Writing Women's Worlds: Bedouin Stories / Edition 1

by Lila Abu-Lughod

Overview

Lila Abu-Lughod draws on anthropological and feminist insights to construct a critical ethnography of a small Awlad 'Ali Bedouin community in Egypt. She explores how the telling of stories of everyday life challenges the power of anthropological theory to render adequately the lives of others and the way feminist theory appropriates Third World women.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780520256514
Publisher:	University of California Press
Publication date:	04/07/2008
Edition description:	First Edition, 15th Anniversary Edition, With a New Preface
Pages:	306
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.90(d)

About the Author

Lila Abu-Lughod is Professor of Anthropology and Gender Studies at Columbia University. She is the author of Veiled Sentiments (UC Press) and Dramas of Nationhood: The Politics of Television in Egypt. She is the editor of Remaking Women: Feminism and Modernity in the Middle East and the coeditor, most recently, of Nakba: Palestine, 1948, and the Claims of Memory.

Table of Contents

List of Illustrations
Preface to the Fifteenth Anniversary Edition
Preface to the First Edition
Acknowledgments
Keeping the Names Straight
Introduction

ONE Patrilineality
TWO Polygyny
THREE Reproduction
FOUR Patrilateral Parallel-Cousin Marriage
FIVE Honor and Shame

Transcriptions of Arabic Poems and Songs
Bibliography

Editorial Reviews

Abu-Lughod incorporates stories by Bedouin women into a critique of traditional ethnography. (Nov.)

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

Abu-Lughod, a Palestinian American anthropologist and author of Veiled Sentiments: Honor and Poetry in a Bedouin Society (Univ. of California Pr., 1986), is well known for her research on Arab women. In this second book based on her fieldwork among the Awlad Ali Bedouin in northwestern Egypt, she hopes to convey in greater depth the richness and complexity of these Bedouin women's lives through their stories, songs, poetry, and essays. Despite editorial comment by Abu-Lughod throughout (a lengthy introduction discusses her approaches to anthropological fieldwork and ethnographic writing), the Bedouin women themselves are the primary voices in the book (translated by the author). Although this is definitely a scholarly anthropological work, the informed reader can also find much of interest. The tales these women tell, which illuminate their relations to the world around them, have a universal appeal. Highly recommended for academic libraries and public libraries with strong Middle East or women's studies collections.-- Ruth K. Baacke, Bellingham P.L., Wash .

Library Journal