09/25/02: Guests of the Sheik

[juju]

I've been reading a book for one of my classes titled "Guests of the Sheik". It's about a woman, Elizabeth, who goes to live with her cultural anthropologist huband in a remote Iraqi village. She barely speaks the language, everyone is dirt poor, they only have electricity at night, and it basically just sucks ass there.

I thought it would be boring and stupid, but it's actually really interesting. I've learned more about Iraqi culture in the first three chapters of this book than I have in a whole year of NBC Nightly News and Dateline. I guess it's naive to think I would learn about Iraq on tv, except for the fact that it's practically all they've talked about for an entire year.

Anyway, these people are incredibly fucking backwards, at least in 1965 when this book was written. Most men have several wives (blatantly called harems), and women aren't seen as good for anything except making babies. There's so many things wrong with this culture's view of women that I can't even list them all.

Then there's the whole thing about the abayah. Before Elizabeth left America, she despied the thought of wearing one and got into arguments about wearing it. Once she got there, however, things went very different. Check out this part from the first day she arrived. The scene is, she's in a train station, wating for the next train.

While I waited, people gathered to stare at me again, and I slowly became aware that, among the crowds of middle-class Iraqis and townspeople, I was the only woman without an abayah. I began to be self-concious. This is ridiculous, I told myself. Why should I have to wear that ugly thing -- it's not my custom; the arguments with Bob about the abayah returned in a rush. Bob said I ought to wear it, since everyone else did. Since we were guests of the sheik, he added, it would make everything easier if I wore the abayah; the sheik wouldn't have to punish people for insulting me. Insulting me! I had been indignant. "They say an unconvered woman is an immoral woman," Bob had explained, " and the tribesmen ask why a woman should want to show herself to anyone but her husband." I remembered my furious reply: "If they can't take me as I am -- if we have to make artificial gestures to prove we are human beings, too -- what's the point?" Now, although I hated to admit it, my principles were weakening before my emabarrassment as more and more people gathered to whisper and point and stare. I wished from the bottom of my heart that I had borrowed the abayah offered by a Baghdadi lady friend and could bury myself in its comforting anonymity.
[..]
Well, it seemed I'd capitulated; I was going to wear that servile garmet after all. I discovered that my principles were not as strong as my desire to be inconspicuous and well thought of in my new home.

This reinforces a lot of the ideas I have about culture. That being, we believe a lot of things just because it's our culture. We may think they're "deeply held principles", but in reality they're nothing more than a deep-seated desire to fit in.

If you were thrown into another culture with no way to get out, how long would it be before you started changing your ideals?