1. A more accurate spelling would be Awlād ʿAlī, but I have followed the standard spelling used by ethnographers to designate this group.
2. I found it necessary to leave periodically for Cairo and Alexandria. I also took one long break when I returned to the United States for two months in the summer of 1979.
3. It became apparent to me long after I had been living with the family that my arrival had been the main impetus for their move to the new house. They had decided that the old house was too small to accommodate me comfortably. The new house, significantly larger and more elegant than the simple structure they had all lived in for years, had been built on the other side of the road from the core community to establish claim to the land on which it stood. Those who moved into the new house were quite lonely at first, and I felt responsible for having disrupted this family’s life and for having separated the women from their companions. As time passed, however, the women felt that the loss of companions was amply compensated by the increase in status and comfort; they developed closer ties to a different set of households.
4. The actual ties binding those in a residential community are not so simple, as is apparent from the composition both of the community I lived in, which was not limited to those bound by agnation, and of the camp described by Peters (1965). See chap. 2, n.23.
5. In the cases of Paul Riesman (1977) and Vincent Crapanzano (1980b), the results of self-reflection and careful attention to the encounter between themselves and their informants are enlightening. The insight and understanding arise from the fact that neither investigator dwells excessively on himself. Manda Cesara’s Reflections of a Woman Anthropologist (1982) is an example of what can happen when the balance shifts.
6. For a discussion of the conventions of ethnographic writing, see Crapanzano (1977) and Marcus and Cushman (1982).
7. A classic example of the consequences of an American woman’s insensitivity to social communication patterns and standards of morality in Egypt can be found in Vivian Gornick’s In Search of Ali Mahmoud (1973).
8. Mourning rituals are discussed in chapters 3 and 6.
9. Both Makhlouf (1979) for Yemen, and Rogers (1975) for southern France also note the advantages of women’s social invisibility in the company of men for gaining access to information.
10. For elaboration of the notion that men were excluded from the women’s world, see Abu-Lughod (1985a); for a vivid description of a sex-segregated community in Iraq, see Fernea (1965).
11. The s at the end is not part of the Arabic; I have added it to form the plural as in the English rather than using the Arabic plural. Smart (1967) transcribes the word as ghannāwa.
12. Not just in form but in function too, haiku and other forms of traditional Japanese poetry share much with the Bedouin ghinnāwa. Note, for example, the resemblance of the exchange of poetry as a mode of secret communication between lovers in Lady Murasaki Shikibu’s eleventh-century novel, The Tale of Genji, to the Bedouins’ exchange of poetry in courting, as described in chapters 5 and 8. Perhaps the major difference is that the ghinnāwa is an oral, not a written, form, so the calligraphy that is so important to the Japanese poetic tradition is irrelevant in this case.
13. Some German travelers and Orientalists had collected examples of Awlad ʿAli poetry in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Some of these collections are riddled with errors. In the 1960s, J. R. Smart made a study of Awlad ʿAli songs and poetry but published little of his work. Like the German scholars to whom he constantly refers, he is not an ethnographer and did not live with the Bedouins. He conducted his study in a few months, during which time he traveled extensively (Smart 1966, 203), and it is thus unlikely that he had much opportunity to hear the poems and songs in their normal performance contexts. In some cases, he seems uncertain about the occasions on which such genres of poems or songs are properly performed. There is also a small body of literature in Arabic on Libyan folk poetry that provided examples, exegeses, and typologies, but again, little contextual material. These sources will be discussed in chapter 5 and in the Appendix.
14. Sowayan (1985) seems to be an important exception. I regret that his book appeared after I completed my manuscript and that I was therefore unable to incorporate its arguments. For a sensible survey of the field of oral literature, see Finnegan (1977).
15. Here I use the term discourse in its narrow linguistic sense, as a formalized type of communication (see, for example, Labov 1972). Otherwise I will use it in a broader sense, as explained in chap. 1, n.23 (below).
16. Neither study was available until I returned from the field.
17. See Asad (1973) for an intelligent discussion of anthropology and colonialism.
18. Caton (1984, 430) notes that Yemeni tribesmen think it manly to chant poetry and that for a man to sing poetry in public would be a disgrace. Women sing poetry. This distinction does not hold for Awlad ʿAli, although singing poetry is considered shameful and inappropriate in social contexts other than those of intimacy and weddings. See chapters 5 and 8.
19. Caton hints, in his discussion of chanting versus singing, that this valuation is true for the Yemenis. Qādirbūh (1977, 137–39) also cites in a footnote the disdain some Libyan Bedouin men had for certain poems he collected, which the men said were women’s poems. The relationship between poetry and women and youths will be discussed in chapter 8. For an interesting theory about the Dinka’s association of youths with songs, see Deng (1972, 1973).
20. Lancaster (1981, 68) notes Rwala Bedouin women’s poetic talents but unfortunately does not analyze their poetry. Boesen’s (1979/80) study of Pashtun women’s plaintive poetry and T. B. Joseph’s (1980) study of Moroccan Berber women’s wedding poems are exceptions to the general dearth of research in this area.
21. The same can be said of Geertz’s (1976) emphasis on agonistic communication and poetic exchanges in Morocco and Sowayan’s (1985) focus on men’s poetry and politics.
22. It is also possible that Awlad ʿAli place greater emphasis on personal than on heroic poetry, perhaps related to their lesser concern with political adventure under conditions of relative peace and a semisedentary existence based on a combination of pastoralism and agriculture. Meeker (1979, 193–208) suggests just these sorts of differences between the Cyrenaican Bedouin of North Africa (to whom Awlad ʿAli are kin) and the pure pastoral nomads of northern Arabia in the early part of this century. My hypothesis about the changing role of poetry (chapter 8) supports this interpretation.
23. My use of the term discourse to refer to the actions and words of everyday life as shaped by the dominant ideology of honor, although broader than the usage common in sociolinguistics, is consistent with the more current usage that follows Foucault (1972, 1980) and literary critics of various sorts. See p. 186 and chap. 6, n.2 for a more precise definition.
24. I use the term ideology broadly (see Bourdieu 1977) to refer to what many anthropologists might prefer to call culture. I do not mean the term in the Marxist sense of mystification. Rather, ideology is the stuff of definitions of the world, that which allows people to understand and act. Its relationship to social and political systems must be determined in each historical and ethnographic instance.
25. I do not discuss the concept of shame that usually tags along with honor because, as I will argue, modesty is the more important concept to pair with honor, being of the same order but applicable to women and the weak. See chapters 3 and 4 and chap. 3, n.10.
26. See chap. 3, n.2, for references to the literature on “honor and shame” in Mediterranean societies.
1. The Libyan Desert is one name for the vast desert dissected by the Egyptian-Libyan border. For the most part, I will refer to the Egyptian side by the term the Egyptians prefer: the Western Desert.
2. The word the Bedouins use is nawāshif. Classified among the dry foods are cereals, dates, and milk products. Vegetables are not considered dry. It would be interesting to explore their food classification system further.
