More on Veiled Sentiments

October 8th, 2008 • anthropology, education
Tags: anthropology, education

So I finished the book Veiled Sentiments last week and was thoroughly surprised at how well written it is. It’s the first ethnography that I’ve read in a while, if not ever, that’s written to be read by a normal lay man. Aside from a myriad of oft-redefined Awlad ‘Ali dialectical terms, it doesn’t contain the usual obscuring language of anthropology. Ms. Abu-Lughod succeeded in making this book and the lives of these Bedouin extremely accessible to anyone who’s curious.

That being said, I will probably buy her follow up book called Writing Women’s Worlds. This book was written roughly a decade after her original research in the Western Desert and takes place with the same tribe. I think it would be interesting to see how much has changed socially in that passing decade.

The paper I had to write on the book is simply abysmal but it seems I wasn’t the only one. Practically everyone else in class had the same problem I did with the topic. This was essentially a book report that could be backed up by some research but the lives of these people are so complex to Westerners, it’s quite tough to cram 260 pages into 5 pages. Almost everyone loved the book, that was overwhelmingly apparent but everyone suffered the same issue with the bounty of the subject at hand. Hopefully I’ll get a decent grade that I can more than easily make up for with our next two papers.