FICTION

WRITING WOMEN’S WORLDS: Bedouin Stories, by Lila Abu-Lughod (University of California Press: $30; 289 pp.) Bombs come in all shapes and sizes. Anthropologist Lila Abu-Lughod hopes to set off an explosive charge here in the form of a book. In a long introduction to this account of Bedouin women’s lives in western Egypt in the 1980s, she explains that she wants to do more than peek “behind the veil” of Arab reticence and Western stereotype. She wants to shake up anthropology itself, which she calls an inherently Western discipline that assumes a superiority to the people it studies; she wants to explode the very idea of “cultures,” which lumps people together regardless of individual differences and then draws lines between the lumps; she even wants to rattle the windows of feminism, which pities and condescends to Arab women (as in U.S. media coverage of the Gulf War).

The solution, Abu-Lughod says, is to let Bedouin women tell their own stories--through reminiscences, folk tales, poems and songs--even though the audience inevitably isn’t the one the tellers are addressing. Under chapter headings that list the institutions that make the Bedouin “different” or “exotic”--marriage to first cousins, polygamy, semi-public deflowering of brides--the stories show that spunky women have more room for maneuver than we supposed. No two lives, here or there, are the same. The irony is that Abu-Lughod felt compelled to build her bomb in a way that muffles its impact; if she had more narrative skill--or less fear of imposing her own agenda--she might have proven her point even more forcefully.