Includes bibliographical references (pages 297-307) and index.
Contents
Guest and daughter : The community ; Fieldwork ; Poetry and sentiment -- Part I. The ideology of Bedouin social life : Identity in relationship : Aá¹£l: the blood of ancestry ; GarÄba: the blood of relationship ; Maternal ties and a common life ; Identification and sharing ; Identity in a changing world -- Honor and the virtues of autonomy : Autonomy and hierarchy ; The family model of hierarchy ; Honor: the moral basis of hierarchy ; Limits on power ; Hasham: honor of the weak -- Modesty, gender, and sexuality : Gender ideology and hierarchy ; The social value of male and female ; The "natural" bases of female moral inferiority ; Red belts and black veils: the symbolism of gender and sexuality ; Sexuality and the social order ; Hasham reconsidered: deference and the denial of sexuality ; The meaning of veiling -- Part II. Discourses in sentiment : The poetry of personal life : On poetry in context ; The poetry of self and sentiment -- Honor and poetic vulnerability : Discourses on loss ; Matters of pride ; Responding to death ; The discourse of honor -- Modesty and the poetry of love : Discourses on love ; Star-crosses lovers ; An arranged marriage ; Marriage, divorce, and polygyny -- Ideology and the politics of sentiment : The social contexts of discourse ; Protective veils of form ; The meaning of poetry ; The politics of sentiment ; Ideology and experience -- Appendix : Formulas and themes of the GhinnÄwa.
Summary
Lila Abu-Lughod lived with a community of Bedouins in the Western Desert of Egypt for nearly two years, studying gender relations and the oral lyric poetry through which women and young men express personal feelings. The poems are haunting, the evocation of emotional life vivid. But her analysis also reveals how deeply implicated poetry and sentiment are in the play of power and the maintenance of a system of social hierarchy. What begins as a puzzle about a single poetic genre becomes a reflection on the politics of sentiment and the relationship between ideology and human experience. -- Publisher description.