Lila Abu-Lughod
Affiliations
- Faculty Fellow, Department of Anthropology
- Organizer, Workshop on Gender and the Global Locations of Liberalism
Research
An anthropologist with interests in gender, popular culture, and social and critical theory, Lila's first book, Veiled Sentiments (California 1986/2000), was on emotion, poetry, and gender ideology, based on fieldwork in a Bedouin community in Egypt. As an anthropologist of the Middle East, she is concerned about the politics of representation and began to think about ethnographic writing itself, developing a critique of the concept of culture in her book Writing Women's Worlds (California 1993) Interests in gender in the Arab world and in postcolonial theory led her to work on the history and contemporary politics of Middle Eastern feminisms. This was published in an edited book Remaking Women: Feminism and Modernity in the Middle East (Princeton 1998). Lila returned to the study of popular culture in ethnographic work on Egyptian television soap operas as they relate to national pedagogy, class politics, religious and gender identity, and modern subjectivities in her most recent book Dramas of Nationhood (Chicago 2005). This project led her to reflect on theoretical and methodological questions in the anthropology of media, but especially regarding the cultural production of nations. Questions of national identification, violent disruption, and memory are at the center of the work she is now completing on Palestinian narratives of 1948.
Selected Work
- Dramas of Nationhood: The Politics of Television in Egypt. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. 2005.
- Media Worlds: Anthropology on New Terrain, edited. Berkeley: University of California Press. 2002.
- Remaking Women: Feminism and Modernity in the Middle East, edited. Princeton: Princeton University Press. 1998.
- Writing Women's Worlds: Bedouin Stories. Berkeley: University of California Press. 1993.
- Veiled Sentiments: Honor and Poetry in a Bedouin Society. Berkeley: University of California Press. 1986.
See Also
- Featured publications by Lila Abu-Lughod
