Paper short abstract:

This paper explores how museum practices of curation inform historical revisionisms in the Palestinian-Israeli context and further enable educational inequalities between Jewish and Bedouin residents living in the Naqab Desert.

Paper long abstract:

Through permanent and changing displays of historical Naqab Bedouin photographs and artefacts, the Joe Alon Museum of Bedouin Culture is one of the main repositories of Bedouin material culture in southern Israel today. The institutional history of the venue is controversial with their exhibitions of Bedouin heritage aiming to provide ‘a record’ of the ‘almost-extinct way of life’ among ‘the Bedouin tribes scattered throughout the Negev and Sinai deserts’. By way of examining the situation, this paper first questions: How is Bedouin heritage presented in Israeli museums? Who controls these presentations and what do they say about their creators? Where do contemporary Bedouin members fit into these projects? By way of response, I argue that practices of revisionist curation are commonplace in Israel which not only minimise the Bedouins’ continuing history in the Naqab but also frame Bedouin heritage as unchanging thus affirming state constructions of Palestinians.

While serving Orientalisms through their exhibitions, access to Naqab museums is also primarily reserved to tourists and Jewish residents – a situation whereby the Naqab Bedouins' connections to their own material culture is institutionally controlled. Therewith, this paper also questions the results of revisionist curations, that is: How do museums contribute to the educational discrimination of host communities, when people like the Naqab Bedouin have restricted access to these ‘places of learning’ and the artefacts housed within them. I argue that by exploring these issues, we can further understand how national conflicts over historical and cultural capital influence presentations of Bedouin heritage today.