Past and present in the discourse of Naqab/Negev Bedouin geography and space: A critical review

The Bedouin society has been the focus of much research and prolific investigations forming a system of understanding involving multiple interrelationships. If space became the agency of social processes, then researchers, through rigorous data collection and employment of mathematical and statistical models, could potentially uncover the relationship between cause and effect. Modern human geography, particularly in its sub-discipline of indigenous geographies, has been criticized as a western-biased cultural form of knowledge production. Bedouin urbanization commenced during the late 1960s as the government of Israel began an extensive project to resettle the indigenous population in a number of small towns. Similar Bedouin resettlement projects have taken place in Jordan and other Arab states. From the nineteenth century onwards the gradual transition of the Bedouin from an extensive pastoral economy to agriculture was mostly spontaneous and endogenically directed. This transition altered Bedouin spatiality from nomadic-mobile to sedentarized-rural and their way of life from pastoral to agro-pastoral.