The Meaning of Silence in Negev Arab-Bedouin Students` Life Stories

This qualitative study explores explicit and implicit dimensions of identity that Negev Bedouin students position in their life stories. The literature review probes the participants` historical, cultural and social contexts (El-Meccawi & Degen, 2016) and presents the critical discourse-oriented perspective adopted in the study to explore identity construction in narrative discourse (Kupferberg, 2016).

Following the procedure titled "Your life is a book" (McAdams, 1993), the participants—14 men and 16 women attending a college of education in southern Israel—were asked to write meaningful stories related to "various chapters" in their lives in Arabic.

Interpretation of the explicit themes gleaned from the stories revealed that women and men positioned themselves differently as two separate groups vis-à-vis the male-dominated Bedouin society and the education system. Our analysis also foregrounds intriguing "conspiracies of silence" constructed by each of the participants with regard to family relations, economic difficulties, and the government`s attitude towards the Bedouin community.

These silences / conspiracies of silence are described and interpreted in light of the tension between traditional Bedouin norms on one hand and the economic, demographic and social changes that the Negev Bedouin community has experienced in recent years on the other.

References

El-Meccawi, S., & Degen, A. A. (2016). Higher Education among Bedouin of the Negev: Tel Sheva as a Case Study. Nomadic Peoples, 20(1), 88-107.

Kupferberg, I. (2016). Touching the sky: Text and discourse-oriented figurative language analysis. Tel Aviv: Tema (In Hebrew).

McAdams, D. P. (1993).Personal myths and the making of the self. New York: William Morrow and Company.