This collection brings together Emrys Peters' major writings on the Bedouin of Libya.

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First published in 1986, Lila Abu-Lughod’s Veiled Sentiments has become a classic ethnography in the field of anthropology. During the late 1970s and early 1980s, Abu-Lughod lived with a community of Bedouins in the Western Desert of Egypt for nearly two years, studying gender relations, morality, and the oral lyric poetry through which women and young men express personal feelings. The poems are haunting, the evocation of emotional life vivid. But Abu-Lughod’s analysis also reveals how deeply implicated poetry and sentiment are in the play of power and the maintenance of social hierarchy. What begins as a puzzle about a single poetic genre becomes a reflection on the politics of sentiment and the complexity of culture. This thirtieth anniversary edition includes a new afterword that reflects on developments both in anthropology and in the lives of this community of Awlad 'Ali Bedouins, who find themselves increasingly enmeshed in national political and social formations. The afterword ends with a personal meditation on the meaning—for all involved—of the radical experience of anthropological fieldwork and the responsibilities it entails for ethnographers.

The Sinai Peninsula links Asia and Africa and for millennia has been crossed by imperial armies from both the east and the west. Thus, its Bedouin inhabitants are by necessity involved in world affairs and maintain a complex, almost urban, economy. They make their home in arid mountains that provide limited pastures and lack arable soils and must derive much of their income from migrant labor and trade. Still, every household maintains, at considerable expense, a small orchard and a minute flock of goats and sheep. The orchards and flocks sustain them in times of need and become the core of a mutual assurance system. It is for this social security that Bedouin live in and retire to the mountains. Based on fieldwork over ten years, this book builds on the central theoretical understanding that the complex political economy of the Mount Sinai Bedouin is integrated into urban society and part of the modern global world.

Considered by many scholars to be one of the best modern ethnographies on Middle Eastern ethnic groups, the highly regarded, unromanticized account of Bedouin life offers a clear explanation of the kinship system in nomadic societies.

New Arabian Studies is an international journal covering a wide spectrum of topics including geography, archaeology, history, architecture, agriculture, language, dialect, sociology, documents, literature and religion. It provides authoritative information intended to appeal to both the specialist and general reader. Both the traditional and the modern aspects of Arabia are covered, excluding contemporary controversial politics.

Are cows sacred to Indian Hindus because they stand for nature and life, as symbolic analysts explain, or because they pull plows and fertilize the land, providing people with food, as cultural materialists argue? Are witchcraft accusations a scapegoating of the powerless by the elite to maintain their ascendancy, as materialist class theorists argue, or are they social expressions of psychological tensions arising from conflicts in relationships, as functionalist psychological anthropologists have argued? Understanding culture means understanding and appreciating the diverse theories that offer different perspectives on culture. Salzmans Understanding Culture explores six major streams of anthropological theory: interdependence in human life (functionalism); agency in human action (processualism and transactionalism); determining factors (materialism and political economy); coherence in culture (configurationalism and structuralism); transformation through time (history and evolution); and critical advocacy (feminism and postmodernism). Each theoretical approach is initially presented in its own terms, to show its assumptions, aims, and accomplishments, and each is elucidated and illustrated through arguments and ethnographic examples offered by original theorists and practitioners.

Ira Lapidus' classic history of the origins and evolution of Muslim societies, revised and updated for this second edition, first published in 2002.

A detailed study of marriage among the Maduzai, a tribal society in Afghan Turkistan.

The book traces the rise of the Fatimid dynasty in the 4th century AH/10th century CE, from its origins in Islamic messianism to power in North Africa and Egypt, and a central position of influence throughout the Muslim world. The first part deals with the problem of Fatimid origins, the second with the establishment of the dynasty and its religious and political programme in North Africa, the third with the success of that programme in Egypt. Using the history of the Fatimids and their doctrine to survey the world of the Mediterranean and the Middle East in the 4th/10th century, the book offers a new interpretation of the role of the dynasty in the history of Islam down to the period of the Crusades.