Lila Abu-Lughod

Lila Abu-Lughod (born 1952) is an American anthropologist. She is the Joseph L. Buttenweiser Professor of Social Science in the Department of Anthropology at Columbia University in New York City. She specializes in ethnographic research in the Arab world, and her seven books cover topics including sentiment and poetry, nationalism and media, gender politics and the politics of memory.

Early life and education

Abu-Lughod's father was the prominent Palestinian academic Ibrahim Abu-Lughod. Her mother, Janet L. Abu-Lughod, née Lippman, was a leading American urban sociologist.^[1] She graduated from Carleton College in 1974, and obtained her PhD from Harvard University in 1984.^[2]

Career

Lughod's body of work is grounded in long-term ethnographic research in Egypt, and is especially concerned with the intersections of culture and power, as well as gender and women's rights in the Middle East.^[3]

Between the late 1970s and the mid-1980s, while she was still a graduate student, Lughod spent time living with the Bedouin Awlad 'Ali tribe in Egypt.^[2] She stayed with the head of the community, and lived in his household alongside his large family for a cumulative two years.^[4] Her first two books, Veiled Sentiments: Honor and Poetry in a Bedouin Society and Writing Women's Worlds, are based on this fieldwork. Both books draw on her experiences living with the Bedouin women and her research into their poetry and storytelling.^[2] She explores the way that ghinnawas, songs in a poetic form that she compares to haiku and the blues, express the cultural "patterning" of the society, especially with regard to the relations between women and men.^[4] Abu-Lughod has described a reading group that she attended while teaching at Williams College – its other members included Catharine A. MacKinnon, Adrienne Rich, and Wendy Brown – as a formative engagement with the field of women's studies and a major influence on these early books.^[5]

Abu-Lughod spent time as a scholar at the Institute for Advanced Study, with Judith Butler, Evelyn Fox Keller, and Donna Haraway. She also taught at New York University, where she worked on a project, funded by a Ford Foundation grant, intended to promote a more international focus in women's studies.^[5]

Her 2013 book, Do Muslim Women Need Saving? investigates the image of Muslim women in Western society. It is based on her 2002 article of the same name, published in American Anthropologist.^[6] The text examines post-9/11 discussions on the Middle East, Islam, women's rights, and media. Abu-Lughod gathers examples of the Western narrative of the "abused" Muslim women who need to be saved, and explains how the international focus on "saving" these women perpetuates racist ideas of Muslim societies as barbaric.^[7] She argues that Muslim women, like women of other faiths and backgrounds, need to be viewed within their own historical, social, and ideological contexts.^[8] The book suggests that religion is not the main factor in global inequality, suggesting instead that the most significant sources are poverty and governmental abuses coupled with global tensions.^[7] Abu-Lughod's article and subsequent book on the topic have been compared to Edward Said and Orientalism.

Abu-Lughod serves on the advisory boards of multiple academic journals, including Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society^[9] and Diaspora: A Journal of Transnational Studies.^[10]

Significant publications

• Writing Women's Worlds: Bedouin Stories (University of California Press 1993) ISBN 978-0-520-08304-2
• Remaking Women: Feminism and Modernity in the Middle East (Editor) (Princeton University Press 1998) ISBN 978-0-691-05792-7
• Veiled Sentiments: Honor and Poetry in a Bedouin Society (University of California Press 2000) ISBN 978-0-520-22473-5
• Media Worlds: Anthropology on New Terrain (Editor) (University of California Press 2002) ISBN 978-0-520-23231-0
• Dramas of Nationhood: The Politics of Television in Egypt (University of Chicago Press 2004) ISBN 978-0-226-00197-5
• Local Contexts of Islamism in Popular Media (Amsterdam University Press 2007) ISBN 978-90-5356-824-8
• Nakba: Palestine, 1948, and the Claims of Memory with Ahmad H. Sa'di, (Columbia University Press 2007) ISBN 978-0-231-13578-8
• Do Muslim Women Need Saving? (Harvard University Press 2013) ISBN 978-0-674-72516-4

Personal Life

Abu-Lughod is a supporter of the Boycott Divestment Sanctions movement. She is married to Timothy Mitchell.

See also

• Postcolonialism
• Subaltern
• Orientalism
• Imagined geographies

Notes

Further reading

• An Interview with Abu-Lughod on women and Afghanistan
• Profile of Lila Abu-Lughod at the Institute for Middle East Understanding
• Columbia University Department of Anthropology Faculty
• Lila Abu Lughod: My Father's Return to Palestine Winter-Spring 2001, Issue 11-12 Jerusalem Quarterly (Accessed 17.06. 2012)
• Oral History interview with Lila Abu Lughod, 2015, IRWGS Oral History project, Columbia Center for Oral History Archives
• American Ethnologist interview with Lila Abu Lughod, 2016