Ethnography

One of the most common genres of writing about the Muslim world is a Western traveler arriving, seeing some things they love and some things that disturb them, and writing for folks back home about their experiences. This sort of journalistic travel writing varies widely in perceptiveness and reliability, but at its best it expands our understanding of the world by providing vivid yet subtle portrayals of places where most of us will never go. It also, however, often raises hackles among people who are more familiar with the places portrayed, since the impressions formed during brief visits can be deeply misleading. Visiting a place for a week or two can produce some excellent travel writing, but it is hardly conducive to a nuanced understanding of a culture.

Ethnography partakes a little in the travel genre, as it is usually conducted by an outsider in a culture not their own. But it is a longer and more subtle process. The researcher undergoes training and self-examination to help them see and set aside their own cultural expectations, stays in a particular place for a year or more, and takes abundant and meticulous notes, from which later work is written. Ethnography can still end up being sensationalistic, exploitative, or simply misleading, but the following two books are, in my opinion, excellent examples of ethnography done well.

Elizabeth Warnock Fernea, Guests of the Sheik: An Ethnography of an Iraqi Village (1965). In 1956, Fernea arrived in the small rural village of El Nahra in southern Iraq. Her husband was an anthropologist, but both of them understood that he would have no opportunity to speak with any of the women in the village, and that any portrait of the village would be incomplete if it did not include its women. Fernea therefore became an anthropologist herself, taking careful notes as she set up housekeeping, adapted to village ways as best she could, got to know the women, became friends with some of them, participated in their Shi’ite religious celebrations, and reflected on the social and economic changes that were just beginning to affect village life. If you would like to get a flavor of what traditional village life was like, in a society that practiced strict segregation of the sexes but was not yet subject to wrenching changes, I highly recommend this delightfully well-written and absorbing book.

Steven C. Caton, Yemen Chronicle: An Anthropology of War and Mediation (2005). Caton arrived in Yemen in 1979 as a graduate student interested in studying tribal poetry, which in Yemen has great political as well as cultural significance. Ali Abdullah Saleh had become president of the Yemen Arab Republic (North Yemen) the year before, South Yemen had recently invaded North Yemen, Iranian students had just taken the American embassy hostage, and the political environment for American scholars was touchy. Caton ended up in a village that was a hijra, or “sanctuary,” inhabited by descendents of Muhammad. Turmoil erupted when it appeared that a young man from the sanctuary had kidnapped two girls from a nearby village, and Caton was given a close-up view of conflict resolution in tribal Yemen – which included plenty of poetry, but also bullets coming through his home. Yemen Chronicle reflects on these experiences years later, as well as the whole project of anthropology, memory, and human relationship. The result is fascinating if you are curious about Yemen’s tribal cultures and politics on the ground, though of course some things have changed in the last three decades.