Elizabeth warnock fernea biography

Elizabeth Warnock Fernea (October 21, 1927 – December 2, 2008) was an influential writer and filmmaker who spent much of her life in the field producing.
Elizabeth Warnock Fernea was an influential writer and filmmaker who spent much of her life in the field producing numerous ethnographies and films that capture the struggles and turmoil of African and Middle Eastern cultures.
She channeled Middle Eastern women's voices through her own writings and documentary films, by facilitating the publication of their work and by mentoring women.

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Elizabeth Warnock Fernea [incl. MESA]

Elizabeth Warnock Fernea, who died on December 2 aged 81, lived in an Iraqi harem for two years and subsequently devoted her life to studying the roles of women in the Muslim Middle East and north Africa.

She knew nothing about their lives until 1956 when, newly-married and full of Western preconceptions about the inferior position of women in Muslim societies, she accompanied her husband, Robert Fernea, an American social anthropologist, on a two-year field study at El Nahra, a remote village in southern Iraq.

They were there as guests of the local sheikh, a member of a conservative Shia sect. To help her husband gain acceptance and to add to his research, she agreed to live as the local women did – segregated from men and covering her head and body in the long black abayah.

Her preconceptions were challenged from her first day, when she was invited to lunch with the sheikh’s harem. Instead of ignorance and repression, she found solidarity, self-confidence and a ribald sense of humour. When she refused a proffered cigarette, one of the

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Elizabeth Warnock Fernea dies at 81; scholar of Middle Eastern women’s studies

Elizabeth Warnock Fernea, a scholar of women’s studies in the Middle East who delved into the subject as a newlywed in 1956 in Iraq and whose memoir about the experience, “Guests of the Sheik,” was the first of several of her works that examined the role of women in the region, has died. She was 81.

Fernea, who was a professor emeritus of comparative literature and Middle Eastern studies at the University of Texas, died Tuesday at a daughter’s home in La Cañada Flintridge after a long illness, her family said.

When she arrived in the remote Iraqi village then known as El Nahra, she was essentially there as the supportive spouse of Robert A. Fernea, a social anthropologist doing doctoral fieldwork. To accommodate his study, she lived as the local women did -- segregated from men and covering her head and body in public in a black robe known as an abayah.

“No Western woman had ever lived in El Nahra before, and very few had ever been seen there,” Elizabeth Fernea wrote in “Guests of the Sheik,” “whi