Abu-Lughod's 'Shifting Politics in Bedouin Love Poetry'

   What society is Abu-Lughod studying? In what position are they to the
   state of Egypt?

   The Awlad Ali society is rapidly changing. What is being changed according
   to the anthropologist? Find examples in the text!

   “The Awlad Ali view sexual bonds and the bonds of agnation [relatives] as
   competing.”

   What does it mean? How does she explain it? (p.145)

   “Women often told me that love matches always ended badly for the women
   because she would not have the support of her male kin if her husband
   mistreated her.” (p.145)

   According to this proposition, what benefits did women gain from arranged
   marriages?

   Compare the “modesty code” (p.145) with the concept of shame in Rosaldo's
   article!

   According to Abu-Lughod, in what way is love a subversive sentiment (of
   defiance, resistance)?

   What role do love songs (registered on cassettes or sang on weddings) have
   in resisting the power (economic dominance and absolute authority) of the
   elders?

   p.148 “The relationship between love and freedom in this song is
   complex...”

   Why is it complex if not even paradoxical?

   p.149 “'Discourse' is a concept that recognizes that what people say,
   generously defined […], is inseparable from and interpenetrated with
   changing power relations in social life.”

   Focusing on the discourse means that this article does not study WHAT love
   (or romantic sentiment) is for the Awlad Ali. The question is thus not
   WHAT emotions are - whether they are universal or culturally specific -
   but rather how emotions are talked about, what practices and institutions
   they are affiliated with, what power strategies they are attached to, how
   they act as vehicles of larger socio-economic changes. So could you now
   summarize what the cassette story revealed about the Awlad Ali society?

   p.150 “This incident can serve as a reminder that the emotional discourses
   we might want to use for our anthropological discourse on emotion are
   hardly inert. They may indeed have a cultural context, but the more
   important thing about them is that they participate in social projects
   […].”

   The author is suggesting that rather than trying to isolate particular
   features as characteristic of a culture, we might need to see how, for
   example narratives about romantic sentiment, make a part of the complex
   shifts within the society. At the same time, stories might be used
   strategically just like in the case of the father of the host family
   trying to prevent Abu-Lughod from departing by telling her an exaggerated
   story of the cassette.

   So how is Abu-Lughod’s perspective on emotions different or similar to
   that of Evans, Dixon, Seligman, Ahmed, Solomon and Rosaldo? Examine and
   compare it with each of the studied authors and see how they understand
   emotions, what they suggest we should study when we study emotions, what
   methods they use to study them, what approach and classification they
   propose, where they locate emotions etc.

   The extended version:

   See the introductory pages for a good example of a literature review (the
   author does not just list works and paraphrase the main arguments, she
   shows how these arguments build on each other and lead towards her
   position on the study of emotions).

   => emotions cannot “be detached in meaning and consequence from the flow
   of social life” (p.25)

   => p.25 “Many anthropologists have become skeptical of Western academic
   and popular ideas about emotions – about their naturalness and thus
   universality, their internal location, and their personal or individual
   quality.”

   => considering emotions as constituted by social processes in which they
   are embedded => various forms of society produce various emotion contructs
   (remember Eskimos, Tahitians in regard to anger?) => “what individuals can
   think and feel is overwhelmingly a product of socially organized modes of
   action and of talk [Rosaldo]” => emotion as discursive practice:

   “how emotion discourses are deployed in social practice”, “how discourses
   on emotion, or emotional discourses […], are implicated in the play of
   power and the operation of historically changing systems of social
   hierarchy”, “to study the ways emotions are used, to focus on practice
   rather than meaning, and to examine discourses rather than their putative
   referents [...]”

   => the question is thus NOT what are emotions, whether they are universal
   or culturally specific BUT RATHER how emotions are talked about, what
   practices and institutions they are affiliated with, what outcomes they
   manifest in regard to power distribution in the society.