Writing Women′s Worlds – The Bedouin Stories (Paper) - Softcover

Abu–lughod, Lila

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0520083040 ISBN 13: 9780520083042

Publisher: University of California Press, 1993

Synopsis

In 1978 Lila Abu-Lughod climbed out of a dusty van to meet members of a small Awlad 'Ali Bedouin community. The anthropologist was about to join that community to learn from them. Living in this Egyptian Bedouin settlement for extended periods during the following decade, Abu-Lughod took part in family life, with its moments of humour, affection and anger. She witnessed striking changes, both cultural and economic, and she recorded the stories of the women. "Writing Women's Worlds" is Abu-Lughod's telling of those stories; it is also about what happens in bringing the stories to others. Abu-Lughod explores how anthropology typifies cultures, questions the appropriation of Third World women in feminist theory, and unsettles the prevailing popular and scholarly understandings of Muslim Arab society.

About this title

Review:

"In "Writing Women's Worlds, Bedouin women are the narrators of their own lives; they are not the subjects or objects of ideas projected by the ethnographer's imagination. . . . This will be an important work in the field of international feminist studies for some time to come. . . . An excellent effort to 'decolonize' a people in writing and to alter the usual preconceived ideas the Western reader brings to studies of Arabs and Muslim women."--"Women's Review of Books

About the Author:

Lila Abu-Lughod is Professor of Anthropology and Gender Studies at Columbia University. She is the author of Veiled Sentiments: Honor and Poetry in a Bedouin Society (California, 1986) and the co-editor, with C. Lutz, of Language and the Politics of Emotion (1990).

About this edition

• Publisher: University of California Press
• Publication date: 1993
• ISBN 10: 0520083040
• ISBN 13: 9780520083042
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 290