ABSTRACT
I begin with a few lines by a Bedouin girl, Kamla, from her essay written for ethnographer Lila Abu-Lughod on how young Bedouin women’s lives are changing:
In previous work, Abu-Lughod had described her observations that among the Bedouin of Egypt, two apparently conflicting discourses-one of honor and modesty, and one of intimacy, sentiment, and sexual love-circulate in radically different social situations. The former underpins a social hierarchy and limits individual freedoms, especially women’s freedoms to make life choices. The strength of this ideology of honor and modesty, she writes, is that “by framing ideas as values, in moral terms, it guarantees that people will desire to do what perpetuates the system” (Sentiments 238). Nor does this ideology merely mask the private and authentic feelings or inner reality expressed in the other, poetic discourse of sentiment and sexual love, which is also culturally sanctioned, and frames yet another set of ideals about cohesion among equals, thus also solidifying the social ranks. Such ethnographic work, like much recent scholarship, overturns the still-forceful doxa that emotions are simply internal, irrational, and natural (Lutz and Abu-Lughod 2), giving us good cause to reexamine pathos.
