The Sanusi Bedouin of Libya, also known as Libyan Bedouin, Sanusiya, or the Senussi of Cyrenaica, are a semi-nomadic people living primarily within the desert regions of Western Libya and Eastern Egypt (Figure 1). Due to their relative isolation and strict social hierarchy, the Libyan Bedouin have maintained the traditions, practices, and language of their Arabian ancestors. However, they also place great emphasis on religious learning, in large part due to the actions of Sayyid Muhammad ibn Ali as-Senussi, The Grand Sanusi.
The Bedouin have complex kinship patterns that act as the greatest means of social integration and stratification. Because the Bedouin are Sunni Muslims and thus believe that dancing, singing, and public displays of emotion are sins, poetry acts as the sole, socially acceptable, cathartic outlet for intense or otherwise inexpressible emotions. The ethnographic present for the sources range from 1949 to 1986, resulting in an ethnographic present for this paper of approximately 1967.
Subsistence Method
The Libyan Bedouin are a pastoral people, moving as needed through the Sahara desert with their sheep, goats, and camels. Their movements depend largely upon the seasons due to lack of vegetation and water in the lowlands during the dry season. They also cultivate small plots of cereal grains during the wet season on the desert plateaus and oases of Libya (Behnke, 1980).
Political Structure
The Bedouin are a tribal culture, as defined by Lewellen, with a few traits tending towards a chiefdom. Their patriarchal leaders are chosen from with the tribe and possess authority without power. Legal disputes are settled within the tribe, by local Sheiks (political leaders) or Imams (religious leaders) who typic...
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...ations who believe that poetry is an acceptable medium. Recent political and social upheaval in Libya and Egypt have prevented further participant observation anthropological research with the Bedouin people.
Works Cited
Abu-Lughod, L. (1986). Veiled sentiments: honor and poetry in a Bedouin society. Berkeley: University of California Press. 400 pp. HRAF.
Adler, R. B., Proctor II, R. F. (2013). Looking Out, Looking In. Cengage Learning. 430 pp. Kindle Edition.
Behnke, R. H. (1980). The Herders of Cyrenaica: ecology, economy and kinship among the Bedouin of Eastern Libya. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. 197 pp. HRAF.
Evans-Pritchard, E.E. (1949). The Sanusi of Cyrenaica. Oxford: At the Clarendon Press. 240 pp. HRAF.
Lewellen, T. C. (2003). Types of Preindustrial Political Systems. Political Anthropology an Introduction (3rd ed., ). Westport, Conn.: Praeger.
This book differs from most ethnographies in that it was not authored by an anthropologist. Fernea originally set out to accompany her husband as he completed research for his doctorate in social anthropology from the University Chicago. Henceforth, Fernea did not enter the field with any specific goals, hypotheses, or particular interests. In many ways, Guests of the Sheik reads as a personal narrative, describing Ferneas struggles integrating into a society that has vastly different expectations and guidelines for women. Fernea recalls the culture shock she first experienced as well as her eagerness to overcome it. Her goals were mainly of a human nature: she wanted to feel a sense of belonging, to have friends, and to establish a life in El Nahra. The first part of Guests of the Sheik largely mimics Fernea's own journey to feeling accepted as it introduces readers to the various groups of women who soon become Fernea's close friends and confidants, most importantly Laila, who will later introduce many aspects of Muslim culture to Fernea. Throughout the book, each chapter emphasizes a different aspect of life as Fernea discovers it, or details an important event. As such, readers experience Ramadan and Eid, two staples of the Muslim culture, Weddings and marriage arrangements, discussions of monogamy and polygamy, the Pilgrimage to Karbala, and many other customs
It is important to note that Elizabeth Warnock Fernea herself is a brilliant writer, and her piece of Guests of the Sheik offers a very in debt analysis of an Iraqi village that would not be seen from most outsiders. How while Fernea concedes the fact that she is not an anthropologist she was married to one and the first two years of their marriage they lived in an Iraqi village called El Nahra. Since she lived in a village that has hardly any social contact between men and women, Fernea is able to give us a beautiful account of what the women’s life style, roles, and other aspects of a women’s life in an Iraqi village. While women are not treated incredibly badly there lifestyle was a lot different than the one an American woman would live. One of the primary directions of Fernea’s study are to show how the author could be credible in ultimately idealizing her culture and peoples in this ethnography. She uses her Self authority to convince the reader of that and her interactions with other women. The
Elizabeth Fernea entered El Nahra, Iraq as an innocent bystander. However, through her stay in the small Muslim village, she gained cultural insight to be passed on about not only El Nahra, but all foreign culture. As Fernea entered the village, she was viewed with a critical eye, ?It seemed to me that many times the women were talking about me, and not in a particularly friendly manner'; (70). The women of El Nahra could not understand why she was not with her entire family, and just her husband Bob. The women did not recognize her American lifestyle as proper. Conversely, BJ, as named by the village, and Bob did not view the El Nahra lifestyle as particularly proper either. They were viewing each other through their own cultural lenses. However, through their constant interaction, both sides began to recognize some benefits each culture possessed. It takes time, immersed in a particular community to understand the cultural ethos and eventually the community as a whole. Through Elizabeth Fernea?s ethnography on Iraq?s El Nahra village, we learn that all cultures have unique and equally important aspects.
