Abu-Lughod, L. (2016). Veiled sentiments: Honor and poetry in a Bedouin society. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press (Original work published in 1986).

The book “Veiled Sentiments,” by Lila Abu-Lughod, was first published in 1986 and has since become a classic ethnography in the field of anthropology. In the late 1970s and early 1980s, the author spent over two years living with a Bedouin community in the Western Desert of Egypt. She studied morality, gender relations, and the oral lyric poetry through which women and men expressed personal feelings. The poems were evocative of emotional life, and the evocation was very vivid. However, analysis also uncovered how deeply poetry and sentiment were entwined in the game of power and the preservation of social hierarchy. The author’s research explored literary forms yet evolved into a study on sentiment politics and cultural complexity.

This new thirty-fifth anniversary edition reflected on changes in anthropology as well as the lives of this group of Bedouins, who became increasingly entangled in national and social institutions. The comments to this new edition concluded with a personal reflection on the meaning of anthropological fieldwork as a transformative experience for everybody engaged, as well as the obligations it entails for ethnographers.