3. Although I have used the word spring to refer to a season, the Bedouins do not use it that way. For them, rabīʿ, the word usually translated as “spring,” is not a season but a state of pasture. When there has been sufficient rain in the months of October through January, shrubs and grasses thrive in the desert. When the desert is green, they say there is “spring”; in bad years when there is little rain, the desert is not green and there is no “spring.”
4. These changes, of course, are happening to Bedouins throughout the Middle East. For other cases in Jordan, Syria, and Saudi Arabia, see Abu Jaber et al. (1978); Chatty (1976, 1978); Ibrahim and Cole (1978); Katakura (1977); and Lancaster (1981).
5. Citing a report by those who landed with Napoleon in 1798 that the Awlad ʿAli were at war with the Hanādī tribes of Egypt near Alexandria, Obermeyer (1968, 7) takes issue with Evans-Pritchard’s (1949) statement that the expulsion took place well after 1800. Most likely, certain segments were forced out of their territories in Cyrenaica through a process of “slow, continuous, and cumulative minor alterations which are even today part of the Bedouin system of territorial relations” (Behnke 1980, 162). The rest were driven out in a major battle at the end of the century in which the Ḥarābīs enlisted the aid of the Turks and Arabs from Tripoli (Evans-Pritchard 1949, 50; Johnson 1973, 32; Obermeyer 1968, 5).
6. The Mrābṭīn claim no genealogical connection to the Saʿādi tribes, nor any overarching genealogical links among themselves, although they are divided into groups called tribes. There are two categories of Mrābiṭ tribes: those who formerly paid tribute and those who were pious or holy figures (mrābṭīn bil-brka). Generally considered socially and politically inferior, those who have not lost their reputations for piety are held in awe. They used to serve as peacemakers and continue to be healers. There is much confusion about their origins and their social position, suggesting a need for a careful study of these groups. Peters (1977) discusses the relationship between the free tribes and clients of various sorts, but his research concerns an earlier period in Libya, where the situation seems to have been different. Behnke (1980) considers a more recent period. I consider some aspects of the relationship between the Mrābṭīn and the Saʿādi in chapter 3, but there is much about their social and religious roles that I could not include here.
7. Total population estimates range between 120,000 and 170,000. These are no doubt inaccurate, since census figures for the Western Desert do not distinguish Bedouins from non-Bedouin migrants to the urban centers, Marsa Matruh in particular, and the reclaimed lands of Mariut. Moreover, figures specifically for Awlad ʿAli do not indicate whether Mrābiṭ tribes are included.
8. Sources for the history of Awlad ʿAli during this period include Baer (1969); von Dumreicher (1931); Falls (1913); Murray (1935); Obermeyer (1968); and Stein (1981).
9. In 1940 the British told the nomads to flee the Italian advance in the west and prepared refugee camps near ʿAmriyya in the east for them. Axis armies marched into the Western Desert in 1940, and by 1942 Rommel had advanced his headquarters to Marsa Matruh. After the German defeat at Alamein in November 1942, the Bedouins returned to their lands to find much lost (Obermeyer 1968, 16–17; Bujra 1973, 144). The older Bedouins I spoke with remembered the war, the crowded camps, the bombing, the parachutes, the airplanes. As we passed the cemetery in Alamein, one man recalled terrible scenes after the battles, when the bodies of young men lay everywhere. One legacy of the war is the widespread presence of land mines, which explode, maiming and killing Bedouins every year.
10. For a discussion of the projects undertaken and their effects, see Bujra (1973) and Stein (1981).
11. Christians—Europeans or Coptic Egyptians—do not constitute a vivid reference point for self-definition, since contact with them has been minimal; for most Bedouins, they are little more than a rumor. In any case, their religion, however little understood, is distasteful, and the European languages are alien. Christians are on the edge of the Bedouin world, necessary to the distinction between Muslim and non-Muslim, a radical but almost abstract distinction that is seldom relevant in daily life.
12. The Bedouin dialect is closely related to the Eastern Libyan dialect and differs from Cairene and rural Egyptian in vocabulary, pronunciation, and some elements of grammar. Awlad ʿAli clothing is also distinct from that of either urban Egyptians, whom the Bedouins describe as lābis affandī (dressed as effendis or bureaucrats, i.e., in Western clothing and bareheaded); peasants (flūḥ); or Upper Egyptians (ṣaʿayda), who wear the flowing bell-sleeved gallabiya and some form of cap or turban, in the case of men, and the smocked, unbelted robes and either a black headcovering or kerchief, in the case of women. Bedouin dress differs in important ways and is thought of as more “modest” and thus in keeping with the decorum prescribed by the Koran. The Bedouins set great store by headcoverings, and their robes cover their arms to the wrists and their bodies to the ankles. Men wear on their heads a ṣmāda, a headcover similar to that worn in other parts of the Arab world but here often wrapped as a turban; this has replaced the traditional small red felt cap called a shanna. Under the robe, called a thōb, with shirt-tailored collar, sleeves, and breastpocket, all men wear sirwāl, baggy pants that narrow at the ankles. For formal or ceremonial occasions, no man is caught without his jard, a large white woolen blanket knotted at the shoulder and draped like a toga. Women wear their hair in numerous small braids tied together in a topknot, which they cover with a black cloth called a ṭarḥa that is wrapped and knotted in such a way that it covers the hair, neck, and shoulders and can be pulled over the face to serve as a veil. Their dresses are long-sleeved, ankle-length, and gathered at the waist. No woman ever goes without a belt, the most common type being a woven red wool sash about sixteen inches wide and six feet long, which is folded in half along the width, wrapped several times around the waist, and fastened with a large safety pin. Women tuck into its folds an amazing array of small objects—bars of soap, lemons, jewelry, money, spices—whatever they wish to carry with them or keep away from others. The symbolism of the black veil and the red belt, the keys to femininity, is explored in chapter 4.
13. Since there is an official adoption procedure for both individuals and whole tribal segments, the genealogical links are certainly not always those of blood. This fact accounts for some of the heterogeneity of racial types among Awlad ʿAli. It is clear from the complaints of the British that this adoption procedure was widespread during the first decades of the twentieth century. For example, Jennings-Bramly, the Frontiers District Officer stationed in Burg el-Arab, proposed in a memorandum (London 1926) to the Minister of War dated September 24, 1926, to increase the number of men who could be conscripted by weeding out the peasants who had gotten themselves adopted, often through payments, into Bedouin tribes to avoid conscription. He condemned this “nefarious practice” and estimated that up to one-third of every tribe consisted of adopted peasants (certainly an exaggeration). Apropos of this topic, I was told a story, perhaps apocryphal, about Jennings-Bramly’s attempt to rectify the situation. As I was being tested on the names of parts of the Bedouin tent, my teacher laughed and claimed that I was going to be a true Bedouin. He related that “Bramlī,” a clever man familiar with the Bedouins, had set up a test to separate the true Bedouins from the peasants claiming tribal status: he called each man into a traditional Bedouin tent and asked him to name the parts. My teacher commented with pride that only a true Bedouin could answer correctly.