There are many cultures throughout the world, which may be far apart and yet still have similarities. Two of those such cultures, the Basseri, that live in Iran, and the Nuer, whom live in Sudan, have their differences, but also have some similarities. Many of the differences and similarities come from their subsistence strategies and the social and political organization of their societies. With the regions of the world, both the Basseri and the Nuer live in, they’ve had to adapt to the environment they live in along with the limitations imposed by that environment.
Writing Women's Worlds is some stories on the Bedouin Egyptian people. In this book, thwe writer Lia Adu-Lughod's stories differ from the conventional ones. While reading, we discover the customs and values of the Bedouin people.
Nomadic-pastoralist peoples have had a dramatic impact on world history on several occasions. Generally speaking, their impact has been destructive and short-lived. The Arab conquests, from 632 onwards, of the Middle East and North Africa brought about certain consequences. Alone among other nomad warriors, the Arabs brought with them a dominant religion, Islam, and this in its train contributed a written language of high culture and, later, of administration. Arabic had become a language of religion and government, as well as the spoken vernacular of almost the entire population from the Zagros Mountains to the Atlantic Ocean. There are few events that have affected world history as profoundly as the battles and expeditions between 632 and 720, and everyone lives with those consequences at the present day.
...dentity*. The government’s huge efforts to promote sedentism, reflects the common prejudice that nomads represent a deterioration that is extremely distant from modern life. The advocacy of officials towards racial discrimination has made the diffusion of racism inevitable. Accordingly, when Bedouins, particularly the Awlad Ali tribe, visit Cairo and other cities, they describe Egyptians as inhospitable and unhelpful people*. While I was initially shocked by their statements, I came to realize that “hospitality” is such a relative term, for in the presence of racial discrimination, how on earth were these Bedouins going to see the hospitable side of Egyptians! Furthermore, such an outwardly biased system will no doubt advocate the formation of stereotypes towards “inferior” groups, and it will help create a correlation between stereotyped traits and life chances.
Love and war, two concepts that are so contradictory it is hard to believe they could ever coexist simultaneously in one society. War is a state of conflict, hostility and chaos which reeks havoc on civilizations as opposing forces struggle to defend their cause not matter what the price. Throughout history the world has seen the devastation such conflict can bring; from the gory conquests of the ancient Romans, to the horrific Nazi Holocaust in World War II, to the bloody battles between government forces that raged in Afghanistan. It is in this world of mayhem and cruelty that Pashtun women must carry on their lives. They attempt in whatever possible to find and salvage any kind of love and beauty amidst the turmoil of their warring nation. These women must find ways to stay strong and resist the oppression forced upon them by their patriarchal society which coerces them into hard physical labor as well as demeans their humanity as their status is reduced to nothing more than property (Majrouh XIII, XIV). The song of the Pashtun woman is her escape, her release, and her joy as she unites with other women in her community and sings out against her oppression. Through these landays, or songs, one sees another dimension to the lives of Pashtun women as they transform the misery and grief of their everyday lives into a spirit of beauty as they lament against their oppressors and find ways to love even in a time of war.
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An Arab tribal community used to this tradition as its life is intrusively disrupted by outsiders and its ancestral ways and values are dislocated. Like a rock thrown into a calm pond, the foreigners' arrival began to ripple throughout the community as curiosity, anxiety, and suspicion spread among its members.
Joyce, James. "Araby." 1914. Literature and Ourselves. Henderson, Gloria, ed. Boston, Longman Press. 2009. 984-988.
Asani, Ali. “In Praise of Muhammad: Sindhi and Urdu Poems.” Religions of India in Practice. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995.