|
› Volume 17, 2011
|
›
Volume 5, December 2004
Archive:
›Volume 16, 2011
›Volume 15, 2010
›Volume 14, 2010
›Volume 13, 2009
›Volume 12, 2009
›Volume 11, 2008
›Volume 10, 2008
›Volume 9, 2007
›Volume 8, 2007
›Volume 7, 2006
›Volume 6, 2005
›Volume 5,
2004
›Volume 4,
2001
›Volume 3, 2000
›Volume 2, 1999
›Volume 1, 1999
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
“Sahib, you are no longer a guest .
. . You are one of the family”: Wilfred Thesiger and the
‘Problem’ of Participant Observation |
|
DAVID SIMMONS
Northampton University
WASFI SHOQAIRAT
Hussein bin Talal University
Abstract
This article examines
Wilfred Thesiger’s second text The Marsh Arabs
(1964) through the prism of participant observation. More specifically, we
explore the, at times, complex self-depiction of Thesiger’s relationship with
the Madan tribes’ people. Thesiger’s rapport with the Madan, we argue, offers a
decidedly more nuanced engagement than might at first appear. Indeed, while it
is possible to read Thesiger’s account of his time in the southern area of Iraq
in The Marsh Arabs as adhering to many of the established and
entrenched critical ideas concerning the behaviour of Western explorers in the
Middle East (imperialist nostalgia, the trope of self-discovery, romanticism),
the text also allows for less ‘conventional’ readings. Though Thesiger, like his
predecessors, intended both to reify and narrativize the Arabs, thereby
documenting their lives for an occidental audience, his first hand engagement
with the Madan gives rise to a host of paradoxes that create a more balanced
account of this vanishing people’s way of life.
Keywords:
Participant observation, Wilfred Thesiger, Arabia, the Marsh Arabs, Orientalism
|
|
BACK
|
|
|