14. The meaning of the complex concept of ḥasham will be explored in chapters 3 and 4.
15. For a masterful elucidation of the issues involved in analyzing this model of political relations based on the segmenting genealogy, see Meeker (1979, 11-15, 183–208).
16. The role of the segmentary model as an ideology in social life has again been brought into question in the recent work of Moroccanists such as Eickelman (1976) and H. Geertz (1979), who argue that the segmentary model obscures the realities of Moroccan economic, political, and social life and propose, respectively, a diffuse concept of “closeness” (qarāba) and a notion of shifting dyadic ties as more accurate models. I tend to agree with Combs-Schilling (1981) that this may be a false dichotomy and that both models are ideologies available to individuals and operative on different organizational levels.
17. If Awlad ʿAli use the kinship idiom to describe or organize political relations, it is because this idiom provides such a powerful metaphor for close social relationships and carries so much in the way of sentiment. It makes political alliance and order seem “natural” rather than arbitrary. Yet Peters reminds us not to assume that this model of social relationships espoused by the Bedouins is an accurate reflection of the way their society operates. He argues that the segmentary lineage system must be seen as a folk model “which enables them, without making absurd demands on their credulity, to understand their field of social relationships, and to give particular relationships their raison d’être.” But, he continues, “it would be a serious error to mistake such a folk model for sociological analysis” (1967, 270). I would add that when the kinship idiom is taken out of the domestic or interpersonal realm and given ideological primacy in such culturally valued arenas as political and economic relations, its legitimacy is enhanced and its original power to inform interpersonal relations reinforced.
18. The term Awlad ʿAli use for bonds of agnation or common patrilineal descent is translated as “group feeling” by Rosenthal in his translation of Ibn Khaldun’s Muqaddimah (1958) and as “social solidarity” by Issawi (1950). It is intriguing that Ibn Khaldun’s fourteenth-century comments on “group feeling” strike many of the same notes my discussion of Awlad ʿAli conceptions of social life does. For example, in a section entitled, “Group feeling results only from (blood) relationship or something corresponding to it,” he argues that well-known ties of blood, combined with close contact, lead to the greatest solidarity because kinship creates natural bonds of affection and identification (for example, leading a person to experience shame when a relative is treated unjustly). The closer the kinship tie, the greater the group feeling. Ibn Khaldun adds, however, that the same sentiment can develop regarding neighbors, allies, or clients when close contact characteristic of kin ties develops among them (1958, 264–65).
19. Bourdieu describes the same process of “reading” kinship relations in different ways, depending on the social context. He notes that the official (male) reading recognizes links through men, whereas the heretical (female) reading notes the more direct links through women (1977, 41–42).
20. McCabe (1983) presents data from a Lebanese village suggesting that there is less sexual desire in marriages between close cousins, specifically paternal parallel cousins who have had intimate childhood association. She argues that this corroborates A. Wolf’s (1970) argument (based on the analysis of marital histories for two types of marriage in Taiwan, adopted daughter-in-law marriage and marriage between strangers) that childhood familiarity suppresses sexual desire.
21. Early explanations of the Arab preference for patrilateral parallel-cousin marriage argued that it served to keep property within the family, a position criticized by Murphy and Kasdan (1959) and Keyser (1974). The literature on preferential patrilateral parallel-cousin marriage is vast. Bourdieu (1977, 32–33) presents a summary of the positions, and Eickelman (1981, 129—31) presents not only a summary but also a relatively complete list of articles on the subject.
22. The emotional pain caused by this relationship’s impermanence is evident in a proverb my host recited regarding my stay with his family: Forbid living together because of parting (ḥarram l-ʿishra bisabab il-fargā).
23. Bourdieu recognizes the bonds forged by common property in his comment that “the genealogical relationship is never strong enough on its own to provide a complete determination of the relationship between the individuals which it unites, and it has such predictive value only when it goes with the shared interests, produced by the common possession of a material and symbolic patrimony, which entails collective vulnerability as well as collective property” (1977, 39–40). As Peters (1965, 1967) demonstrates for the Cyrenaican camel-herding Bedouins, however, residence, common property, and kinship are not coterminous in practice. The Awlad ʿAli are no exception. At the core of the camp I lived in were the adult sons of two men and their various dependents, including wives, children, and clients. Attached to them were poor families belonging to two branches of the same tribe. Peters provides good comparative material from late-1940s Cyrenaica, where he estimates that the level of coresidence of agnates was as high as 80 percent (1967, 262), but he shows in his analysis of the links between members of a particular camp that a number of other types of bonds, especially those through women, determined the actual composition of the camp (Peters 1965). Beware of the discrepancy between Peters’s diagram and his verbal description —corrections can be found in J. Davis (1977, 234–35).
24. For a fascinating comparison of the Turkish and Arab constructions of joint honor, see Meeker (1976). See also chapter 4 for an elucidation of the logic of honor killing.
25. A man or a group of brothers arrive with a sheep or a goat, unless they are too poor or distantly related, in which case they substitute ten Egyptian pounds for the sheep. For women, the money gift is essential. In addition, women may bring other sorts of things, such as candy, biscuits, or fruit beverage syrup (sharbāt), but these are optional. At circumcision celebrations, women give money to the mother and grandmother of the circumcised boy; at homecomings, they give to the wife or wives and mother of the man, and occasionally to his sisters. At weddings, the mother, grandmother, and sisters of the groom, and the bride the following morning, all receive nugūṭ (wedding gifts) from the groom’s side of the family. The bride’s relatives give money to her mother, grandmother, and perhaps an older sister. These money-gifts are generally quite small (ranging from ten piasters to an Egyptian pound, or approximately U.S. $1.45), but given women’s minimal access to cash, even such small amounts can be difficult to come by. The amount given at any event depends on previous exchanges, just as the men’s sacrifices are returns on previous gifts. (The only exception to this rule is the gift presented to the new bride by her husband’s kinswomen and neighbors, which intitiates her into the exchange network of the community and marks the establishment of relationships between her and these women. Her first outing will be to return the gift at the appropriate occasion.) Women take note of the amount they receive and try to increase it slightly when they return the gift. For practical reasons the escalation usually stops at one pound. Men generally do not increase the number of sheep, but they may try to improve on the original gift by giving a higher-quality animal.
