Dying Camels

Earlier this year, there were several reports on City 7 News about an exorbitant number of camels dying in the deserts of the Emirates. The camels would eat plastic bags and other trash as they grazed through the small shrubs throughout the desert. The trash compacts and is calcified in their stomach. This blockage clogs their digestive system and makes it impossible for them to eat, causing a prolonged and painful death. Though it seems pointless to even allude to the irony, it is just too much to pass up. Camels are dying as a result of the excesses and consequent environmental degradation.

The UAE carries an understandable pride in the country succeeding, in moving from "rags to riches." This pride and self-regard carries over to the Emirati identity and traditions: the candora and abaya for dress, falconry, Arabian horse-racing, and the desert for leisure, and Islam for religiosity.  Besides the latter, however, these were all pursuits that were either out of reach for all but the wealthiest sheikhs, utilized for purely pragmatic matters, or were invented in more recent decades.

A man's candora is an example of a tradition that was used in the past for practical role. The robe is complemented by a head scarf and an ogal (the black cord that holds the scarf in place). The scarf was tied to shield the face from dust storms while the ogal could be twisted in half with a small ring around a camel's feet to prevent it from walking away. While men's dress can be traced back to a traditional root, women's clothes do not have as straightforward of heritage. Emirati women wear a black abaya (that's frequently embroidered) with a scarf covering the entire face, all but the eyes, one's head, or fashionably draped halfway back one's head. In this dress and with henna and jewelry on one's hands, there is not much direct link with a lived past. Speaking of Iran, Michael Axworthy highlights just how different society was before industrialization and urbanization. Women had to actively work to support a family, doing routine tasks around one's village and home. An awkward veil was not always compatible with this type of work. Instead, at least in Iran, heavily veiled women began to emerge around the end of the 19th century as a sign of a man's status. A husband would leave his wife at home, only to emerge by his side, veiled, and with no work like to do. The veil then became an a symbol of upward mobility. In the UAE, the abaya would fit in with this heritage, rather than a form of timeless Arabic dress.

Also part of the Arabian heritage is the desert. Because of its physical and historical presence, all locals are forced to negotiate the meaning of the desert in their lives. Some people, such as Dubai's ruler Sheikh Mohammed take inspiration and solace in the desert. His result is his recent reflections in "Poems from the Desert." It seems that for most others, however, it is a place to conquer.  Trips to the desert aren't desert sojourns to remember and honor the area's Bedouin heritage, they are leisure trips for dune-bashing and camping.  Quadbikes have replaced camels while generator-powered stereos and movie projectors replaced storytelling for a truly authentic Bedouin experience. 

The most tragic result of this cultural conquering of the desert is the trash that is left behind. As a joke went in South Africa, the national flower was plastic shopping bags stuck in barbed-wire fences, blowing in the wind. A drive through the desert shows how the same holds true in the UAE. It is hard to maintain any image of a pristine desert when the view from the road (and popular camping spots) is scattered with rubbish. To make matters worse (and more ironic), the trash not only tampers the desert landscape but it is killing camels. Again, though it doesn't even have to be explained, the camel--the most popular symbol of Arabia--is suffering a brutish death as their digestive system is slowly forced to a halt. Could there be a more dismal example of the excesses and environmental destruction going on in the Emirates?

Living here, its been powerful to see the ownership that Emiratis have over their culture. Their traditions have been solidified (calcified?) in the face of their recent prosperity and in light of the fragility of the system that has been created. Basically, if tourists stop visiting, the service sector will dry up, there will be less of a demand on housing, there will be less construction, and, with each successive downturn, more resident visas will be cancelled and more people will leave the UAE, leaving it with less capital to maintain its "world's biggest" endeavors. With the rapid change of the past forty years and the insecurity of the future, the pillar of Emirati identity rises above the transience of life. This identity, like many other people in the developed world, is seen as a step outside of history. With the perspective that you have conquered the most basic challenges of life (food, water, shelter, etc.) and now have time for leisure, your destiny is no longer determined by questions of where your next meal is going to come from. Now, you are in control of your destiny, your life, and your identity, with tradition supporting one's sense of self.

This shift treats tradition as something that isn't determined by the immediate forces around you. It isn't knowledge passed down to deal with the harsh realities of nature and the surrounding world. Tradition, now, is determined despite the realities of the natural world. This isn't to say that tradition carries no connection with the lived past but that explicit traditions are now being created in an entirely different framework, one detached from the basic pressures of survival. For this reason, people have the tendency to either glorify or scorn the past. Tradition can paint an all too clear of picture with too neat of connections with the past. For some, this painting is incomplete, however, needing a painter to continue the work of preserving its heritage. For others, tradition is forgotten altogether, the painting is white-washed, the painter steps out of history, seeing their past works as a stumbling block towards future prosperity. Either way, the past is seen as such a potent force that must be dealt with and controlled. For someone living in these realities, the individual is above the clutch of history, they are now in control of their traditions, their identity, and their place in the world.

One of the primary issues that these types of tradition must confront is prosperity. Most Americans have answered this question with an attitude of entitlement: we (and our ancestors) worked hard so we deserve our wealth. With Bedouin ancestors and poverty throughout the world, this is not an easy task for Emiratis. Emiratis have fallen into wealth even easier than Americans, with a deeper sense of entitlement that prosperity is part of their heritage, just like family, the desert, or Islam. As we have seen, this same heritage has led them to weekends of leisure in the desert, the place where their Bedouin ancestors lived under the grim realities life. If destroying the desert landscape isn't enough of a departure from the Bedouin lifestyle the fact that camels are dying should be enough to highlight the disjuncture between tradition, the past, and the present. So I conclude, how can you make sense of the reality of camels dying in light of the past?