Guests of the Sheik

Elizabeth Fernea observed an arranged to swap daughter and son with a brother in marriage. She said, “Bob reported that Ali had family completed marriage arrangements with his brother. Ali’s brother’s son would come to El Nahra, bringing his sister who would marry Hassan” (Fernea 136). This type of marriage is called preferential cousin-marriage, “which is a practiced in one form or another in most of the major region of the world. Unlike our own kinship system, kinship systems based on lineages distinguish between two different types of first cousins: cross cousins and

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

By asserting that she uses her extreme influence and power to advocate for the Muslim culture, she not only defers to Saddam Hussein’s ego, but she places him in her debt. By doing this, she effectively persuades him to return her son to her by appealing to his pride for his culture as a motivator to wish to help her in return for advocating so strongly for his culture.

Marriage practices vary across cultures. Every culture has its own way of conducting marriage according to their traditions and customs. Most cultures share common customs and practices, while some cultures have unique practices. Marriage refers to a social union agreed upon by the couples to unit as spouses. The union of couples implies sexual relations, permanence in union, and procreation. This research paper focuses on comparing marriage practices in American and Indian culture. There is significant difference between the two cultures in marriage practices.

As American singer-song writer Duncan Sheik once said, “It’s inevitable your environment will influence what you do.” It is not a secret that the environment a person grows up in helps shape their views of the world and how he or she perceives different issues. The United State of America are known as the melting pot. We have many cultures and races all living within the same cities working together peacefully for the most part. To outsiders America is the place to come to achieve the “American Dream”, and it is the place where fresh starts, entrepreneurship, and individualism are highly encouraged. There are freedoms in American that many other people across the world are not as lucky to have.

Through its ethnocentric tales and family based beliefs, Elizabeth Warnock Fernea’s Guests of the Sheik suggests that to find the true representation of Islamic culture, one must leave ethnocentrism behind. Not only will we discuss ethnocentrism and the cultural differences between Western and Middle Eastern societies, we will also take a look at the women of El Nahra and family within the differing societies.

You are Fatima, a middle-aged, middle-class woman in El Nahra, Iraq in 1954. You have met an American woman for the first time in your life, and have come to know her pretty well. But you just cannot understand how she can be happy living according to the American customs she has described to you. Construct Fatima’s argument for why the customs of Iraq, especially as they relate to gender roles and gender relationships, are vastly superior to those of the United States.

Choosing an in-law in !Kung San society is primarily arranged by the parents of the woman based on marital status, hunting ability, age, and willingness to accept the responsibilities of family life (Shostak 1981, p.116). The lack of violence and conflict between villages allows !Kung San parents to travel large distances to find an acceptable partner who is not of close relatedness to the girl being married (Shostak 1981, p.115). The almost universal taboo in modern day industrial societies prohibiting marriages between closely related kin is also followed in !Kung San society and the easiest way to avoid marrying your cousin is by marrying someone from a distant group (Shostak 1981, p.115; Allen et al. 2011). Close kinship systems tend to keep families close together so they can all benefit off the same resources. However, in harsh and unpredictable environments, like that faced by the !Kung, flexibility of movement created by non-consanguineous unions and bilateral kinship systems is essential in creating reciprocity systems that allow access to resources that are limiting and seasonal (Allen et al. 2011). Non-consanguineous

Iraq is a different world than where we live in North America. Canadian values and culture of North America are vastly different from those of the Middle Eastern country that is the subject of an-article by Arshin Adib-Moghaddam titled Abu Gharib and Insaniyat. Following the terrorist attacks in New York in 2001 the differences between these two cultures seemed immense. The stories and images that were beamed into our houses by television and other media were unreal to our eyes. From our perspective we feel fortunate to live in a different place and wonder how the world got to a point where things can be so different in two places,

There are many countries in the world and every country is unique and individualistic with many exclusive qualities. Everyone in the world has a culture but it is not easy to accept or agree with other people’s culture. The ethnography, “Guests of the Sheik”, written by Elizabeth Warnock Fernea really captures what it is like to live and to be immersed into another culture. Ethnography is “comprised of the writings of the anthropologist, detailing the life ways of a particular culture, investigated by means of direct fieldwork” (Arenson, and Miller-Thayer 1). Elizabeth Fernea lived in a small village of El Nahra in southern Iraq for two years to gather data for her anthropologist husband Bob. In the beginning, she had limited knowledge of Iraq, its religion or culture, but as she started connecting with the women of the society, she came to learn both about this foreign country and about herself. Acculturation is “the process of acceptance resulting for the contact between two cultures, or an individual interacting in at least two cultures” (517). As she builds relationships with the woman’s, she is acculturated.

Through out Middle East the lives of women appear to have no influencing role in society. Elizabeth Fernea provides an survey of the traditions of an Iraqi village in her book Guests of the Sheik. Within this book, Fernea explores the element of gender and its impact on the roles of women in Iraq, directly in the village of El Nahra. She also encounters the expectations based on the gender-specific social constructs of polygamous families. Another woman author, Leila Abouzeid, explores similar elements in the work Return to Childhood, which is based in islamic Morocco. Fernea, who the women of the harem call Beeja, presents experiential information about the life of both women and men and her role within her husband 's life as it reflects

As BJ and her husband, Bob, began to get ready to leave for their trip to El Nahra, BJ is pessimistic about wearing an abayah. She didn’t understand why she had to wear this when it wasn’t her custom to do so. Bob explained to her that people are going to look at her differently, because she is new to the town and has lead a completely different life style than their own. He said she will have to get used to it, become accepted, and learn the culture. BJ was new to the town, and she was experiencing culture shock. In El Nahra, women that were uncovered were known as an immoral woman. For many westerners, like Fernea and Bob, the veil was a symbol of patriarchal Islamic societies in which women are assumed to be oppressed, subordinated and

Death, decay, crime, war, and other horrors are at the center of Hayder Al-Mohammad’s “You Have Car Insurance, we have Tribes.” The author’s intended subject, tribes, and more specifically how they are as the author says, waxing in Iraq, however, is only briefly discussed in the article, which focuses more on the city of Basra Iraq. While the Al-Mohammad does look at historical aspects of the city of Basra through the lens of tribalism, he fails to construct a reasonable argument for why tribes are needed in modern Iraq, or for that matter, in general. This is because he commits several sins in authorship, including mixing personal experience with historical fact, self-contradiction, and switching between third and first-person writing.

Marriage plays a significant role in today’s contemporary society, and it is only through marriage the subsequent generation is created. Most people may have attended a wedding before; however, not all weddings are alike due to the difference in religion and/or culture. For example a Christian wedding has different customs than a Hindu wedding as a result of different beliefs and traditions. There are different types of marriages such as an arranged marriage and love marriages; however in the modern society many people have love Marriages. Aside from the types of marriages mentioned above, endogamy and exogamy are important factors for marriage. Endogamy is the custom of marrying a person within one’s community, while exogamy is the practice of marrying one from different community. Endogamy can be found in India’s caste system, Muslim marriages, Eastern Catholics marriages, and Jewish marriages. On the other hand exogamy can be found among the Latin American communities. In communities that practices endogamy, there has been disputation whether or whether not the practice endogamy should still be continued. The custom of Endogamy should still continue because it created a unique identity among the various communities which practice it, and it is a practice that was passed from one generation to the next. The tradition of Endogamy enables unity among the community members, empowers the couple to practice the same religion and culture, and