Iraq

Given the significance of Iraq since 2003, I wish I had recent books to recommend. But I don’t, just one book that is fascinating but from another time.

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.