitment to an Arab Bedouin identity rather than the Israeli state.