26. The concern about sexuality is the main impediment to girls’ education. Until five years ago, the only schools in the vicinity of my community were in the towns, about four kilometers away. No one would consider sending a daughter that far. When a local school was established within sight of the community, some of the girls attended, but most soon dropped out, complaining of the discipline and corporal punishment by urban teachers. They faced no opposition at home for their truancy. Only one girl in the community had continued to the fifth grade. Her father permitted her to continue over the objections of his brothers, who thought she was getting too old to be mixing freely with boys from outside the community. Women with daughters in school complained that school made the girls disobedient and lazy. The mutterings of the one girl who was in the fifth grade did hint that education may indeed have important effects on Bedouin lifestyles. In frustration at the heavy burden of chores she was expected to carry, she sometimes cursed “this rotten Bedouin way of life” and expressed a wish to marry someone educated and live a genteel life in a town or city. At the same time, however, she was fiercely prejudiced against foreigners, Christians, and even Egyptians and staunchly defended Bedouin values, particularly those of modesty and proper comportment. In the urban areas, where schools are more accessible and education more respected, attendance by girls is higher. Still, according to Stein’s figures on the status of education in the Western Desert in 1976, girls constituted no more than 29 percent of the school population (1981, 39). It is not clear whether his figures include the non-Bedouin populations, especially in Marsa Matruh; if so, the figures would be inflated.
1. The persuasive functions of analogy and metaphor have been explored by Burke (1969) for propaganda and by Tambiah (1968) for magic.
2. The literature is quite extensive. The volume edited by Peristiany (1966) remains a classic. References to some major theoretical positions are to be found at the end of chapter 4. J. Davis (1977) and Gilmore (1982) summarize some of the diverse materials in their recent reviews of Mediterranean anthropology. On the Christian side, Campbell (1964) provides some of the most thorough ethnographic description, while Blok (1981), Brandes (1980), Gilmore (1980), Herzfeld (1980), and Pitt-Rivers (1977) each make significant arguments. Meeker (1976) and Bourdieu (1966, 1977, 1979) present the most stimulating discussions of honor on the Islamic side of the Mediterranean. For a more traditional approach to the honor code in the Islamic world, see Abou-Zeid (1966) on Awlad ʿAli. Most recently, Wikan (1984) has made the important point, which my own analysis certainly confirms, that the concepts of honor and shame should not be seen as binary opposites. Herzfeld (1984) warns of the dangers of reifying the Mediterranean culture area.
3. This matter of the moral worth of Mrābṭīn is complicated by the facts that certain tribes are associated with religious piety and that most saints and healers come from Mrābiṭ tribes. Awlad ʿAli associate Islam with morality, sometimes even noting how their ideas about honor are against Islamic principles.
4. I have chosen to refer to the recent version of this paper, which first appeared in Peristiany (1966), because the translation is better and the author has made a few modifications.
5. Lancaster (1981, 67) describes the same stoicism in the face of physical pain as characteristic of the Rwala Bedouins.
6. There do seem to be differences in usage for the word ʿagl, however. Eickelman interprets it for the Moroccan case in terms similar to those I use for the Bedouin instance. He argues that “reason is the capacity to discern realistically existing, if ephemeral, patterns of dominance and deference in the social order and to act appropriately” (1976, 141). He notes that “reason grows in a person with his ability to perceive the social order and to discipline himself to act effectively within it” (1976, 138). Anderson (1982, 405) argues that for the Pakhtun in Afghanistan, ʿagl is “sense” or “reason” and “is manifest as cooperation and composure and is acquired by learning in society, most especially in public worship.” A systematic comparison of local beliefs about ʿagl in societies across the Muslim world would make an interesting study.
7. According to Dwyer (1978), Moroccans hold similar beliefs. She notes, “Given the uncertain origins of male responsibility, it is not surprising that most men are said to reach their quota of ʿaqel (intelligence, responsibility) relatively late in life. Its flowering is believed to begin at the earliest at age forty, when a context that is maximally conducive to the development of responsibility tends to take place” (1978, 101).
8. See Mohsen (1975, 39) for more on the ʿawāgil of the Western Desert.
9. For a good description of the procedure followed by women who “throw themselves” on the mercy of a religious figure or tribal leader in order to obtain a divorce, see Mohsen (1967, 163–65). Such a woman is said to be rāmya.
10. For instance, it is tempting to translate ḥasham simply as “shame,” thereby placing our discussion of the Awlad ʿAli squarely in the middle of a familiar anthropological discourse on honor and shame. As will become clear, however, to do so would necessitate interpreting the concept as the opposite of what it is. For Awlad ʿAli, modesty and shame are forms of honor. Dishonor is another matter.
11. S. Davis (1983, 156–57) notes similar uses of the term in Morocco.
12. For elaboration of these ideas on sexual segregation, see Abu-Lughod (1985a).
1. Females are disadvantaged in this social system, being prevented from gaining that which facilitates achieving honor. Although they retain their own tribal identities and affect their children’s status to some degree (Abou-Zeid 1966, 257), they cannot pass on their affiliation. They thus become somewhat peripheral to the patriline and consequently to the genealogy through which some aspects of honor pass. Economically, women are nearly always dependents. They can own property and are entitled, according to Islamic law, to half as much of an inheritance as each brother. In practice, women rarely own productive property, either land or animals, and they give up their share of the inheritance to their brothers on the assumption that they can return to their natal homes if need be and that their brothers will always be willing to care for them and support them. For more on the relationship between brothers and sisters, and the continued dependence of women on their brothers in married life, see Granqvist (1935) and Rosenfeld (1960). Economic dependence limits women’s capacity for independent action as well as their ability to act generously and to gain dependents. In other words, it limits their gadr, or power, a key element of honor.
2. It is interesting to compare this version with a short folktale collected by Dwyer (1978, 45) in Taroudannt, Morocco, which describes how Adam and Eve looked for each other every day, but when Adam finally found Eve, she denied having ever looked for him.
3. I never saw this ritual performed, but I found references to the same type of doll in Granqvist (1935, 84). She notes that in their wedding ceremonies, the Palestinian villagers used an effigy of the bride that was also called a zirrāfa. R. Joseph (n.d.) mentions the use of a similar doll in the “bride of the rain” ceremony in a Moroccan Berber community.
4. Fischer (1978, 204–5) compares Muslim, Zoroastrian, and Jewish beliefs and rituals surrounding menstrual pollution.
5. For more on the meaning of right and left among the Arabs, see Chelhod (1973).
6. The fact that women are rarely identified socially as mothers may also be related to the compromising nature of a social state that is so closely tied to sexuality and sexual acts. Unlike most other parts of the Arab world, the use of teknonyms is rare in the Western Desert; it is not a sign of respect to call anyone “mother of so-and-so.” Bedouins use first names in address, first name often followed by either father’s first name or tribal affiliation in reference. Even more telling, when people related to a young person through his mother (i.e., maternal relatives) wish to refer to him or identify him by these maternal links, they call him “So-and-so, his father is so-and-so” in which the mother’s name is substituted for the father’s. Paternity is a social fact given emphasis in a social system organized around notions of patrilineal descent; it is not closely associated with the natural acts of sex.
7. The sartorial marking of the transition is far more dramatic among the more traditional Rashāyda Bedouins of eastern Sudan (see Young 1982).
8. I leave this word untranslated because I was never able to find out what it meant. The word usually means “scissors” and, given that the woman later commands it to cut out the tongues of Muḥammad būh Sulṭān’s slaves, it seems plausible to consider it some kind of animated scissors.
