Customer Reviews

Veiled Sentiments: Honor and Poetry in a Bedouin Society

5 star:		(9)
4 star:		(2)
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This book is one of the best ethnographies I've come across. The author's ability to see beyond the stereotypes and catch-phrases surrounding "veiled" women is astounding.

Abu-Lughod is capable of insight I believe dozens of modern anthropologists and social scientists have yet to discover...and her direct look at the way that power is manifested through alternative forms and agendas is matchless. In particular, her dicussion of the way in which women's modes of power work outside of the more studied realms reveals that resistance has a history and discourse all its own.

This book is definitely an excellent answer to those who want to view Islamic women as voiceless. And though the author attempts to show aspects of silence and veiling as manifestations of cultural distinction and identity, she is also quick to note in later chapters that it is Western influences that manage to increasingly isolate the veiled woman and reduce her realm of influence.

Provacative and intense, Abu-Lughod also has a touch of the poet in her, and this book reads easily. She wraps each intellectual argument in a thick blanket of anecdote and conversation, helping the reader create his/her own conclusions.

Lila Abu Lughod, an Arab American woman, lived among the Awlad Ali tribes of the North West of Egypt for two years. Veiled Sentiments is the book she wrote on the lives and poetry of Awlad Ali. Abu Lughod field work was clearly not carried out from a "superior" stance; she sympathized with her subjects and dealt with them as equal human beings rather than inferior specimen or cultures. Abu Lughod attitude, intelligence, training and tremendous analystical ability helped her in developing great insight and understanding of this fascinating culture.

Abu Lughod analysis of concepts such as "hishma" was truly incisive and shed a great deal of light on the nature of modesty between women and men and amongst men and women. The analysis seems to explain behaviors and norms witnessed elsewhere in Egypt and indeed other parts of the Middle East.

An important thesis of Abu Lughod is that the Awlad Ali people often communicated in very conservative and modest way directly through words; they only said what was proper and fitted the norms. Yet a second mode of communication far more true and expressive was found in their little songs or poems.

Abu Lughod discussed gender relation amongst Awlad Ali at length and the relationship between women and the families of their husbands and the society at large. I really enjoyed this book and would highly recommend it. For an excellent work on veiling and gender issues, I would recommend Leila Ahmed's Women & Gender in Islam.

I agree with the other reviewers. It was the best ethnography I can remember reading. What struck a chord with me was her description and explanation of the women's submission to the men, that the submissiveness was valuable only when it was voluntarily given. The idea of women being submissive to men is not only Islamic, but exists also in Christianity.

Abu-Lughod looks at the role poetry plays in the lives of women in Bedouin society, as an alternative to the poetic tradition of the men and a way to communicate and validate experiences outside the morality imposed by the male dominated culture. What's most fascinating for me as a student of poetry is the implicit definition of poetry that Abu-Lughod gives us along the way--a poetry defined, as Sir Philip Sidney once argued, not by its form but by the role it plays in the culture.

"Veiled Sentiments" is academic. It is the outcome of the author's living in a Bedouin community in northern Egypt (the Western Desert) for two years, a feat of no mean proportions.

Lila Abu-Lughod came to a deep understanding of such aspects of the culture as blood ties, veiling and poetry not only because of her talent and training but also because she has ties to that culture. She calls academics like herself "halfies" because they belong both "inside and outside the communities they write about." She realizes that such a situation benefits them in terms of gathering knowledge within close cultures.

The veiling of women (or rather women's veiling of themselves) is an important topic because of recent events including world politics and of the ongoing research in feminism. It is also important because it is so often misunderstood and so difficult to understand even when it is explained.

After reading Abu-Lughod's renowned (in the world of academics) book, "Veiled Sentiments," I think I have a better handle on veiling than I ever would have had otherwise. It was not easy to absorb the concepts that surround it. That it took ¼ of a 315 page book to do it (a conservative estimate) is a testament to the intricacies of and the psychological motivations behind this cultural /religious practice.

