Generational Transformations of Bedouin Women’s Labor in the Bekaa

Abstract

This thesis asks how sedentarization and a cash-based economy in the Bekaa have changed Bedouin women’s work across three generations, and what those changes look and feel like inside everyday life. The main thread undergirding my analysis is housewifization: the gradual move towards associating women with the needs of the settled household, as well as the social and economic reformulations that have accompanied that move. Based on ethnographic fieldwork—house visits, long kitchen conversations, walks to fields and shops, and semi-structured interviews—I trace how a mobile, artisanal-heavy, subsistence-centered way of life gave way to settled routines and new obligations. In my analysis, the physical qualities of the concrete house matter—floors, furniture, and appliances expand the amount of daily upkeep, and space becomes gendered in new ways. I also show how generational transmission has shifted: from learning tent-based skills with mothers and grandmothers to managing settled interiors, work schedules, and comparison with neighbors, with new ideas about what a “good” daughter, wife, and mother should do. I use feminist Marxist work, housewifization, and domestic production theory as guides, but I provincialize these frameworks to consider the Bedouin’s unique shift from nomadic pastoralism to sedentarized capitalist integration. Overall, this study hopes to offer a grounded account of how housewifization took root under sedentarization and capitalist integration, and how Bedouin women have reworked their labor—quietly, creatively, and often without recognition—to meet the needs of the present.