ABSTRACT
The dependence of the Mount Sinai Bedouin on the city was even greater than that of the Negev Bedouin. In Sinai such a conception did not work for either the Egyptian authorities or the Israeli occupying forces which replaced them and put much effort into administrating the Bedouin population. While David Schneider's American Kinship showed conclusively that the anthropologists' conception of kinship was embarrassingly similar to what the American man-in-the-street thought about kinship, we have not yet fully embraced the lesson that kinship is a Western ethnocentric construct. Only an incessant dialectic between our selective observations and tentative interpretations can get us somewhat closer to understanding a reality that is almost impervious to conceptualization. As our conceptions determine which aspects of reality we see and which we ignore, conceptualization stands at the core of anthropological work. Many anthropologists still consider kinship to be a special field of study.