Learning more about veiling alone made this study one well worth reading. But the surprise for both the reader, and-as explained by Ms. Abu-Lughod-the author herself is the discovery of this culture's use of poetry. To take it one step further, the insight into how societies in general (at least ours and that of the Bedouins) similarly use their poetry and relate to it.

Abu-Lughod finds that poetry is used somewhat differently among women in the Awlad ` Ali tribes than it is used by men. Because I am writing my own book of poetry called "Skyscapes: A Woman's View," I was especially interested in this aspect of "Sentiments;" it also was, by the author's own admission, an amazing and important cultural discovery. A group of women in China have their own secret language apart from the men; now this anthropologist brings to our attention how the poetry and veiling customs of these women reveal their emotions and are rooted in the traditions of a society in which they live quite separately from men.

Though this book is not meant for mainstream readers, I hope that many who have no ties to anthropology will make an effort to read it. I believe that women will find it especially interesting but men will also find pertinent information for today's political climate within its pages. No amount of travel could impart the depth of understanding of this culture, and-by extension-similar cultures that this book does.

(Carolyn Howard-Johnson is the author of "This is the Place..." )

What is most interesting about this book -- which centers on the poetry of the Bedouin tribe of Awlad Ali -- is not the poetry per se, but that it gives an insider's view of the craft of Ethnography. It shows, through the eyes of a skilled ethnographer, and almost by indirection and in reverse order, how meaning is attached to cultures by the people who live in them.

By peeling back the skin of the Awlad Ali culture - one of the nomadic tribes that once hovered around the edge of the Western Egyptian Desert -- we learn, not just "the ways" of this and similar Nomadic tribes, but more generally, the steps needed to attach meaning to the onion called culture. This analysis reveals, layer-by-layer, the structure and texture of the Awlad Ali worldview. It also reveals the various ideologies that supported its construction.

The Awlad Ali tribe is a society based on blood kinship, on honor, and on a kind of fierce tribal autonomy and independence. And however abstract these categories may seem, and however much they may seem settled at birth, they are in fact constantly being re-negotiated in the tribe's everyday efforts to survive: "lived deeds" in the Awlad Ali culture always trump ascribed status and words. The culture has especially derogatory names and references to those who talk, but fail to act.

Moreover, cultural meaning and societal rules remain close to the ground: that is, closely attached to survival needs. Ascribed status - that is patrilineal genealogy, maleness, etc. definitely have a pride of place in the culture, but these do not settle the matter of status once and for all: What one does with these is the final arbiter of ones position and status within the tribe.

As an American peeping into another culture, what I learned in a somewhat painfully indirect way is that most of rest of the world - even primitive tribes -- still speak and relate to each other in the language of humanity: poetry, songs, prayer, proverbs, folklore, tales, myths, etc. To them, these are not mere cultural trinkets, ornamentations and affectations, to be tossed about during holidays, or to be commercialized and then tossed aside, or just the colorful tools used to promote a particular kind of politics or political organization, but they are the real meat of human discourse. They serve as the actual conduits through which deep human feelings are conveyed and transmitted.

As a backdrop to our own culture, there are at least two lessons to be learned (indirectly and in relief) from this book:

(1) That it is possible to construct a cultural worldview (a complete cosmology of meaning) entirely without the need for a category called "race" or without reference to the idea of a "religion." The author, who was Christian and a partly-white female, lived in the home of the tribe she was studying for two years, which was nominally Muslim, but with all of the many intersecting categories of meaning: race and religion, were never mentioned to her or ever played a role in tribal discourse.

(2) That we Americans live in a social world that is bereft of normal meaningful human attachments and discourse. In comparison to the Awlad Ali tribe, we live in a world of greatly diminished humanity in which racism, acquisition of things, commodification and consumerization of those things, rationalizations and political spin, false piety, rationing of intangibles qualities, knee-jerk bipartisanism, sublimated hatred, and artistic shallowness, are substitutes for real meaning.

Is this all just an inevitable part of modernity? It is difficult to know, but we must be grateful to this author for showing us with great skill that there are other images of, and paths to meaningfulness.

