Lila Abu-Lughod (1952 - )

Quotes
"Anthropologists should now pursue, without exaggerated hopes for the power of their texts to change the world, a variety of strategies for writing against culture." - Writing Against Culture (1986)

“What does freedom mean if we accept the fundamental premise that humans are social beings, raised in certain social and historical contexts and belonging to particular communities that shape their desires and understandings of the world?” - Do Muslim Women Need Saving? (2013)

"It is deeply problematic to construct the Afghan woman as someone in need of saving. When you save someone, you imply that you are saving her from something. You are also saving her to something. What violences are entailed in this transformation, and what presumptions are being made about the superiority of that to which you are saving her? Projects of saving other women depend on and reinforce a sense of superiority by Westerners, a form of arrogance that deserves to be challenged." - Do Muslim Women Need Saving? (2013)

Biography and History
Lila Abu-Lughod was born on October 21, 1952, with Palestinian and Jewish roots to academics Ibrahim Abu-Lughod and Janet L. Abu-Lughod. By 1974, she had graduated with an undergraduate degree from Carleton College and achieved her PhD from Harvard University in 1984. As a sociologist, she currently teaches Anthropology and Women’s and Gender Studies at Columbia University.

Considered the specialist of the Arab world, Abu-Lughod is very well known for her work on gender and postcolonial theory in the Middle East. In the late 1970s, she spent two years in Egypt studying an indigenous nomadic group. Furthermore, during the events of 9/11, Abu-Lughod had become the most requested intellect by media outlets to give a perspective on understanding Muslim women and their roles during that period. Furthermore, to understand Islam and the role of the women and their cultural practices in this religion.

Work
Lila Abu-Lughod’s work primarily encompasses her two passions: ethnography and feminism. Her work centers on the many different relationships between society and culture such as the relationship between cultural forms and power, the politics of knowledge and representation, and the dynamics of gender and the question of women’s rights in the Middle East.

She published her first book called Veiled Sentiments in 1986 which features her field research on the Bedouin community in Egypt. Her second book Writing Women’s Worlds which she published in 1993 focuses primarily on a feminist form of ethnography. Her latest book published in 2013 entitled ''Do Muslim Women Need Saving? ''is much talked about, particularly due to the fact that Muslim women and the desire to ‘liberate’ them has become such a hot topic in the Western world.

Having done many fieldwork, she starts to notice the bias surrounding ethnographic research and questions its legitimacy. In Writing Against Culture, she criticizes the forms of ethnographies that are popularly followed by anthropologists studying the culture of 'others' and proposes her own methods of conducting field research. Abu-Lughod also tries to promote feminist ethnography, a field that she argues has been overshadowed and undermined by the ethnographies dominated by Occidental men. However, her being a feminist does not stop her from seeing the flaws in the works of feminist philosophers such as that of cultural feminists.

While not responsible for its creation, Abu-Lughod further develops Kirin Narayan’s concept of ‘halfies’ – a term she uses to refer to people whose natural or cultural identity have been altered by migration, overseas education, or parentage. Her article Writing Against Culture widely popularized this otherwise relatively unknown concept.

Influences
Lila Abu-Lughod was influenced by feminist theorists, such as Marilyn Strathern. The female self being constructed in opposition to men was used in reflection of Lila’s enlightenment of western dominated anthropology and use of the term ‘halfies’. Abu-Lughod’s methodological stance was largely influenced by James Clifford’s critical reflection of ethnographies; Lila’s ‘Writing Against Culture’ (1991) was built on Clifford’s ‘Writing Culture’ (1986). Her works bear tribute to hermeneutic theorists placement of importance on the value of meaning, such as Clifford Geertz. Lila Abu-Lughod’s constructivist regards to social identity further bears skeletal resemblance to Max Weber’s nominalism, which challenges social constructs and their universality.

However eclectic Lila’s influential background, her works continue to contribute to gender equality discourse and ethnographic representations today. Notable works of which would be; Ulf Hannerz’ ‘Transnational Connections: Culture, People, Places’ (1996), Yali Zou and Enrique Trueba’s ‘Ethnography and Schools: Qualitative Approaches to the Study of Education’ (2002), and Mike Featherstone’s ‘Global Modernities’ (1995).

Analysis
Lila Abu-Lughod’s methodology is in sync to the post modernist era of criticality. With this critical turn, Lila shines a light on modern injustices with gender equality and the western perception of non-western worlds. Lila Abu-Lughod’s anthropology evades cultural categories and attempts to write ‘against culture’; meaning without the assumption of distinction between ‘self’ and ‘other’. By doing this, Abu-Lughod challenges the extent of cultural relativism and ushers in a modified technique for ethnographies without a pre existing, bias understanding of the persons at hand along with the built in divisions of power in the previously imposed structures.

In many of Lila Abu-Lughod's works, she focuses on the relations between Islam and the assumed oppression of women in Muslim communities depicted by Western world. Through many of her works, she critiques feminist discourses and she challenges the cultural relativism and the constant normative othering of Islam and the Muslim women. She argues that it is government structures, politics and economics that cause the suppression and the shift in geopolitics that criticize Islamic populations and Islamic women thus creating negative stereotype of Arab societies and the assumption that Muslim women are in need of liberation.

Critique




Lila Abu- Lughod’s theoretical work emerges during the post-Cold War in the 1980s, where anthropologists pay more attention to cultural representation. Lila’s anthropological work is positively received by feminists, Arab communities, and among scholars, because she has demonstrated the importance of representation and understanding culture in its historical context. For example, Ayyad Al Batneegi, an expert in General Law and Political Theory mentions that, “Abu-Lughod’s arguments challenge the international demarche of the Western development discourse, often promoted as a one size fits all global model to follow. In contrast, Abu-Lughod, maintains that this globalized conception of the liberal development discourse works to the detriment of women, justifying their right to reject being integrated into globalism and defend their cultural and local specificity” ( Batneegi, 2014, p. 1).



Abu- Lughod’s ethnographic methods are based on the Interpretative perspective of Anthropology, which came about in the Post-Modern era. This school of thought depicts the importance on the meanings in the actions and thoughts of people based on their historical content and the critique of representation. Hermeneutics anthropologists like Lughod and Renato Rosaldo challenge the traditional forms of representation of culture and rely on Marxist theory to strengthen their critiques. Lughod refers to Orientalism to show how theorists should adopt new form of knowledge to properly represent the culture being studied. Abu- Lughod (2001) mentions that “Orientalism is as not just about representations or stereotypes of the Orient but about how these were linked and integral to projects of domination that were ongoing. The problem is about the production of knowledge in and for the West” (p. 101)

Marnia Lazreg, a social scientist challenges Lughod’s argument on Muslim women wearing the veil. Lazreg disagrees with Abu- Lughod’s argument that veil liberates women by “enabling them to appear in public” (Lazreg, p. 1). “ Lazreg criticizes this view as apologia that “in reality makes oppression more intellectually acceptable. . . The implication is that the ‘oppressed’ are not so oppressed after all; they have power” (6). She argues that this naturalization of the veil excuses women from having to critically examine their personal reasons for choosing to veil” (Lazreg, p. 1). Theorists that follow Durkheim’ theory and the Structuralism school of would disagree with Lughod’s concept of culture and representation. 