Bedouin, an anthropologist, change, and Sinai permeate the pages of this book. The people referred to collectively here as “Bedouin” are the Jabaliya mountain folk and other Egyptian citizens of south Sinai. The anthropologist is Emanuel Marx, who spent twelve months between 1972 and 1982 observing how people around Mount Sinai manage, negotiate, and make their livelihoods. Individual articles Marx subsequently published are rethought and brought together here to show how the local Bedouin economy has been transformed and thus needs reinterpretation. Meanwhile, the perceived liminal status of Sinai as a bridge between Asia and Africa, a buffer between Israel and the Egyptian “mainland,” and a region of increasing lawlessness and insurgency form the book's worrying backdrop.

For context, Marx reflects on his long research career in Middle Eastern anthropology. He first conducted fieldwork and lived among Bedouin in the Negev in the early 1960s and writes that he tried to understand these Bedouin as they presented themselves. They influenced his way of thinking and changed his life course, a phenomenon common among anthropologists who engaged in long-term research in remote, isolated communities. The resulting 1967 publication, Bedouin of the Negev (Santa Barbara, Calif.: Praeger, 1967), constitutes one of the first professional ethnographies of a Middle Eastern community. Later research among Moroccan Jews in a new town in Galilee and among Palestinians in refugee camps seems not to have captured Marx's sociological imagination and enthusiasm like his earlier Bedouin work.

When Israel occupied the Bedouin-dominated Sinai in 1967, Marx opted to keep his distance from the region and its people, fearing that research there would lead to a long-term personal commitment. However, when invited by a friend in the Israeli civil service to visit Sinai in 1972, Marx accepted. Thus began the present study of the Mount Sinai Bedouin and the author's intellectual struggle to conceptualize how a seemingly simple, small-scale Bedouin society and economy is part of a complex political economy that he labels “urban.” The author's 1960s work among Negev Bedouin described the ecological and administrative settings and then focused on kinship, marriage, and the organization and dynamics of social groups. The present work goes in different directions, reflecting a changed focus in anthropology as well as a different situation: 1960s Bedouin in the Negev are quite different, and are seen to be different, from those in south Sinai today.

Recognized by Jews, Christians, and Muslims as the place where Moses received the Ten Commandments, Mount Sinai is an ancient center of reverence, pilgrimage, and religious tourism. The Christian Greek Orthodox monastery of St. Catherine was established nearby in the 6th century; and Bedouin grazed livestock in the area, cultivated farms in high mountain terrain, and served the monastery. Presumably, people described and analyzed in this book are descendants of those ancient Bedouin. They continue to herd, farm, and maintain ties with the monastery. However, as Marx's study is keen to show, many of the men now engage in wage-labor migration, work in local and external trade, cater to tourist-related activities, and in some cases smuggle narcotics and other illegal goods. How should we comprehend this community today? Is it still “Bedouin” or has it become something else?

Marx documents the establishment of older and newer desert and mountain farms, the creation of permanent and semipermanent settlements, and the continuation of herding. He details the prevalence of male wage-labor migration out of the home region, demonstrates the importance of itinerant traders from north Sinai in south Sinai, and argues that local people tend to move between different activities as conditions change. The existence of a money economy is stressed, along with the prevalence of economic insecurity. Description of nomadic pastoralism—a central concern of “traditional” Bedouin studies—figures only marginally in this case and reflects perhaps the relative unimportance of herding. Data about topics one might expect to find in older Bedouin research stand apart in a chapter about tribal identities and visits to tombs of locally revered “saints.” The strong conclusion Marx draws from his data is that Mount Sinai Bedouin constitute part of an urban economy and society.

Surely, they exist within a complex economy and society linked in multiple ways to people and institutions in cities. Mount Sinai Bedouin also form part of a nation-state society and are affected by the history and activities of two states that have been in hot and cold conflict with each other for more than half a century. Marx's data and analysis firmly put to rest persistent notions of Bedouin as primitive, backward, and timeless. This major achievement opens up trajectories for future comparative research on the transformation of communities formerly engaged in nomadic pastoralist production in areas once remote from nation-state power throughout the Middle East and beyond. Indeed, Marx's moniker of “urban” breaks a glass wall that has all too often served to idealize and isolate Bedouin from the wider polities in which they exist and should participate as citizens.

Yet, Bedouin have often shunned cities, expressed negative stereotypes about urban life, and praised their own life ways and identities in poetry and other media. State systems have been prejudiced against them or just ignored them. Marx mentions what he considers negative aspects of Israeli actions and colonization. He also points to inadequacies and negative dimensions of Egyptian policy and action in the area. A strong, explicit focus on nation-state attitudes, policies, and actions toward Bedouin should follow on the complex economy and society findings of this study.

For Sinai and its people, a new conceptualization is also needed to see the peninsula as something more than just a bridge between here and there. The imperial British government of Egypt administered Sinai (and other Egyptian Bedouin areas) separately from the Nile Valley. Following the end of colonial rule, Sinai has experienced warfare and military occupation and has passed back and forth between Egypt and Israel. And since the 1978 Camp David Accords, Sinai falls under Egyptian sovereignty but without the Egyptian army on its soil. Meanwhile, references to an Egyptian mainland that does not include Sinai stoke feelings of insurrection within Sinai and resentment within the rest of Egypt. Lessons learned from this book about economy and society—with the addition of a stronger focus on relevant nation-state identities and institutions—can contribute to a better world for the Mount Sinai Bedouin and beyond.