GUESTS OF THE SHEIK, being fully a product of Fernea's untutored description of her stay among the women of the village, is a deeply personal work, full of small details & emotional shading that might otherwise be omitted from a more scholarly tome. Her own failures & victories - nothing is hidden; the reader learns from her mistakes as SHE learned from them, & typically we find the cause of her blunders to be the values & ethics deeply entrenched in our Western culture. When broken down into its roots, the word `ethnography' literally means `folk story,' and that this is, being both a story of the `women of the veil' in this tiny village in southern Iraq as they were in 1956, and also a story which goes far towards explicating our OWN culture, revealing the sometimes absurd nature of our OWN thoughts & desires. It is not meant to be taken as a universal tale, or some steadfast rule that we must measure ALL Iraqi villages by, but is a description of ONE woman's singular experiences in ONE small, unique village. Fernea's purpose here is simple; to give these women a voice, so that others might hear. In doing so she destroys many preconceived notions about their culture, & paints a vivid picture of these women, their intelligence & their way of life that will not be soon forgotten.
