Lila Abu-Lughod

she/her

Lila Abu-Lughod is a Palestinian-American sociocultural anthropologist with an academic career spanning over 40 years. Using her extensive long-term ethnographic fieldwork in Egypt, she has produced a number of award-winning publications on topics concerning the power of cultural forms, the ethics and politics of understanding “others”, memory and violence, media and nationalism, feminist theory, and liberalism in women's rights discourse.

Born in 1952, Lila Abu-Lughod was the child of two well-known scholars, Ibrahim Abu-Lughod a Palestinian academic, and Janet Abu-Lughod an American sociologist. She began her academic journey at Carleton College, receiving her BA Magna cum laude with a distinction in Sociology-Anthropology in 1974. Abu-Lughod continued on to earn her MA in Social Anthropology at Harvard University in 1978 along with her Ph.D. in Social Anthropology at Harvard University in 1984. From her time in school to the present day, Abu-Lughod has had an active, successful academic career, publishing and editing over 70 pieces of work.

Lila Abu-Lughod's publications refer heavily to her intensive long-term ethnographic fieldwork mainly centered in rural and urban Egypt. As a graduate student in 1978, she began studying and working with the Awlad `Ali Bedouin people in Egypt's Western Desert. This fieldwork provided the basis for her first two books, Veiled Sentiments: Honor and Poetry in a Bedouin Society and Writing Women's Worlds. Veiled Sentiments, which received the Silver Medal for Outstanding Contributions to the Development of Anthropological and Ethnological Science through Publication from the International Union of Anthropological and Ethnological Sciences and an honorable mention from the Chicago Folklore Prize, examines how gender relations and ghinnawas (emotional lyric poems) are used by Bedouin women and young men express their emotions; while also exploring how they relate to the politics of sentiments and the upholding of social hierarchy. In Writing Women's Worlds, Abu-Lughod retells the stories shared with her by the women in the Bedouin community. She uses critical ethnography to highlight these stories as forms of women’s agency and bring them into the political sphere of repression. Writing Women's Worlds was her second major publication to receive an award, earning the Victor Turner Prize from the Society for Humanistic Anthropology from the American Anthropological Association in 1994.

Continuing her fieldwork in 1989, Abu-Lughod began to study Islam, television, and public culture in Cairo and Upper Egypt. This led to her third book and winner of the American Ethnological Society Senior Book Prize, Dramas of Nationhood: The Politics of Television in Egypt, which dives into the role of television in Egyptian culture. Abu-Lughod’s fourth and most recently published book, Do Muslim Women Need Saving?, draws on her previous ethnographic fieldwork along with her work studying the discourse of women’s rights in Jordan and rural and urban Egypt during the mid-2000s. Do Muslim Women Need Saving? explores the normative Western assumptions about the role Islam plays in the repression of Muslim women’s rights across the globe, arguing that this subversion is linked to shifting geopolitics and structures of political, economic, and social powers rather than solely their religious culture. Abu-Lughod's extensive fieldwork and academically renowned publications have made her an important figure in the anthropological field. 

Currently, Abu-Lughod is the Joseph L. Buttenwieser Professor of Social Science, at Columbia University Department of Anthropology and Institute for Research on Women, Gender and Sexuality and has been in the position since 2009. She has also held various other positions at Columbia along with other academic institutions such as New York University, Princeton University, and Williams College. Lila Abu-Lughod, now 70 years old, is still an active contributor to the Anthropology discipline and a member of the Board of the Palestinian Museum in Taawon. Her most recent published articles include On the Move: Reframing Nomadic Pastoralism, a piece accompanying the exhibition On the Move at the National Museum of Qatar, and Feminism and Geopolitics: A Collaborative Project on the Cunning of Gender Violence, a co-authored piece in Feminist Studies.

Sheedy, Ava. 2023 "Lila Abu-Lughod (1952)". CounterCanon Project. Department of Anthropology. Wheaton College, MA.