The culturalisation of indigeneity: the Palestinian-Bedouin of the Naqab and indigenous rights

The Palestinian-Bedouin community in the Naqab, the southern region of Palestine/Israel, has been capitalising since the mid-2000s on the international discourse on indigeneity in their struggle for land justice. The mobilisation of indigenous rights has been advanced by sympathetic critical scholars and civil society organisations, resulting in the international recognition of the Bedouin as indigenous. This article revisits these scholarly and activist efforts and argues that sympathetic scholars and NGOs have mobilised a liberal multicultural notion of indigeneity that draws on the centring of culture in indigenous rights as the defining feature of indigeneity. Justification for the recognition of the Bedouin as indigenous has been predicated on the fetishisation of Bedouin culture as premodern and endangered, and therefore deserving of protection and preservation. Through the case study of the Bedouin, the article demonstrates that in its current multicultural(ist) iteration, international indigenous rights law can operate as an essentialising and racialising instrument and as a site of subjectivation that reproduces the racialising logics of settler colonialism and racial imageries of indigenous peoples. The culturalisation of indigeneity, both in international law and in the production of Bedouin indigeneity, the article concludes, risks compromising the long-term claims of indigenous peoples to land by conditioning them upon the perpetual practice of ‘authentic’ culture.