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Stanford University The six essays consist of these scholars discussing their own research and the advantages and disadvantages that their gender and Arabness/Arab heritage brought to their ability to do fieldwork and their ability to gain the trust of their informants/hosts. These discussions are framed within the anthropological literature on two issues: the first is the issue of insider-outsider status and how their research was influenced by their status as indigenous anthropologists; the second is the issue of male-bias dominating the ethnographic material on the Middle East/Arab world, because of the varying levels of sex-segregation in the societies they study, and their attempts to redress it. In 1988, when the book was published, the position of the indigenous anthropologist was, as the introduction reports, a hotly debated topic. In the intervening 16 years, however, it has become more understood and the advantages and disadvantages of the indigenous position widely known and accepted as more and more people with ties to their research areas enter the field. In that sense, this book is somewhat outdated. However, that fact does not undermine the value of the essays, particularly for young scholars in investigating the issues that they may face during research. Of interest is that a number of the scholars reported that in their initial research they felt the need to be overly attentive to rigorous methodologies and objectivity to silence potential criticisms. (40-1; 86-7; 119-120). They all report, however, that as time passed, the information and material that they gathered in informal sessions became as valuable and insightful as their rigorously collected data to their final analyses. The second-issue, the critique of male-biased interpretations, grows out of the rise of feminist interpretations and awareness in the sixties and seventies, which profoundly affected the field. A valuable contribution of this volume is that the authors tie their own fieldwork to this movement, something which does not always come out in larger ethnographies (4-7; 43-46; 62-65; 78-9). Taking issue with standard anthropological interpretations of Arab women, Altorki concludes that the problem is not with the anthropological methods, but rather with "the Western theoretical frameworks used to interpret the relationships between men and women in Arab society [that] misrepresent social reality." (68) That male and female anthropologists have profoundly different experiences reflected in their analyses and ethnographies, and are developing theoretical tools to deal more effectively with the differences has also become largely a given in current anthropology. In both of these cases, the authors provide extensive reviews of the anthropological literature on the two subjects which are useful, clear, and valuable. Today’s scholars, whether indigenous or not, will find that they share a number of subjects faced by the anthropologists in this volume, beyond the topics of indigenous anthropology and fieldwork by women. For example, the issue of state power and its role in the lives of their informants arise in a number of the accounts. The presence of the state, and the wariness of many of its citizens, pushed these anthropologists to distance themselves from the officials and police (see Abu-Lughod, El-Solh, and Morsy). In addition, Morsy originally set out to "prove the difference between women’s apparent subservience and the reality of their power" in examining the healthcare system and the subjugation of women, she realized that it was impossible for her to separate "the system of female oppression and the health system from Egypt’s class structure and its integration into the global political economy" (89). In addition, the class differences, with the anthropologists all coming from higher classes than their subjects (with the exception of Altorki and Shami when they were studying their own family communities), played a large role in how they were received by their research communities which was in many cases interpreted through the lenses of Arab societal patronage relations (Abu-Lughod among the bedouin was the exception to this case). Their absorption into the communities fell along familial lines. All of the women also expressed that when they were single they were adopted and treated as daughters within protective social structures, and when married and with children, were considered fully adult. In some cases there was more freedom with marriage, in other cases less. The variety provides a window onto the diversity in the Arab world, further challenging the anthropological notions that Arab society can be categorized into a single practice of sex-segregation that limits and constrains the behavior of women. A lacuna in the essays makes the volume appealing to the contemporary reader who is interested in women and Arab society. None of the authors seriously comments on the significance of religion or religious belief to any great extent (whether Islam or Christianity), nor, with the exception of Abu-Lughod, do they address how their own practice, or lack thereof, concerned their hosts. All of the authors express their own lack of religious devotion and their progressive and secular leanings, reflecting such trends in the Arab world and the western academies in the 1970s and 80s. But the societies they studied also have changed since that time; the Arab world was also a more secular place and religion had not yet assumed the public persuasive role that it has today. In this sense, these essays document a time and fieldwork experience which anthropologists today are less likely to encounter. This volume, then, provides a window into a particular historical moment in anthropology of the Arab world, standing in contrast to the current period where religion has become a major subject of discussion and anthropologists’ affiliations with western institutions, particularly American ones, takes on a new meaning in the post-Gulf war era. ● |
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An edited volume detailing
the fieldwork experiences of the most influential women 