Veiled Sentiments: Honor and Poetry in a Bedouin Society

Rural Women Redefining Care and Agency in the Argentine Pampas

“…The third type of care empowers women to transform and care for the environment, and is exercised by not using pesticides in horticultural production and by disseminating knowledge on the matter. In line with discussions of postcolonial feminism (Abu-Lughod, 1986;Mahmood, 2001;Suárez Navaz, 2008), I argue that certain properties that are attributed to women relative to caregiving -by way of a dichotomous view of gender relations -fuel their agency: for these women the cultivation of vegetables is a form of agency that actively combats food, training and labor inequality.…”

Cultural model of sexuality in Persian: A cognitive linguistic investigation of key concepts in Iranian culture

“…The study of haya demonstrates some inadequacies in descriptions that have been provided in anthropological research for concepts that, similar to haya, are applied to avoid causing or feeling shame in honor cultures (Muslim and Mediterranean cultures). First, in majority of studies (Abu-Lughod, 1986;Delaney, 1987;Dumitrescu, 2005;Giovannini, 1987;Menon & Shweder, 1993;Moxnes, 1996;Peristiany & Pitt-Rivers, 2005;Stiebert, 2002), scholars refer to shame-avoiding concepts as "positive shame", distinguishing it from the actual experience of shame, which is referred to as "negative shame". The dual senses of shame are based in a contrast made between honor and shame in honor cultures, where loss of honor is perceived to bring about shame for the person and the community to which he belongs (negative shame) and constraints on women's behavior are regarded as a means to preserve honor (positive shame).…”

“…Haya as a fundamentally religious concept places restrictions on any behavior that might threaten or stain one's own honor and that of the family, and its possession and application is as significant for men as it is for women (Milani, 1992;Pasandideh, 2004). Second, in many anthropological descriptions of shame-avoiding concepts, such as hashama in Egyptian society (Abu-lughod, 1986), lajya in Orissa (Menon & Shweder, 1993), kezhüghi keya in Naga society (Thong, 2014), shyness is mistakenly taken as a meaning or realization of the shame-avoiding concepts. As I explained in the introduction, although haya and shyness are at times expressed in a similar way (e.g., by lowering the gaze or self-effacing), they obviously signal distinct mental states.…”

“…While narrative descriptions in anthropology, cultural studies, and gender studies, to some extent, illustrate how people think and talk about such culturally significant concepts, in most cases, one may not be able to distinguish some of the concepts merely on the basis of narrative descriptions and the representations of the concepts in social behavior. For example, in many studies on gender construction in Muslim cultures (Abu-Lughod, 1986;Ahmed, 1992;Farahani, 2002Farahani, , 2006Hélie & Hoodfar, 2012;Hessini, 1994;Hume, 2013;Milani, 1992) one cannot explicitly distinguish haya and effat as two relatively separate selfregulating forces and the way each of the forces individually affects women's social acts and conceptions of their own bodies. A cognitive linguistic analysis of these concepts could compensate for this shortcoming by identifying the principal functions that each concept performs and demonstrates the coordination between mental representations, bodily effects, linguistic manifestations, and social behavior.…”

How to make sense of cultural difference in mental health care: analyzing biographies of diasporic Muslim women with mental health problems

“…These studies (e.g. Abu-Lughod, 1986) restored the absent voice of women to previous analyses of Middle Eastern societies that, for decades, have portrayed Muslim women as passive, submissive, and powerless beings determined by structures of male authority. Without denying its important effects, Mahmood (2005: 8) problematizes this point of departure and explores how feminist scholars often invoke a notion of human agency that locates agency in the political and moral autonomy of the subject.…”