Pastoral Nomads and the Dialectics of Development and Modernization: Delivering Public Educational Services to the Israeli Negev Bedouin

Pastoral nomads in Africa and the Middle East have recently come under intensifying contacts with governments through processes of sedentarization and social modernization. The dialectics of these processes have the capacity to make nomads dependent upon public goods, thus equipping governments with manipulative tools to bring nomads under political control. A major tool in this regard has been the delivery of public educational services. This paper is an attempt first to provide a theoretical framework of the spatial, social, and cultural manipulation of pastoral nomads through the process of delivering educational services. The case is then examined of delivering these services to the Israeli Negev Bedouin who, unlike other nomadic societies, have been undergoing processes of sedentarization and social modernization within a modern Jewish state.