Long-lasting Effects of Sedentarization-induced Increase of Fertility on Labor Force Proportion and Rural Development in an Arab Socieity: a Case Study in South Jordan

Arab people, who have inhabited vast arid areas of the Middle East, were originally nomadic pastoralists, called Bedouin, and most of them have changed their lifestyle from nomadism to sedentarism due to several reasons such as droughts in pasture lands, overpopulation and the governmental policy for promoting their settlement (Lewis, 1987; Bocco, 2000). In Jordan, a typical Arab country, the proportion of Bedouins (which refer to only nomadic Bedouins in the governmental documents of Jordan) to the total population has decreased from 46% in the 1920s to 35% in the 1940s and then only 10% in the early 1990s (Yousef, 1992; Massad, 2001). It has been reported that sedentarized Bedouins are impoverished and socioeconomically destitute (Bocco, 2000). Grigg (1980a, 1980b) pointed out that major causes of their disadvantageous status were subdivision and fragmentation of farmlands, landlessness, overgrazing and soil erosion as well as decline of wages. Despite that these causes were related to population increase and/or labor intensification of agriculture, no historical demographic studies for sedentarized Bedouins in relation to work conditions have been conducted. Since Bedouins do not have their own characters, their demographic events in the past were seldom recorded. It is thus needed to collect historical information through fieldwork and to estimate demographic indicators (Birdsall and Sinding, 2001), among which fertility plays the most significant role in determining age composition as well as the pace of population increase (Coale, 1957). The authors conducted genealogical-demographic research (Ohtsuka, 1986) to reconstruct the records of births and deaths among the people of a sedentarized Bedouin clan in south Jordan from the time at sedentarization in 1948 (Sueyoshi and Ohtsuka, 2007). J. Human Ergol., 36: 13-20, 2007