Lila Abu-Lughod draws on anthropological and feminist insights to construct a critical ethnography of a small Awlad 'Ali Bedouin community in Egypt. She explores how the telling of stories of everyday life challenges the power of anthropological theory to render adequately the lives of others and the way feminist theory appropriates Third World women.

Lila Abu-Lughod is Professor of Anthropology and Gender Studies at Columbia University. She is the author of Veiled Sentiments (UC Press) and Dramas of Nationhood: The Politics of Television in Egypt. She is the editor of Remaking Women: Feminism and Modernity in the Middle East and the coeditor, most recently, of Nakba: Palestine, 1948, and the Claims of Memory.

"A different kind of ethnography, one in which the texture and richness of individual lives are vividly conveyed. . . . Abu-Lughod has demonstrated with great effectiveness that anthropology does not have to emphasize the divisions between us and everybody else; it is equally capable of drawing attention to our common humanity."—New York Times Book Review

"In Writing Women's Worlds, Bedouin women are the narrators of their own lives; they are not the subjects or objects of ideas projected by the ethnographer's imagination. . . . This will be an important work in the field of international feminist studies for some time to come. . . . An excellent effort to 'decolonize' a people in writing and to alter the usual preconceived ideas the Western reader brings to studies of Arabs and Muslim women."—Women's Review of Books

"Some of the most compelling depictions of women's lives ever presented in an ethnography."—Law and Society Review

"Fluid, wonderful prose makes the book a sheer pleasure to read. . . .Its message is crucial, although deeply disturbing."—American Anthropologist

Winner, Victor Turner Prize in Ethnographic Writing, Society for Humanistic Anthropology, American Anthropological Association