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     This study, based on ethnographic fieldwork among the Hajari Bedouins of the mountain zone of the United Arab Emirates, aims to highlight the significance of agriculture and pastoralism in the political economy of the Hajari communities.  It, therefore, provides a detailed ethnographic picture of the extent of local knowledge involved in economic activities such as agriculture and pastorals, and its assumed effect on the political and economic life of Hajari society and their culture.

     In the first part of this paper, the author presents a critique of the economic and political studies of the Arabian Gulf societies. These societies overvalued economic commodities, such as pearls, and later oil at the expense of other locally produced commodities in either pastoral or agricultural communities. The study then puts forward extensively the Hajar case by illustrating the importance of local knowledge in tobacco growing, date cultivation, goat herding and husbandry in the economic, political and social lives of those societies.