Acknowledgements
In many ways this book is a synthesis of almost every kind of scholarship that I have tried to understand since I began studying anthropology in 1970. My teachers and my debts to them are, consequently, very many. I can begin with John M. Roberts, who taught me while I was an undergraduate at Cornell. He showed me how to use Osgood’s semantic differential and also explained other methods for making subjective and qualitative data quantifiable. I have tried to apply a similar approach in Chapter 8. I should also thank Charles F. Hockett, who exposed me to structural linguistics and guided me toward the realist philosophy of language that I relied on for Chapters 2 through 7.
When I moved to UCLA for my graduate work, I had the good fortune to study under other leading anthropologists. One of my teachers was Michael Moerman, who introduced me to the complexities of conversational analysis and, at the same time, helped me understand the significance of “everyday life” for the social sciences. I have no doubt that the insights about the social construction of the mundane world that I got from his classes – in addition to the emphasis placed on everyday traditions and customs by all of the anthropologists who taught me – helped me to grasp the importance of naming customs for Arab identities. My biggest debt at UCLA was to Fadwa El Guindi, who exposed me to the thought of Claude Lévi-Strauss, encouraged me to study Arab kinship, and tirelessly supported me in my efforts to learn Arabic and carry out field research in the Arab world. I could never have approached the topic of this book without the training that she provided. I must also thank Dwight Read for convincing me that a scientific approach to cultural materials – such as the kinship group names that are the subject of this study – is both possible and productive. Fadwa and Dwight have been good friends as well as mentors over the years. I am also grateful for the financial and institutional support that I received from UCLA’s von Grunebaum Center for Near Eastern Studies, where I spent many hours in the company of my fellow students of the Middle East. Because they viewed the region through the lenses of other disciplines, my own perceptions of the Arab world were enriched. Georges Sabagh, long-time Director of the von Grunebaum Center, always made me feel welcome there.
This book implicitly revolves around my comparison of the Bedouin and non-Bedouin traditions that are found in the rural societies of the Arab world. I could not have written it without drawing on my fieldwork experiences with Bedouin and non-Bedouin. As for the former, I lived among the Rašāyidah Bedouin of eastern Sudan for three years. Funding for my field research in Sudan, for which I am extremely grateful, was provided by the Social Science Research Council. I also feel greatly indebted to the Rašāyidah who hosted me during those years: the families of Aḥmad Ḥasan Mubārak, ʿAbdallāh Ḥasan Mubārak, and Ḥāmid ʿĀyiḍ. As for my experience of non-Bedouin societies, I carried out field research in the town of Kufrinǧah in northwestern Jordan during the early 1990s. I would like to thank Dr. Aḥmad ʿAnnāb for generously offering me the use of his home while I lived in Kufrinǧah. My stay there opened my eyes to the roles played by kinship groups in sedentary Arab societies and enabled me to place my experiences among the Rašāyidah in a broader context. I am also indebted to the Fulbright-Hayes Commission for the grants that funded my stay in Jordan and that gave me a temporary place on the faculty of the Department of Anthropology at Yarmouk University, in Irbid, Jordan. Two of the other faculty members there, Dr. Seteny Shami and Dr. Martha Mundy, shared with me their insights about rural Arab families and the connections between land tenure and household structure. My conversations with them helped me understand agricultural life in Jordan. My stay at Yarmouk University also exposed me to the many fine studies of rural societies that have been written by Jordanian scholars. I have made use of several of these studies for this book.
I should thank my colleague Nicole Sault for originally inspiring me to examine the place of birds in Arab naming traditions. Her suggestions pushed me to expand my initial ideas and write this book. She also read part of Chapter 2 and gave me very useful feedback. I am grateful to Barry Freedman for agreeing to read my many drafts of Chapter 1 and identifying some of the logical gaps and unclear expressions that they contained. Glen Garelik also commented on this chapter. He made it possible for me to see the Arab case from a wider perspective with his insights about Russian family names. Tim Buckwalter was kind enough to read an early draft of Chapter 4. He helped me deal with some of the issues in Arabic lexicography that were complicating my efforts to translate Bedouin tribal names. I made good use of Daniel Varisco’s research on agricultural practices in Yemen to expand my list of Arabic terms for plants and finish Chapter 5. As for Chapter 6, I should thank Ben Greet for sharing his data about Bedouin hunting traditions and Bedouin nostalgia in southern Jordan. Clive Holes also helped me with this chapter. His lively conversations about modern Bedouin poems inspired me to look at them more carefully. What is more, he encouraged me to examine ancient Arab names and search for parallels with modern usage in antiquity. My friend and colleague in Jordan, Mohammed Shunnaq, gave me additional help with Chapter 6. He brought to my attention the important work on nicknames by Julian Pitt-Rivers and pointed out that it applies to the Arab case. Mohammed also helped me locate many of the Arabic works on biology and botany that I needed to compile my lists of Arabic biological terms. I have greatly benefitted from my conversations with Mohammed about Arab kinship and Arab family life. Finally, I should acknowledge the diligence and careful thought of the anonymous reviewers who read the manuscript for this book and provided me with their reactions to it. They enabled me to view my writing from fresh perspectives and undoubtedly improved it in the process.
Of course, these friends and colleagues who so generously gave me their time and comments bear no responsibility at all for any oversights and mistakes that might appear in this book. Readers who find errors, poor judgements, vague or confusing ideas, or omissions in my writing should hold me responsible for them.
I had to consult several hard-to-obtain publications when writing this book. Fortunately, I found many of them in the collections of the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C. I am grateful for the assistance given by the librarians of the library’s Middle East and North Africa Reading Room and for the help of many other members of the library staff. They made it possible for me to examine many Arabic books that were not available elsewhere. Georgetown University’s Lauinger Library, in Washington, D.C., also generously opened its stacks to me and allowed me to search their collection of Arabic books, for which I am thankful. I should also thank several organizations who have posted academic works on their websites, making open access to crucial scholarly materials possible for me and many other researchers. They include JSTOR (https://www.jstor.org/), the organizers of the Internet Archive (https://archive.org/), Noor Book (https://www.noor-book.com) and the consortium of scholarly institutions that runs the Arabic Collections Online (https://dlib.nyu.edu/aco/). I depended on these websites during the years when the COVID pandemic was still raging and when many public and academic libraries were closed. Without these important open-access sites, I could not have completed this book. In addition, I should commend a German scholarly library – the Universitäts- und Landesbibliothek Sachsen-Anhalt at the Martin-Luther-Universität in Halle – for making many of its books available online (see http://www.mwu.sachsen-anhalt.de/). This is a great service to scholars worldwide. All of these digital websites – and all other institutions that foster open-source publication and do not charge readers for making use of their holdings – deserve our support.
My greatest debt, of course, is to my mother, Pearl J. Young, who sacrificed her personal happiness to make it possible for me to get an education. She never objected to my decision to study anthropology, even though it offered little of the financial security that other professions bring to their practitioners. During the bygone era when there was no word processing, when manuscripts had to be laboriously typed by hand and when copies were made by using carbon paper, she expertly typed up my Master’s thesis. She also helped me get through the many years of graduate study that followed my Master’s degree. I owe most of my accomplishments, whatever they may be, to her.