Guests of the Sheik: an Ethnography of an Iraqi Village
Fernea accompanied her anthropologist husband to a small village in Southern Iraq (just a year or two before the Ba'athist Revolution/Coup/whatever), and at his urging undertook to document that part of women's lives (i.e., nearly all) that he as a man was not permitted to witness. It's a really fascinating account of how traditional Islamic and customary Arab sex roles and restrictions are actually supposed to work in practice and in their more or less original setting, and how modernity was impinging on them even then and in that remote spot. While reading this I spent a lot of time thinking about the difference between merely enacting customs that you've inherited and trying to reimpose them self-consciously and selectively as an aspect of a political ideology. In the former case so much wiggle room is left for contradictions and special cases and slipped feet, while in the latter beating square pegs into round holes seems to be almost the entire point of the exercise.