9. This static equation recalls Ortner’s (1974) seminal argument that the universal devaluation of females is based on their closer symbolic association with “nature,” as opposed to “culture,” with which men are more closely associated. My argument, like many of those sparked by her piece (see, for example, MacCormack and Strathern 1982), suggests that the simple version of the formulation does not hold up cross-culturally.
10. Granqvist (1935, 161) notes a similar belief among Palestinian villagers of the late 1920s. She reports that villagers believe an unclean woman can harm others, quoting an informant as saying, “If anyone has bad eyes, and an unclean woman looks steadily at this person, it is not good.”
11. A patrilateral parallel cousin may assert his claim to marry his first cousin, even if she or her father wishes a different match. It often happens that marriages arranged by the father or brother are prevented at the last minute by the intervention of the father’s brother’s son. Some cases, like one that occurred while I was in the field, are quite dramatic: all the wedding guests were gathered, when suddenly the bride’s cousin, accompanied by his weapon-brandishing supporters, rode up in a truck and carried away the bride. Cousins usually assert their rights long before the wedding and are rewarded either by a monetary compensation or by the breakdown of negotiations between the kin of the prospective bride and groom.
12. My argument follows the same lines as Bourdieu’s. He too views parallel-cousin marriage as a “refusal to recognize the relationship of affinity for what it is” and writes that this type of marriage is “most perfectly consistent with the mythico-ritual representation of the sexual division of labor” (1977, 44).
13. However, the opposite message—that she should forget her family—is sometimes carried in ditties sung to the bride, as in the following wedding song:
If he puts his arms around youforget your father who raised youkān ‘alēk liffā bīdēhbūk illī rabbāk insēh
14. For more on divorce among Awlad ʿAli, see chap. 7, n.4.
15. To simplify matters for the reader, I have treated the word as if it were English, adding an s to imply that it is a verb in the third person, rather than using the third person singular feminine Arabic form.
16. The same dynamic can be seen at work in matters of vengeance. A homicide is an attack on the victim’s group that reveals it to be vulnerable: in the eyes of others, the group is weak. Avenging the homicide is a way of reasserting power and strength, of wiping out the shame of having been attacked. The matter of honor killings is complex. Although killing the woman is, in principle, the only way of restoring honor, in fact it seems to happen very rarely. I heard only two stories about brothers who had killed their sisters for sexual misconduct, and both incidents had happened fifteen years earlier. I heard many more hushed stories of women whose families moved to distant areas or who were married off to distant strangers who had not heard of the scandals or to cousins willing to cover up for the family. The ideals of honor and the realities of family closeness and humanity are in conflict in such cases. See also Antoun (1968).
17. Three anthropologists besides Anderson have written insightful pieces on veiling that recognize its multiple uses and meanings in Muslim contexts (Abu-Zahra 1978; Fischer 1978; Makhlouf 1979). They recognize the association of veiling with morality but do not reduce it to simplistic terms of sexuality or Islam. In general, the work on veiling done by anthropologists specializing in India and Pakistan is more sophisticated, perhaps because they are forced to look at social factors rather than religious ones, since only some of the groups that veil in India are Muslim. Jeffery (1979) shows how veiling and seclusion, because of their association with Islam and piety, are used to enhance the authenticity of Muslim shrine-keepers in Delhi. Sharma (1978, 1980) describes a situation in North India, where Hindu women veil but for a different set of people—only affines—from those for whom Bedouin women veil. She makes an interesting argument about the functions of this type of veiling in a situation of village exogamy. There are also a number of excellent articles gathered in a collection edited by Papanek and Minault (1982).
18. This precedence of generation over age was obvious in an interchange I overheard between a man and his maternal uncle’s young wife. She veiled for him, and he told her not to, arguing, “How can I call you khāltī [my maternal aunt] if you veil for me?”
19. This behavior may account for Kennett’s (1925) misleading observation that Awlad ʿAli women did not veil. I noticed that when a foreigner (British) came to visit our household when the men were absent, the women not only greeted him unveiled but also stared unabashedly.
20. Even circumstance can be used to justify an unorthodox approach to veiling. When I noticed that one young woman (about twenty-one years old, with one infant) who had married her paternal and maternal first cousin and thus lived in the same camp in which she had grown up did not veil for her father, I asked why. Several adolescent cousins of hers explained that when she had first married, she had begun to veil for her father. But then once when she fell ill, her father offered to drive her to the doctor in town, and riding in the back of his pickup truck, the wind blew her veil from her face. She then decided not to bother veiling for him anymore.
1. See the Appendix for background on the exchange of poems and linguistic play in Awlad ʿAli ghinnāwa composition and performance.
2. For a wonderfully thorough and sensitive discussion of the many ways texts derive their meanings from a variety of contexts, see Becker (1979).
3. Most of the types of poems and songs, including the barrāka, majrūda, and ṭagg recorded by Smart (1966, 1967), Hartmann (1899), and Falls (1908, 1913), are no longer sung regularly, at least by the Bedouins with whom I lived. Cassette tapes of these songs, many smuggled from Libya, are extremely popular, and I became familiar with them through this medium. Most of these genres were associated with wedding festivities, which have changed dramatically in the past few decades. In the past, weddings and circumcision ceremonies were celebrated for up to seven days. The main activities were singing and poetry recitations, mostly by the young men. The major wedding performance was the ṣaff, in which the young men formed a semicircle and clapped and sang while a young woman, usually a sister or cousin of the groom, danced completely veiled in their midst (for descriptions, see ʿAbd al-Ḥamīd 1969, 136–40; Mason 1975; and Qādirbūh 1977, 114). The men’s songs extolled the dancer’s beauty, detailing parts of her face and body. Most of the women over thirty remembered this well. At the weddings I attended, however, women only danced for each other. Another genre of wedding song was associated with fetching the bride, who in the past was carried in a litter (karmūd) on camelback but now is brought in a car or truck. Smart (1966, 207) correctly presumes that the genre called the barrāka, an example of which he translates and analyzes, is associated with this part of wedding rituals.
4. In his general discussion of Bedouin poetry, Smart confirms that “the distinction between the two [poems and songs] has never been clearly set out” (1966, 202) and admits that his rough classification of the Western Desert’s corpus of poetry into two categories—poems (spoken or recited) and songs (chanted or sung)—is based on nothing more than how he personally heard the pieces performed (1967, 246).
5. Smart (1967, 247–48) also notes that the term gōl “seems to be the only general term for poetry and song.”
6. Smart (1966, 206) says the ghinnāwa was the only type of song he heard women sing. Women actually sing another type of long song and occasionally recite bits of spoken poetry, which they recognize as men’s poetry. At one wedding, a group of old women huddled in a circle and began to perform some of the songs traditionally sung by men at weddings. Under normal circumstances they would not have performed these songs (not even the men do anymore), but they did so to assert their Bedouin identity in reaction to the Egyptian peasant songs the bride’s retinue was singing. Although ghinnāwas can be sung by men or women, Qādirbūh (1977, 137–39) makes reference in a footnote to an intriguing incident when some men reacted disdainfully to a number of poems he had collected, which they referred to as women’s poems. Qādirbūh deplores their sexism. I did not detect this distinction in the community where I did my fieldwork, and I heard women repeat poems they heard men recite. This issue of gender and poetry requires further investigation.
