Lila Abu-Lughod, "Honor and Shame"

When Lila Abu-Lughod was completing her graduate work in anthropology at Harvard University in the late 1970s, she designed a fieldwork project that took her to Egypt to study interpersonal relations between male and female members of a nomadic Bedouin community. Once there, Abu-Lughod noticed that the people she was living with frequently punctuated their talk, both in public and in private, by reciting short pieces of poetry. Although this wasn't what she had come to study, she became fascinated by the "radical difference between the sentiments expressed in [the oral poetry] and those expressed about the same situations in ordinary social interactions and conversations." Her first book, Veiled Sentiments: Honor and Poetry in a Bedouin Society (1986), grew out of her efforts to understand what produced these two very different ways of using language.

Currently a professor of anthropology at Columbia University, Abu-Lughod is internationally recognized for her contributions to feminist ethnography and to the study of gender politics in the Muslim world. What makes her work so distinctive and so unsettling is her insistence upon the importance of carefully examining both the actions and the assumptions that make up our everyday lives. Thus, while Abu-Lughod works hard to understand how women can gain power in traditional societies, she also encourages all who pursue such research to consider what women lose when they adopt the lifeways and the values of modern society. "Feminists, leftists, progressives, and other intellectuals still haven't questioned the idea of development, progress, modernity, as wholly a good thing," she has said. "No one has challenged this concept . . . that we have to follow a certain path, and as people get educated, they will get more enlightened."

In "Honor and Shame," which comes from her second book, Writing Women's Worlds: Bedouin Stories (1993), Abu-Lughod focuses on this question quite directly. What does Kamla, the subject of "Honor and Shame," stand to gain by breaking with her tradition and completing her education? What does she stand to lose? Under the circumstances, what outcome should one hope for? By telling Kamla's story in just this way, Abu-Lughod arouses the very kind of sentiments she most wants her readers to explore.

Abu-Lughod, Lila. "Honor and Shame," Writing Women's Worlds : Bedouin Stories (University of California Press, 1993). 205-242.
Digital image drawn from Professor Abu-Lughod's home page.
Initial quotation from Veiled Sentiments: Honor and Poetry in a Bedouin Society (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1986); closing quotation from Sarwat Ahmad, "A Muddled Modernity," Cairo Times, V. 3, Issue 1, March 1999, 4-17.

Links to Explore:

CIA's Factbook on Egypt: this site, which is maintained by the CIA, provides information on the geography, economy, and government of Egypt.

The Interpretation of Culture(s) After Television: a talk Abu-Lughod delivered in 1997 where she discusses the role that television has come to play in the lives of Egyptian women and suggests ways for anthropologists to contend with television's global presence.

Muslim Student Association: this site, maintained by the Muslim Student Association at the University of Houston, provides information to college students about Islam and the Qu'ran, including links to a special issue of their journal, Al-Manar, that is devoted to marriage and the role of women in Islam.

Google.com: enter "Bedouin" in this or any other search engine. What do you find?

Questions for Learning:

• The Bedouin tribes that Abu-Lughod studied are known, collectively, as the Awlad 'Ali and they reside in a region that stretches along the Mediterranean Sea, west of Alexandria to the border of Libya. How are the Bedouin represented in the CIA's Factbook on Egypt? How does the factbook's representation of Egypt differ from Abu-Lughod's?

• In her engaging essay, The Interpretation of Culture(s) After Television, Abu-Lughod reflects back on the work she did more than a decade earlier studying the Bedouin. She writes:

  In Writing Women's Worlds, I suggested that we could write critical ethnographies that went "against the grain" of global inequalities, even as we had to remain modest in our claims to radicalism and realistic about the impacts of these ethnographies. Television, I believe, is particularly useful for writing against the grain because it forces us to represent people in distant villages as part of the same cultural worlds we inhabit - worlds of mass media, consumption, and dispersed communities of the imagination. To write about television in Egypt, or Indonesia, or Brazil is to write about the articulation of the transnational, the national, the local, and the personal. Television is not the only way to do this, of course . . . [b]ut television makes it especially difficult to write as if culture and cultures . . . were the most powerful ways to make sense of the world.

  What is to be gained by representing "people in distant villages as part of the same cultural worlds we inhabit"? Would you say that Abu-Lughod accomplishes this in "Honor and Shame"?
  

• In "Honor and Shame," Kamla provides Abu-Lughod with her sense of the many roles that women play as members of Bedouin society, practitioners of the Islamic religion, and citizens of Egypt. After you've had a chance to read through the discussions of marriage and have visited the link to "Women in Islam" included on the Muslim Student Association's web site, what would you say is the relationship between Kamla's views and the views on the MSA's web site? What, if anything, is to be gained by learning about the views of students, either here or abroad, on matters as important as religion?
  
  
• If you search the web for images or information about the Bedouin, what do you find? What can one learn about the Bedouin and their culture online? How does the information available online differ from the information that Abu-Lughod provides about the Bedouin? Where might one find an unmediated representation of the Bedouin?

Questions for Connecting:

• In "Honor and Shame," Lila Abu-Lughod describes how education has changed the expectations of a young Bedouin woman named Kamla. Based on Abu-Lughod's account, can we say with certainty whether Kamla was given access to what Nussbaum terms the "central human functional capabilities" prior to her marriage? Would she have access to all of the capabilities after her marriage? How would Nussbaum recommend that we respond to Kamla's transition? Would she share Abu-Lughod's ambivalence about Kamla's move to the city?
  

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