Re-Reading Elizabeth Fernea’s Guests of The Sheikh in An Era of ChatGPT

Abstract

For some readers, Elizabeth Fernea’s Guests of the Sheikh: An Ethnography of an Iraqi Village (Doubleday, 1965), is contextualized by her personal history, including marriage to Robert Fernea during 1956 as the basis for their decision to move to Iraq as he completed fieldwork a PhD in anthropology required (Zuhur, 2006, p. 43). In the village identified as "al-Nahra", near al-Diwaniyah in southeastern Iraq, Fernea (1927-2008) became a woman in the Middle East (Cohen, 1994, p. 157). For some readers, her initial reluctance to wear an abayah (which yielded to an eventual decision to don the clothing worn by women in al-Nahra) is an important point in her transition from wife to ethnographer (Holden, 2012, p. 154). Finally, readers respond to Fernea’s growing awareness that women of al-Nahra did not envy her but felt sorry for her as skinny, with short hair, no children, no mother, and no gold to have been a crucial moment in her transformation into a feminist (Meneley, 2016, p. 113). Recently arriving in Iraq for an appointment in academic administration, in an era of ChatGPT, I am re-reading Fernea’s Guests of the Sheikh for examples of visual analysis, references to architectural space as an index to human communities, and finally references to changes in subjectivity (i.e., "learning").