The Structure of Bedouin Society in the Negev: Emanuel Marx’s Bedouin of the Negev Revisited

The Bedouin have played a major role in world history, and the literature dealing with them is correspondingly large. But in spite of earlier contributions by some outstanding authors, it was only in 1967, with the publication of Emanuel Marx’s Bedouin of the Negev, that we had for the first time an analysis of a Bedouin society that came up to the standards set by modern social anthropology. In recent decades a number of other professional anthropologists have published books on the Bedouin, but Marx’s work retains-and will continue to retain-a central place in the field.