In the 1950's, a newly married American woman named Elizabeth Warnock Fernea accompanied her husband to a rural Iraqi village, where he was performing field research for his doctorate in anthropology. This book describes her experiences. The adjustment for her was profound, because she lived in a mud hut with no indoor plumbing, didn't speak the local language, and found it advisable to wear the veil in order to fit in with the local conservative Islamic community. In this book, Fernea covers the day-to-day life of the women in the tribe, the process of slowly making friends with them as she learned their language, and the local Shiite religious observances that she shared in. She talks about the veiling of women, the practice of polygamy, the hard manual labor that is part of everyone's life, the religious customs, the food that people eat, the structure of society, and the encroachment of modern "civilized" life on the traditional rural culture. Guests of the Sheik: An Ethnography of an Iraqi Village provided a fascinating glimpse into the day-to-day life of women in one part of the Middle East.
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