Long before the automobile was invented, the mobility of people was evident in the nomads of Africa and the Arabian peninsula. Most of us know about nomads only through the Bible and those Arabian nights type of stories and movies with swaggering Bedouins on fancy horses, pitching their tents in oases, always searching for some beautiful woman to do their bidding. However, today there is yet another angle to the nomadic existence described in the book: Oil discoveries have changed the traditions of centuries.
Ms. Chatty tells us a factual story about people passed by, overlooked, neglected, not part of the new oil-rich status of Oman and its neighboring lands. Chatty's concern is the efforts of various governments to force nomads to live in communities instead of continuing to roam the countrysides. "Advocates for nomadic communities around the world have recommended mobile solutions to pastoral development needs for 20 years or more. This notion, that state assistance should be built into and around the spatial strategies of pastoral peoples, flies in the face of nearly all development efforts in the twentieth century. Rather than seeking nomadic solutions, governments, international aid agencies, and nongovernmental organizations are adamant in their efforts to settle pastoral communities and to create peasants and laborers from herders" (Robbins 448). For the first time, a country tried to implement a specific program meant to benefit the Nomads, and make them eligible for such benefits as health care and an improved education. It is obvious from reading Ms. Chatty's book that the Nomads were long neglected, and were treated much like India's Untouchables were a generation and more ago. There was also a lot of opposition from both citizens and government officials, even though Oman is an oil-rich nation. In his extensive point of view on Ms. Chatty's book, Robbins (1997) explains that the development project Chatty docume...