Janus-faced mobility, sense of road-as-place and Indigenous Bedouin-Jewish settlers relationships

Abstract

ABSTRACT As any other locality a road is a place with sense of road as place among people experiencing it. Roads in peripheral areas are a scarce social resource over which people compete. When a periphery is an internal ethnic frontier, competition between the local/Indigenous people and the settlers over accessibility/connectivity afforded by a road reflects not only hegemonic cultural and identity differences but also contradicting spatiality temporality and dimensionality related to sense of road as place. These mobility-related differences are a neglected area of ethnic relationships. We analyze Indigenous Bedouin's and Jewish settlers’ sense of Road 31 as place in Israel as an infrastructure for understanding ethnic relationships resulting from co-using it. We surface relationships at various times scales and spatial dimensions revealing the contrasting and dynamic dimensionality of mobility, accessibility regimes, and informal mobility emanating from both cultural and political ethnic relationships.