Guests of the Sheik

Elizabeth Warnock Fernea reveals that she has spent her first two years of marriage living in a rural tribal settlement in the southern Iraqi village of El Nahra. She does so to support her husband, Bob Fernea, a doctoral candidate in social anthropology at the University of Chicago who is doing research for his doctorate degree. Elizabeth refers to her work as her personal narrative. Even though she lived among the El Eshadda tribe for a long time, she knew nothing about its society when she first joined it. She also admits that she is not an anthropologist, she does not know the Arabic language, and she knows little of Middle Eastern culture. For these reasons, Elizabeth’s work is a collection of her “reactions to a new world” (ix). Elizabeth notes that all of the tales in her ethnography are true, but she has changed people’s names in the book “so that no one may be embarrassed,” though she doubts that the women she lived among will ever read her work (ix).