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 numerous ethnographies and films that capture the struggles and turmoil of African and Middle Eastern cultures. Her husband, the anthropologist Robert A. Fernea, was a large influence in her life. Fernea is commonly regarded as a pioneer for women in the field of Middle East Studies.
Biography
Fernea was born October 21, 1927, in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Her father was a mining engineer and was eventually sent to Flin Flon in Manitoba, Canada by his firm. Instead of forcing his family to live on the firm’s compound, he opted to live in town with ordinary people. This choice might have sparked a later interest in anthropology because, as an American, Fernea was marginalized by her fellow Canadian students. Since it was the Depression, the other children on the street did not take kindly to Americans so this was her first taste of being an “outsider”. During an interview with Fayza Hassan, Fernea stated that the other kids would yell at her window saying “It’s not that we hate you, it’s just that you’re American,”. In addition to being an outsider while growing up, Fernea learned from her mother that it is the norm to follow your husband where his job takes him. These two lessons could possibly be the reason why she was so willing to go with her husband Robert to Iraq and why she was able to eventually fit in with the women there.
Going to school during the Depression was a good experience for Fernea. Because teaching jobs were hard to come by in America, her local school was staffed with great teachers who moved to Canada instead. However, when World War II broke out, her family moved to Portland, Oregon. Upon her arrival to school in America, she was bored with the curriculum and found it far less challenging than in Canada. After high school she obtained her degree in English from Reed College in Portland. Her postgraduate work was done at Mount Holyoke College in Massachusetts as well as at the University of Chicago. She met Robert Fernea at Reed College and married him in 1956.
After she married Robert in 1956, she followed him to Iraq so he could finish his doctorate in anthropology. For two years she stayed with him in the village of El Nahra, near Al Diwaniyah in southeastern Iraq. While there, she learned a lot about women of the Middle East. At first, Fernea acted stubborn and did not want to wear the veil or abayah but after being stared at, she decided it was best to don the clothing worn by the women of El Nahra. Fernea thought it might be better to try to act as an insider and not be the marginalized outcast, so instead of fighting this culture, she imitated it to try to learn from it. Fayza Hassan argued that “This may have been the awakening of Fernea’s true pioneer spirit, but more importantly it underlined one of her more endearing traits, a genuine humility embodied in her belief that she has a duty to share the burden of the less fortunate without complaint, a price to pay for being lucky enough to belong to another, trouble-free world to which she will eventually return,”.
Another thing that struck her, which might have opened her eyes to this subject, is the fact that these women did not envy her but felt sorry for her. “And the chastening realization that the women had pitied me. Pitied me, college-educated, adequately dressed and fed, free to vote and to travel, happily married to a husband of my own choice who was also a friend and companion.” It was seen as a misfortune that she was skinny, had shorter hair, no children, no mother and no gold. These women did not see themselves as being secluded from the outside world, where they could have limitless choices, and this was mind-boggling to Fernea. She concluded that these two cultures were, and still are essentially, too stubborn to see each other's side of the story. This was a problem for Fernea, since she ended up questioning what the point of their study was if this gap between cultures would only widen.
By the end of her stay, she felt like she was leaving home when she and Robert came back to America. She had become very close with the women from El Nahra and had created lifelong friendships with some of them. It was after she was back that Robert and her friend Audrey Walz kept encouraging her to publish her writings about her stay in El Nahra. Finally she decided to finish it and publish the ethnography even though, as she states in the introduction, she is not an anthropologist. Even though she was not technically an anthropologist she continued to write ethnographies about her experiences.