Ten Stars

the book is written by an american woman with mideastern roots -- she provides great insight into the traditionals of the bedouin and arab worlds. I read this before I went to Egypt and it provided great foundation for understanding the culture of the town and village. I like her writing style -- she makes anthopological analysis interesting by explaining in the context of her interactions with the bedouins.

This book presents a fascinating and moving description of Beduin life in Egypt. The author presents an extremely thoughtful analysis of Beduin codes of honor, elements of which I suspect pervade much of more general Arabic society. This is one of the most insightful books on Arabic culture that I have ever found.

Lila Abu-Lughod's Veiled Sentiments: Honor and Poetry in a Bedouin Society examines the identity of the Bedouin tribes, known as Awlad `Ali, living in the Western Desert of Northern Egypt. Abu-Lughod studies the value of honor and its correlation with hierarchy and autonomy within the society, as well as the significance of the medium of poetry through which men and women expressed their feelings otherwise untold.

As a woman of Palestinian-American descent, Abu-Lughod's two years of fieldwork in Egypt's Western Desert consisted primarily of research within the female's sphere of the Muslim community, however she gained access to many segments of the male social circle in her observations of the interactions between men and women. In the first part of her ethnography of the Bedouin tribes, Abu-Lughod discusses the ideology of the social life of the Awlad `Ali, and very clearly demonstrates the individual identities of the Awlad `Ali as separately functioning parts of a collective whole, primarily dependent on the esteem of their respective kinship. She inspects the ideologies of modesty and honor and analyzes how social order revolving around inequality is thus justified and based on the closeness of paternal relatives (agnates). The structured differences between genders in their social expectations and hierarchical standings reminded me of les fétiches in the Minianka religion described in Kris Holloway's, Monique and the Mango Rains. The fetishes were expressed as ritual objects that were part of a complex system of beliefs and practices that protected the village and its people and regulated social interactions. Similarly, the systematized configuration within the Awlad `Ali enabled and assisted in safeguarding the society from external influences that did not relate to their own norms and controlled the existing social customs. In the second part of the book, Abu-Lughod focuses on the contradictory discourses of everyday conversation, which emphasizes honor and modest behavior, as opposed to oral lyric poetic discourse, or ghinnawa, "a genre of love and vulnerability on the [other] hand" (10) and how these two articulate and embody their human experience.

Abu-Lughod's analysis of the Awlad `Ali is generally consistent in its discussion of the various parts of Bedouin culture, although I maintain some criticisms. As a female anthropologist living in the Awlad `Ali society, she assumed the role of an adoptive daughter in order to participate. Her daily chores and responsibilities as a fictive, female kinsperson did not seem to cloud or skew her evaluation of gender roles in favor of women, and she displayed no resentment in her ethnography because of the social duties and obligations that she experienced firsthand. The use of the word "veiled" in the title of the book, as well as in the descriptions of the dispositions of the Bedouins struck me as oddly fitting in some contexts, and incompatible in others. The values and affects of the individuals are associated with representations of the self, but are also obscured by the ideologies of the collective tribes. However, Abu-Lughod also uses the term in her preoccupation with the social connotation of veiling as a means of facilitating sexual modesty, to the point that she seems to forget about the religious capacity of the term. Also in her discussion of the shifting economic situation I was drawn to her recognition of the practices and contributions to the new cash economy, but I would have better understood the evolving situation in the eyes of the individuals if she had recorded the reactions of Awlad `Ali to the new system. Although Abu-Lughod has effectively documented the Bedouin culture in its many dimensions, the use of interviews and more personal interactions would have shown her as both a friend and observer.

I had to read this for an intro to cultural anthropology course. I have to say, it's my favorite out of every college textbook I've read. The author includes her personal experiences working in Bedoin society, and her writing style is engaging to the point where you don't want to put the book down. My teacher only assigned three chapters but I ended up reading the entire thing. As an anthropology major, this ethnography was a real treat