Rating: 
Summary: Powerfully affective
Review: When Elizabeth Fernea set out for the rural Iraqi village of El Nahra in 1956, she was no trained anthropologist, no great published writer - no, she was, very simply, a newly married woman going to join her anthropologist husband overseas & to help him in his studies. When she left 2 years later, however, she held in her hands the germ of an idea for one of the most finely wrought ethnographies in existence, a book she would call GUESTS OF THE SHEIK.GUESTS OF THE SHEIK, being fully a product of Fernea's untutored description of her stay among the women of the village, is a deeply personal work, full of small details & emotional shading that might otherwise be omitted from a more scholarly tome. Her own failures & victories - nothing is hidden; the reader learns from her mistakes as SHE learned from them, & typically we find the cause of her blunders to be the values & ethics deeply entrenched in our Western culture. When broken down into its roots, the word 'ethnography' literally means 'folk story,' and that this is, being both a story of the 'women of the veil' in this tiny village in southern Iraq as they were in 1956, and also a story which goes far towards explicating our OWN culture, revealing the sometimes absurd nature of our OWN thoughts & desires. It is not meant to be taken as a universal tale, or some steadfast rule that we must measure ALL Iraqi villages by, but is a description of ONE woman's singular experiences in ONE small, unique village. Fernea's purpose here is simple; to give these women a voice, so that others might hear. In doing so she destroys many preconceived notions about their culture, & paints a vivid picture of these women, their intelligence & their way of life that will not be soon forgotten.
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