Near Eastern Tribal Societies during the Nineteenth Century: Economy, Society and Politics between Tent and Town.

• Author: Potts, D.T.
• Position: Book review

Near Eastern Tribal Societies during the Nineteenth Century: Economy, Society and Politics between Tent and Town. By EVELINE VAN DER STEEN. London: Equinox, 2013. Pp. xvii + 302. $110. [Distributed by ISD, Bristol, Conn.]

A book that begins by asserting "For as long as we know, Near Eastern society has been fundamentally tribal" (p. xi) had better be ready for a critical reception. I'm not sure that anyone who has ever worked on Hittite Anatolia, Elamite Iran, or Sumerian Mesopotamia wakes up every morning thinking, "My, how tribal the ancient inhabitants of those regions were." Then again, a book purporting to be about the Near East, which refers to the well-known Anglo-American historian of Islam, Bernard Lewis, as Bernhard (p. 8), does not exactly win the reader's confidence.

Rather than the "Near East," this is a book about the Holy Land, or Palestine, Israel, and Jordan (p. 45). It contends that, whereas "Anthropological studies of present-day tribal societies are of little help" in trying "to imagine what a fully tribal society looked like before the age of globalization," the "vast pool of information, drawn from a time when the great tribes controlled the region: the observations from travellers in the Near East in the nineteenth century, up to World War I" (p. xi) is. Put more directly, E. van der Steen believes that "Nineteenth-century tribal societies can tell us much about the Bronze and Iron Ages that twentieth and twenty-first century society in the region cannot" and "finds it hard not to compare nineteenth-century tribal society with the world of the Old Testament" (p. ix).

Put very simply, this is a highly questionable thesis that glosses over or ignores a vast array of changes, on many levels, that the populations inhabiting the southern Levant underwent between the Iron Age and the nineteenth century. Moreover, apart from mining, predominantly, the English-language literature on the study area, the random insertion of insights from ethnographies of Turkmen tribes (viz. the work of W. Irons) or late twentieth-century Baluchistan (the work of P. C. Salzman) is completely unsystematic. If the nineteenth century is the explicit window through...