ABSTRACT
In the literature on pastoralists in the Middle East some admirably detailed accounts are given of a wide range of their activities, but descriptions of their rituals are conspicuously lacking. Information on the jinn and the evil eye - superstitions that are given unaccountable precedence - abounds, and it is often deployed to substitute for religion and ritual. Apart from scattered bits and pieces of this sort, nowhere in the literature is there any systematic treatment of ritual, a lacuna made more obtrusively obvious by the several excellent analyses of Muslim religious orders. ( 2 ) In an article on the bedouin family, I wrote: ‘The equalitarianism of the desert denudes the Bedouin of ritual riches’. ( 3 ) At the time that was written I held the view that the elaboration of rituals which characterise the lives of peoples in Africa, India, Australia and Oceania is quite alien to the Arab pastoralists of Cyrenaica, and that what ritual appears among them is distributed disconnectedly, on a small scale, throughout social life. The view that rituals are inconsequential among bedouin is implicit in the dearth of information in earlier works, such as those of Burckhardt (1831), Musil (1928), Murray (1935), and Dickson (1949), and in the more recent writings of Cunnison (1966), Marx (1967), Asad (1970), Cole (1975), Irons (1975), and Behnke (1980). Although Cole devotes a chapter to religion, his treatment of it is so perfunctory as to be of little value. The other authors might well justify their omission on the grounds that an analysis of ritual is irrelevant to their subject matter, consisting, as it does, largely of political problems. This is hardly acceptable since ritual permeates so many social institutions, political institutions particularly, that to detach it is to exclude an important part of these institutions. Or it might be argued that it occurs in such dribs and drabs as not to merit much attention. Barth is explicit about the matter: ‘The Basseri show a poverty of ritual activities quite striking in the field situation’, and he continues: ‘What is more the different elements of ritual do not seem closely connected or integrated in a wider system of meanings; they give the impression of occurring without reference to each other, or to important features of the social structure.’( 4 ) Unlike many others, Barth sees ritual paucity as a problem. Why there should be this poverty is a question Barth and I sought to answer, and although we arrived at different views we both assumed that there exists in societies, those of Middle East pastoralists included, a need for ritual, and that the elaboration of ritual should match, or at least be consistent with, the social structure. At the end of his quest Barth is able to fulfil this kind of need; I will argue that if a need exists at all it is not a need of a structural kind.
