The romantic, nineteenth-century image of the Bedouin as fierce, independent nomads on camelback racing across an endless desert persists in the West. Yet since the era of Ottoman rule, the Mzeina Bedouin of the South Sinai desert have lived under foreign occupation. For the last forty years Bedouin land has been a political football, tossed back and forth between Israel and Egypt at least five times.

Smadar Lavie is Associate Professor of Anthropology at the University of California, Davis. She is co-editor of the forthcoming volume, Creativity in Anthropology.