This reference presents 37 pieces of contemporary scholarship on Bedouin, Tuareg, and other nomadic groups of the Middle East and North Africa. Editor Chatty (anthropology, U. of Oxford, UK) has organized them in four parts. The first, looking at contested authority and power, contains studies on the persistence of tribes and tribal ideologies in Mauritanian contemporary society, the social process of tribal recomposition in the Sudan, and customary law among the Bedouin of the Middle East and North Africa. Contested spaces and social transformations are explored in papers on nomadic pastoralists in Morocco and response to the government's sedentarization policy, structural pressures challenging the systems of animal husbandry of village-based herders in northern Lebanon, questions of Bedouin identity and dialect, and other issues. The section on contested development and economic transformations contains discussions of political and economic change among the Bedouin; nomadism as an economic process of movement and as philosophy among the Tuareg of North Africa; tourism as a substitute for pastoralism for the Tuareg in Algeria and the Bedouin of Jordan; and contestation and mediation between Bedouin, the state, and conservation agencies in Jordan. Finally, papers look at contested cultures and engendered spaces, specifically focusing on such topics as transformation of education and the use of new technologies by the Qashqa`i of Iran, sedentarization as a form of de-tribalization in Saudi Arabia, and the transformation of gender relations as a consequence of sedentarization. Annotation ©2006 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)