56 pages • 1 hour read
Lila Abu-LughodVeiled Sentiments
Nonfiction | Book | Adult | Published in 1986A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Themes
Womanhood and Patriarchy
From her text’s first pages, Abu-Lughod informs readers that both her experience as a woman and her interest in gender motivate her study of the Bedouin. Although her role as “daughter” in the Haj’s house brings her “acceptance,” she notes immediately she must be “dependent” upon his family (17). Being a respectable woman among the Awlad ‘Ali not only inhibits her self-expression but also limits her work as an ethnographer.
Honor, in Bedouin society, is most interesting to Abu-Lughod for how it informs women’s lives. Women render this value problematic; indeed, women themselves are viewed as the problem, marked off by their veils and belts, both symbols of their “natural” difference and insufficiency. She presents honor in the text partly as patriarchal currency which allows men to gain respect yet does the opposite for women. She comes closest to experiencing the culture of honor as a “native” from a distinctly gendered view.
Gender becomes important, in Awlad ‘Ali society, not only because Abu-Lughod begins with an interest in women, but also because Awlad ‘Ali social organization sexually segregates women. The experience of being a woman is more than—and different from—the hierarchical position accorded to women. Because Abu-Lughod is most often limited to female circles, she sees their experiences most intimately. Abu-Lughod examines poetry because it unlocks insights that she cannot, because of the culture of modesty to which women (who recite the poems) are bound, ask about directly. She therefore suggests that patriarchy limits women in this society, and yet the social use of poetry demonstrates female ingenuity and expression under these structures.
Storytelling as Cultural Expression
Storytelling is the common mode of explanation in Bedouin culture; Bedouins value narrative deeply as an art form. Stories are also commonly located in poems, as Abu-Lughod frequently notes. Fictional characters speak in poems, revealing sentiments (often transgressive and romantic) through verse. Abu-Lughod suggests that narrative gives people opportunities to expressing oneself, since fiction often mirrors reality.
Stories are also a means by which Bedouins understand their lives. One story, about an incestuous couple, explains women’s “inherent” inferiority. Another entrenches the expectation that marriages based on love will be thwarted. Rather than simply explaining the principles, Abu-Lughod provides the stories that shape Bedouin consciousness, because they are more illustrative of the entire frame of mind that she seeks to describe.
Abu-Lughod uses narratives that she hears and records to mimic Bedouin storytelling. Because she cannot record most of the stories directly, she must transform these facts into unreliably authentic tales; there is always a possibility that at least some of her narratives are fabricated by the teller or skewed in her transcription. Abu-Lughod’s use of the mode of storytelling gestures to its effectiveness, its ability to instruct, and its slippery relationship to fact.
Honor and Complementarity in Bedouin Society
Honor, and the multiple terms that describe and relate to it (‘agl, aṣl, ḥasham, and on), is the central system upon which Abu-Lughod constructs her core argument. Pursuit of honor is the primary aim of the Bedouin society, but it is also, through aṣl, the Bedouins’ birthright. This uneasy relationship between inherent honor and earned honor is the first of many tensions that emerge about how honor works and whether it can be equally distributed between and among the Awlad ‘Ali.
Complementarity is one element of Bedouin society that calls honor into question. While the society often splits people into bifurcated structures, it uses complementarity to justify this. For example, in a Bedouin family, younger family members labor to provide for the elders while elders provide wisdom, provision, and protection for them. Relationships between patrons and clients and men and women follow similar lines. Abu-Lughod points out an imbalance of power in such complementary systems, illustrated in the unequal access to free movement and decision-making.
The critical problem with using complementarity to justify inequality within Bedouin society is that free movement and the ability to make autonomous decisions is a critical element of honor. Although autonomy is more vital for men, all individuals seek and portray the ability to act freely. Because of complementarity, not all individuals possess an equal chance to think and act independently of others.
Because honor is inherent (from “pure” Bedouin blood), achieved (through acts of autonomy or modesty, depending on one’s gender), and unachievable (because of the inherent impurity of womanhood), the Bedouins’ social and private actions and expressions must be finely-tuned to fit a code. Abu-Lughod works to decipher this code. At each step of Abu-Lughod’s analysis of poetry and gender, she revisits the relationship of social practice to the code of honor that informs social life. Social life is personal life, as she reminds her reader: because Bedouin society is the only acceptable and available world to the Bedouins, individuals within it are highly motivated, on a personal level, to sustain its demands. Through honor and complementarity, Abu-Lughod therefore suggests the difficulty of sustaining society’s demands in systems containing contradictions, and yet she portrays the honor of doing so.