7. The ghinnāwa sounds totally different when recited and when sung, making the determination of meter both difficult and in some ways irrelevant. Smart (1967, 250) argues that Awlad ʿAli songs, including the ghinnāwa, are composed on an accentual basis, and Al-Ghannāy (1968) classifies the meter as al-muqtadׅhib. From the examples presented in this book, it will be clear that there is quite a bit of variety in the rhythm of the poems, but, even so, this rhythm is only relevant to the poetry when recited; when sung, the sense of meter is completely lost.
8. People with especially good voices tend to repeat the words more often, since this gives them a chance to play with the melody and to stretch out the song. Qādirbūh’s (1977, 122) suggestion that the difference in length depends on whether songs are sung in the city, where they are easy to hear, or in the desert, where people must project their voices and repeat words in order to be heard at great distances, seems highly conjectural. Ron Jenkins (personal communication) has suggested the more intriguing but unverifiable possibility that the form of singing enacts the halting revelation and holding back of sentiment that the poems themselves represent in Bedouin social life.
9. For a critical examination of the utility of the concept of formula, see Finnegan (1976).
10. Qādirbūh (1977) estimates that these songs make up 60 percent of eastern Libyan oral literature, although this figure seems quite arbitrary. Al-Ghannāy (1968, 7) says they are the most loved, something I can confirm for Awlad ʿAli.
11. I translate the term variously, depending on the poem. When the meaning depends specifically on the imagery of eyes, I translate it literally; at other times, I translate it as “self.”
12. I was interested to see that Falls (1908) translates khāṭr as the German Gemüt, a word with no real English equivalent that is usually translated poorly as “soul” (Steven Caton, personal communication).
13. ‘Azīz is a standard Arabic term meaning, among other things, scarce, dear, or beloved. The origin of ‘alam is ambiguous. The most likely derivation is the word meaning something prominent or highly visible by virtue of being at an elevated point. By extension, when applied to people, it means someone exalted or important, i.e., a loved one. There may be some truth to Qādirbūh’s (1977, 125) hypothesis that the use of the word for this genre stems from the idea that poetry expresses prominent, even the highest, social values of Bedouin society. This possibility will be considered in the final chapter.
14. The competitive aspect of poetic composition was central to the institution of the mijlās, in which young men congregated at the tent of a talented unmarried woman to exchange poems with her. It is said that the reward of the young man whose poem best answered hers was the right to marry her. Although the Bedouins with whom I lived had heard of this institution, described in Jibrīl (1973, 66), none reported witnessing it. I suspect that if it ever existed, it was in the distant past. Of the other occasions for singing ghinnāwas that seem to have disappeared, only sheep shearings (discussed in the Appendix) were mentioned to me. Qādirbūh (1977, 108) mentions grain threshings, and tattooing.
15. In the less distant past, and more recently further west than I did my research, the exchange of ghinnāwas at weddings was common. According to informants, the young men forming the semicircle in front of the camp not only sang or chanted the longer types of poetry, primarily to the dancer (ḥajjāla), but also individually directed ghinnāwas to girls or women of whom they were enamored. The women and girls, all gathered in a tent nearby, could hear all that the men sang, and individual women responded with songs.
16. For a sophisticated analysis of the relationship between weddings and circumcisions and the concern with sexuality in Moroccan circumcision rituals, see Crapanzano (1980a).
17. To give the flavor of the genre of wedding ghinnāwas, I will present a few examples, which the reader can compare with the more common ghinnāwas unassociated with wedding ceremonies. At one wedding, on the way to pick up a bride from her father’s house, the groom’s father’s brother’s daughter sang numerous songs, including the following:
We’re used to the house of the highwe won’t descend to the low . . .mwālfīn dār l-‘ilūniḥnā fil-luwṭā mā ninizlū . . .
By this she complimented her own family as high in status and morality and implied a compliment to the bride’s family, which must have been of equal status, since it was considered suitable for providing a marriage partner. In another song, she expressed her pride in her cousin by likening him to a falcon bringing home his prey (the bride). I was unable to identify the type of bird called trushūn, so I have translated it as sparrow because people explained that it was a very small bird. It may, however, be an owl. The important point is that it is a lowly bird, opposed to the great falcon.
A falcon, not a sparrowhe lifted his hood and brought his prey . . .ṭēr ḥurr mō trushūnjallā kmāmtu jāb ṣēdu . . .
The bride’s kinswomen sing to her on the night before the wedding and as they accompany her to her husband’s house. Many of their songs, like the following, express sentiments of sadness at her departure:
The house and the neighbors sufferedover her departure, eye of the gazelle . . .shkā l-bēt wij-jīrān‘alē mashīthā ‘ēn l-arilī . . .
Their sense of loss suggests the worth of the girl they are giving away. In the following ghinnāwa, the bride’s kin indicate their lack of interest in the bride-price, implying that the groom’s family is the one that has gained:
Loser is the one with the moneywinners are those who took the loved one . . .khasrān ṣāḥb il-mālātwkāsib illī wākhdhu l-’alam . . .
These samples by no means represent the full range of sentiments expressed in wedding poems. In addition to the formulaic and predictable expressions of joy or happiness, specific points are made pertaining to the individuals involved or to the particular marriage. For instance, at a man’s second wedding his first wife’s kin are likely to recall the virtues of their kinswoman and implore his consideration.
There is a genre of rhyming wedding ditty known as the shittāwa that accompanies the ghinnāwas but is sung by unmarried girls rather than married women. Although I did not find the shittāwas to be related to the ghinnāwas with which they were interspersed during the wedding festivities, this may be due to the decay of a tradition. Qādirbūh (1977, 144), based on his Libyan material, describes the two as always linked thematically, while Jibrīl (1973, 92) adds that men sing both types of song as the dancer dances before them at weddings. Since women no longer dance in front of men at weddings but instead perform for each other, it is not surprising that they have taken over the songs that accompany the dancing and that they might have lost the original structure of the thematic links.
18. Because of differences in performance context and content, I classify these wedding and circumcision ghinnāwas as separate from those recited in everyday life. Awlad ʿAli do not make a lexical distinction between them, but they can readily identify their appropriate contexts. Analysis of these wedding poems will be undertaken in another study.
19. Qādirbūh (1977, 116) likens ghinnāwas to proverbs, yet it must be remembered that the Bedouins do have proverbs (amthāl), which they clearly distinguish from poems. He argues that, like proverbs, ghinnāwas have stories that go with them but that they can still be understood even after the stories have been lost. I would argue that the similarity lies more in the social functions of the genres. Both genres are marked linguistic forms, set apart from ordinary conversation but included within it, that individuals use in social interactions to make statements about particular current situations through cultural formulas that refer to the past. Although proverbs are more didactic, and poems more expressive, both are rhetorical, intended to persuade or to define situations for action, as Burke (1969) would say. This point will be discussed in the final chapter. For an innovative analysis of the use of proverbs, see Seitel (1977).
