Race from the bottom of the tribe that never was: Segmentary narratives amongst the Ghawarna of Galilee

Members of a low-status Arab group in Galilee, said to be of Bedouin origins and known by neighboring Palestinians as Ghawarna (sing. Ghorani), recently tend to play down this affiliation, some to the extent of denying that a group called Ghawarna ever existed. This phenomenon is evaluated against the better-known tendency in Arab cultures to embellish, glorify, and sometimes invent a unified past. A distinction is made between competition at the top of the social scale-which tends to stress noble descent-and struggle to escape the bottom, which may hinge on undoing pejorative associations. The article suggests that the ideology of blood ties and the social hierarchy that it engenders within and between groups and tribes in Arab culture are perhaps less uniform and constant than hitherto assumed. Finally, the case of the Ghwarna and their (denied) genealogy is contextualized within the political predicament of Palestinian citizens of Israel, particularly those who were displaced in 1948.