Veiled Sentiments

The ethnography opens with a vivid description of “the road that leads West” from Alexandria, Egypt, through “rows of identical sand-colored buildings” and “clotheslines covered with multi-colored garments” (1). Winding across bridges, to the edge of Lake Mariut, to the desert, the narrator describes how “the signs of the encroaching metropolis thin out” (2). The author, Lila Abu-Lughod, arrives at the Western Desert, “the home of the Bedouin tribes known collectively as Awlad ‘Ali” (2), recognizable by their simple homes. The narrator describes her familiarity with the landscape on this road, which built over time after she lived with the Awlad ‘Ali between October 1978 and May 1980. The “silence” of the space, she explains, contrasts pleasantly with the cities of “Cairo or Alexandria” (3).

Abu-Lughod describes returning to a familiar home. The major elements of this home are the Haj, or patriarch, his “senior wife” (who has 18 children), “his second wife, whom he had unofficially divorced a year before [the narrator’s] arrival” (4), a third wife, myriad children, and frequent family visitors who often spend the night. About 15 more houses make up the naji’, or community, around them, united by a shared “economic base and food” that makes them a household (6). Camps are named “from the lineage or cluster of agnates forming the core of the camp” (6), but some are families or distant kin that attach to the group.

The more permanent settlements place “senior kinsmen and their families” at the center of the settlement, with “distant kind and clients occupying the periphery,” where in the past all “tents were pitched side by side in a straight line” (6). The modern community lives in both houses and tents. Although the community lies between a town and a village and has “amicable, neighborly relations” with others (7), they seldom interact with neighbors (except when men pray at a nearby tomb on Fridays).

The community thinks of “town life” as “corrupting” and “immoral” (8). With “economic viability,” the community can avoid it and sustain “a separate identity” (8). Those in the community support themselves through various agricultural endeavors, and “what changes in lifestyle” occurred in the community “were voluntary adaptations to shifting conditions” (8). When the government bought desert land, they bought traditional space back. While “a host of practical and emotional reasons” stopped them from yearly migration to desert pastures (8), “each year […] the idea was raised anew” (9).

Abu-Lughod then seeks to provide “an honest account of the circumstances of fieldwork” for her reader (9). In 1978, Cairo “seemed to be in the throes of change” (11). She explains that her Arab father insisted on traveling with her to the Bedouin community, despite her insistence that she well understands regional customs. In traveling with her, her father protected her reputation in her social world as an “unmarried girl,” an element of social code just as important as proper “behavior in interpersonal interactions” (12).

Her father, she explains, negotiates housing for her through her research director and his Bedouin contact. The Haj accepts her, which usefully imprints her “as a Muslim and an Arab” within the community (13). Because her father is with her and has “noble roots,” he proves that she is “a daughter of a good family” with “male kin” who “protect her” (14), a responsibility that the Haj adopts in his absence. He limits her movement to within the boundaries of the community for her “safety” and so that she will contribute usefully “as daughter” to family life. This role as “fictive kinsperson” enables her to participate in daily life.

Abu-Lughod describes the “warm acceptance” and “limitations” she experiences as an unmarried woman (17). Access to open conversation with women but not with men, ambiguities in traditional dressing, and limited mobility both help and hinder her work as an anthropologist. The inability to be open with those with whom she speaks, though, bothers her most, as she must “dissociate [herself] as much as possible from Americans” to present a “persona” that would avoid and excuse the non-Arab influences in her American upbringing (18). This sense of “inauthenticity” fades as she builds “a common history” with those around her (19). She describes the first experiences in which she participates in both celebrating and mourning with her community as if she is fully part of it.

The book studies “the relationship between Awlad ‘Ali sentiments and experience and the two contradictory discourses that express and inform them” (10): a form of sun poetry and their code of honor. Abu-Lughod explains that her immersion in “the women’s world” gives her more access to both than a man might experience (23). She admits that because of an “unwillingness to pursue questions aggressively or conduct structured interviews,” mostly because of her “position of powerlessness,” she could not study “systematically” (23). The lack of rigid structure and her investment in organic discussion, she explains, unearths both “the Bedouins’ conceptions of their social world” and the passion for poetry “in social life” that becomes her subject (24).

Abu-Lughod begins the passage with a description of a poem told to her by an old woman during a confusing and sad reunion of two families. “Short poems” and songs, she explains, “[punctuate] conversations” and seem to move their listeners. The more that Abu-Lughod immersed herself in interpersonal relationships among the Bedouins, the more she “began to pay attention to” poems (25). “Women’s poems” (26), she discovers, should never be shared with men. Songs, she learns, are “the same genre as the short poems” (27), and they are all called ghinnāwas. But when she first hears the poems, she cannot understand them; she only begins to “interpret them” with help, later.

The poems are “like Japanese haiku in form but more like American blues in content and emotional tone” (27). Their “social context” as “performed poetry” (28), Abu-Lughod notes, is central to society but often ignored by ethnographers and scholars of literature. She notes that those who do speak of Bedouin poetry offer different understandings that “share an interesting set of assumptions that bear scrutiny precisely because they reflect widespread biases” (29). False dichotomies between men and women in Middle Eastern cultures, she writes, permeate these literatures, but she argues that they overlook men’s involvement in personal and family life while cheapening women’s political roles within tribes.

Poems, in such societies, have multiple genres; Abu-Lughod notes that the traditionally male and ceremonial are more studied than the female and personal, which are “officially devalued by male elders” and “virtually unstudied” by others (30-31). The ghinnāwa that she studies are generally the latter genre, “the poetry of personal life” (31). They express emotions about “vulnerability and deep attachment to others” that diverge sharply from typical interactions in Awlad ‘Ali society (32), in which they tend “to joke about or deny concern in personal matters” (31). “The central question,” of Abu-Lughod’s text, then, is “the relationship between the Bedouin poetic discourse and the discourse of ordinary social life” (32).

For the rest of the chapter, Abu-Lughod outlines the central ideas of the coming chapters. She finishes with a series of questions about the two “modes of discourse” in the Bedouin community and about the potential of poetic discourse to reveal truths about “Bedouin social and political life” (35).