1. Both Becker (1979) and Irvine (1979) argue that the issue of formality and informality is far more complex than Bloch’s (1975) argument about the distinction between ritual and ordinary speech would indicate. By noting that degree of formality and informality can vary both in speech acts and in the social contexts of these acts, both authors draw our attention to the possibility that everyday speech can be formal and formulaic, just as ritual speech or formal discourses might be informal and relatively spontaneous. This possibility is significant for this study because it means that the two discourses can be considered equivalent and thus can be compared.
2. In Foucault’s terminology, these discourses might be termed more precisely “discursive formations,” but he himself notes and defends the ambiguity of his use of the word discourse (1972, 80). In his later work (1980) he notes that discourses are linked to power. See also Said (1978).
3. This translation and some of the others that follow differ slightly from interpretations I have published elsewhere.
4. I have translated al-ghanī (literally, “the rich man”) as “married man” because it is a common poetic euphemism for a polygynously married man (not surprising, as generally it is the wealthy men who take more than one wife).
5. In this poem I have translated the Arabic word khāṭr as “soul.” See chapter 5 for an explanation and a warning not to apply any metaphysical connotations to it.
6. Evidence that this phrase is formulaic comes from the following report by Charles Doughty concerning the Arabian Bedouins (quoted in Meeker 1979, 28): “All [Bedouin] talk is one manner of Arabic, but every tribe has a use, loghra, and neighbours are ever chiders of their neighbours’ tongue. ‘The speech of them,’ they will say, ‘is somewhat “awry,” awaj.’”
7. For a comprehensive discussion of feuding and vengeance, see Black-Michaud (1975) and Peters (1951, 1967).
8. These symptoms bear a close resemblance to the affective and behavioral responses reported in studies of bereavement. Marris (1974, 26) calls attention to the following symptoms: “physical distress and worse health; an inability to surrender the past—expressed for instance, by brooding over memories, sensing the presence of the dead, clinging to possessions, being unable to comprehend the loss, feelings of unreality; withdrawal into apathy.” A cross-cultural survey of reactions to death based on data from the Human Relations Area Files (Rosenblatt et al. 1976, 6) notes that in addition to strong emotions, death provokes changes in patterns of behavior including “loss of appetite and consequent weight loss, disruption of work activities, loss of interest in things ordinarily interesting, a decrease in sociability, disrupted sleep and disturbing dreams.”
1. Jibrīl (1973, 76), who defines the genre known in Libya as ṣōb khalīl by length, meter, and topic, says that all of these poems deal with some aspect of love or feelings toward the loved one. He goes too far, although there is little doubt that the ghinnāwa is more closely associated with love than with any other theme. Many of the examples presented in chapter 5 were love poems, and some of the cases described in chapter 6 concerned loss in love. Other examples can be found in the Appendix.
2. Because of relations of respect between father and son, sons would never sing in front of their fathers. The interest the Haj’s father showed in his son’s poems indicates his secret admiration for his son. Why he might have such an admiration will be explored in the final chapter.
3. It is customary to take the bride on a formal visit (called the zawra) to her family’s house fifteen days after the wedding and to bring along some sheep for sacrifice and also perhaps tea, sugar, and flour. In this case, the groom’s family had already taken her to see her brother and mother, with whom she had lived before her marriage. Then they had paid a visit to her uncles, prominent men with whom this family wished to be associated. They paid her father a special visit because he lived separate from her mother, whom he had divorced years earlier, and her brothers. (The father was last on the list because he lived furthest away.) In most cases, only one zawra would have sufficed, but the groom’s family took advantage of the complicated residence pattern (ideally, the girl’s father and uncles would have all been in one camp) to display their generosity.
4. Divorce is a complicated matter among the Awlad ʿAli. According to Islamic law, a man can repudiate his wife by pronouncing the formula “I divorce you” three times consecutively. This, for the Bedouins, constitutes a “final” divorce, or what I have called an official divorce. The Bedouins also usually require that the husband write this formula on a piece of paper for the divorce to be recognized. After this type of divorce a husband cannot take his wife back without remarrying her formally, which he cannot do unless she marries and divorces someone else in the interim; he must also pay bride-wealth again. There are, however, nonfinal divorces, which are much more common. If the husband only says the formula once, he may take his wife back if she agrees. Many of the couples in my community had at one time been estranged in this way. In some cases, the wife returned to her family for periods ranging from two days to nine months; in other cases, she remained in the camp. Usually the husband had to give her a gift of some jewelry or money when he decided to take her back.
1. This modesty about ghinnāwas even applies to wedding songs, as I discovered during a bridal procession when the wife of the man driving the car we rode in confessed her embarrassment about singing in front of her husband. This was the first time she had done so, even though they had been married nearly twenty years.
2. Turner (1976, 1008–9) argues that the difference between values and norms “is principally in the eye of the beholder. . . . The object (value) and the rule (norm) are two constructions the individual can place on the same phenomenon. Which construction is foremost in his experience makes important differences in his relationship to social structure.” He goes on to argue that different conceptions of the self—in his model, self-as-impulse and self-as-institution—correspond to different experiences of these phenomena.
3. The use of a formulaic medium to express sentiments that threaten self-image may serve the individuals reciting poems as a psychological distancing mechanism, just as the identification with the experiences of others implied by the use of well-known poems to express sentiments may be psychologically reassuring in times of crisis.
4. For this reason I find Boesen’s (1979/80, 238) analysis of a genre of Pashtun women’s love songs (called landai) a bit weak. She argues that women’s infidelities and the love songs that glorify them are “the individual’s personal revolt against a system which denies her the right of disposing of her own body and choosing her own fate.” Yet she also notes that “the ‘revolt’ of women does not challenge the Pashtun social code of honour as such.” It seems to me that she has not considered the possibility that the messages of the love songs are somehow also part of the code, or at least culturally accepted, which indeed they must be if they are a well-known genre.
5. For a seminal discussion of the performative or illocutionary function of language, see Austin (1975).
6. Burke (1969, 50) notes this dual definition of rhetoric as that which changes attitude and/or action: “Thus the notion of persuasion to attitude would permit the application of rhetorical terms to purely poetic structures; the study of lyrical devices might be classed under the head of rhetoric, when these devices are considered for their power to induce or communicate states of mind to readers, even though the kinds of assent evoked have no overt, practical outcome.”
7. In many cases, the person to whom the poem is addressed may indeed eventually hear it from someone else, but in most cases I suspect this does not happen. To follow the path of particular ghinnāwas through the community would make a fascinating study. For an interesting discussion of the possible functions of communications to absent addressees, such as magic spells, greeting cards, and love songs, see Rosenberg (n.d.).
