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Poetry of the Heart
| Article
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19037 |
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Section : |
BOOK WORLD
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| Issue
Date : |
1 / 1991 |
2,499 Words |
| Author
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Antony T. Sullivan
Antony T. Sullivan is an associate of the Center for Near
Eastern and North African Studies at the University of
Michigan. He is the author of Thomas-Robert Bugeaud, France
and Algeria, 1784-1849: Politics, Power and the Good Society
(Archon Books, 1983) and Palestinian Universities Under
Occupation (American University in Cairo Press, 1988). |
VEILED SENTIMENTS
Honor and Poetry in a Bedouin Society
Lila Abu-Lughod
Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1988
317 pp., $11.95
Depiction of Third World cultures has always been problematic. All too often representation of alien societies has been flawed by occidental stereotypes fostered by ignorance or malice, or by the patronizing efforts of Western scholars to restructure indigenous reality in a fashion presumably palatable to an American or European readership.
Few indeed have been the Westerners who have thoroughly explored the sinuous, obscure corridors of societies radically different from their own and have reported their results with integrity and without condescension. Rarer yet have been those who have written with a poet's pen. Princeton anthropologist Lila Abu-Lughod is clearly a member of such exceptional company. Veiled Sentiments, her first book, is a minor classic comparable to Elizabeth Fernea's delightful 1965 study, Guests of the Sheik: An Ethnography of an Iraqi Village, and (in a different vein) Grace Goodell's 1986 book, The Elementary Structures of Political Life: Rural Development in Pahlavi Iran.
Abu-Lughod's personal background is germane to the story she relates, and to the participatory social role that she was able to assume during her two years of fieldwork with a fraction of the Awlad'Ali, a recently sedentarized Bedouin tribe in the Egyptian desert west of Alexandria. An American-born daughter of the distinguished Palestinian-American political scientist Ibrahim Abu-Lughod and his Jewish wife, Janet, herself a world-class sociologist, Lila Abu-Lughod was raised as a Muslim in Massachusetts and Illinois. Her American childhood was larded with stays in Egypt and frequent summer visits to relatives in Jordan. She had thus becomes nearly bicultural (so she believed) by the time she selected the Awlad'Ali as the subject of her doctoral dissertation. Moreover, she was certain that her Islamic faith would assure her unfettered access to Bedouin society. Realization of how misleading those notions were, she disarmingly explains, marked the real beginning of her understanding of the world of the Awlad'Ali.
What his daughter did not initially comprehend, Ibrahim Abu-Lughod did. Moral and family respectability had to be publicly vouchsafed before the community if a society as traditional as that of
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