8. These stories are part of a genre that differs from two other types of folktale both in its tragic aspect and in its incorporation of ghinnāwas. Although I collected only a few, I know there were many more.
9. I am grateful to Robert A. LeVine for drawing my attention to this point.
10. This, of course, is Geertz’s felicitous phrase (1973b, 123).
11. The issue of the relationship between art and individual experience is complex and well worth exploring. Some anthropologists who have written recently on this issue are Friedrich (1979), with regard to poetic language in particular, and Geertz (1976).
12. See Rappaport (1971) for an intriguing argument about the relationship between ritual and the sanctity of messages.
1. For a broader discussion of how this community helps us think about women’s rights, see Lila Abu-Lughod, “Preface for the Twenty-First Century,” in Writing Women’s Worlds (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008), xi–xxiv. See also Do Muslim Women Need Saving? (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013).
2. For a fuller description of this visit and the revelations about this incident that came when I returned nine months later, see my essay, “A Kind of Kinship,” in Being There: Learning to Live Cross-Culturally, ed. Sarah Davis and Melvin Konner (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011), 8–21.
3. The two ethnographic works based on this later fieldwork are my Dramas of Nationhood (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005) and Do Muslim Women Need Saving? (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013).
4. I write about this distinction in “On Photographs, Fieldnotes, and Participant-Observation,” Xcp: Cross-Cultural Poetics 3 (1998): 34–41.
5. Safia Kassem Mohsen, Conflict and Law among Awlad ʿAli of the Western Desert (Cairo: National Center for Social and Criminological Research, 1975).
6. Bronislaw Malinowski, Argonauts of the Western Pacific (Prospect Heights, IL: Waveland Press, 1984). This formulation of Malinowski’s book as “mythic charter” for the discipline comes from George Stocking, The Ethnographer’s Magic and Other Essays in the History of Anthropology (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1992).
7. Talal Asad, “The Concept of Cultural Translation in British Social Anthropology,” in Writing Culture, ed. James Clifford and George Marcus (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986), 141–64.
8. The commission of the American Anthropological Association tasked with investigating this kind of “fieldwork” concluded that it crossed ethical, political, and methodological lines and could not be considered professional anthropology. David Price, “Hollywood’s Human Terrain Avatars,” Counterpunch, December 23, 2009, www.counterpunch.org/2009/12/23/hollywood-s-human-terrain-avatars/.
9. James Clifford and George Marcus, eds. Writing Culture (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986). Participants in the seminar at the School of American Research in Santa Fe that resulted in Writing Culture had been invited for their critical thinking about fieldwork (Paul Rabinow, Renato Rosaldo), colonialism (Talal Asad, Mary Louise Pratt), ethnographic writing and authority (George Marcus, James Clifford), and reflexivity in this “experimental” moment, as George Marcus and Michael Fischer put it in Anthropology as Cultural Critique (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986).
10. Dell Hymes, ed., Reinventing Anthropology (New York: Vintage Books, 1972).
11. Pierre Bourdieu, The Logic of Practice, trans. Richard Nice (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1990), 27.
12. Hussein Fahim is credited with early discussions of this idea, using the term “indigenous anthropology.” See Hussein Fahim and Katherine Helmer, “Indigenous Anthropology in Non-Western Countries: A Further Elaboration,” Current Anthropology 21, no. 5 (1980): 644–63. An influential and more recent formulation of some related issues can be found in Donna Reed-Danahay, Auto/Ethnography: Rewriting the Self and the Social (London: Berg, 1997).
13. Lila Abu-Lughod, “Writing against Culture” in Recapturing Anthropology, ed. Richard Fox (Santa Fe: School of American Research Press, 1991).
14. Kirin Narayan, “How Native Is a “Native” Anthropologist?” American Anthropologist 95, no. 3 (1993): 671–86.
15. Elizabeth A. Povinelli, “Disturbing Sexuality,” South Atlantic Quarterly 106, no. 3 (2007): 565–76.
16. Abu-Lughod, “Writing against Culture.”
17. Elizabeth Povinelli, The Cunning of Recognition (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002).
18. Paul Riesman, Freedom in Fulani Social Life: An Introspective Ethnography, trans. Martha Fuller (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1977); Paul Riesman, First Find Your Child a Good Mother (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1992).
19. Abu-Lughod, Writing Women’s Worlds.
20. I was, in a sense, as Biehl and McKay have put it so well, trying to use ethnography to make politics matter differently, by “repopulating public imagination with people and their precarious yet creative world-making.” João Biehl and Ramah McKay, “Ethnography as Political Critique,” Anthropological Quarterly 85, no. 4 (2012): 1209–28.
21. Malinowski, Argonauts, 25.
22. Malinowski, Argonauts, 517–18.
23. Bourdieu, The Logic of Practice, 3.
24. Ibid.
25. Michel-Rolph Trouillot, “Anthropology and the Savage Slot,” in Recapturing Anthropology, ed. Richard Fox (Santa Fe: School of American Research Press, 1991).
26. Ibid. He is referring to Eric Wolf’s groundbreaking, Europe and the People without History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982).
27. Edward Said had already accused anthropology of fetishizing difference in his address to the American Anthropological Association, later published as “Representing the Colonized: Anthropology’s Interlocutors,” Critical Inquiry 15, no. 2 (1989): 205–25.
28. Marshall Sahlins, Islands of History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995).
29. Gananath Obeyesekere, The Apotheosis of Captain Cook: European Mythmaking in the Pacific (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992).
30. Marshall Sahlins, How “Natives” Think: About Captain Cook, for Example (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995).
31. Lucien Levy-Bruhl, How Natives Think, trans. Lilian A. Clare (New York: A. A. Knopf, 1925).
32. Some of these changes have been documented by Donald Cole and Soraya Altorki, Bedouin, Settlers, and Holiday-Makers: Egypt’s Changing Northwest Coast (Cairo: American University in Cairo Press, 1998). For a comprehensive study of the development of the northwest coast, see David Sims, Egypt’s Desert Dreams (Cairo: American University in Cairo Press, 2015).
33. It is called Mashaʿir muhajjaba (Cairo: Nour Arab Publishing, 1995).
34. I am grateful to Nourhan Elsayed for her enthusiastic assistance.
35. Audra Simpson, Mohawk Interruptus: Political Life across the Borders of Settler States (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014).
36. Sherry Ortner, “Resistance and the Problem of Ethnographic Refusal,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 37, no. 1 (1995): 173–93.
37. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. “Can the Subaltern Speak?” in Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, eds. Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1988). For recent reflections on this essay, see Rosalind C. Morris, ed., Can the Subaltern Speak?: Reflections on the History of an Idea (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010).
38. Clifford Geertz, “Thick Description,” in The Interpretation of Cultures (New York: Basic Books, 1973).
39. Didier Fassin, “Why Ethnography Matters: On Anthropology and Its Publics,” Cultural Anthropology 28, no. 4 (2013): 621–46.