Lila Abu-Lughod and Philippe Bourgois both faced a similar challenge in their ethnographies. In Veiled Sentiments, Abu-Lughod describes struggling in the beginning of her fieldwork with the Bedouin people in Awlad ‘Ali, especially because she had been trying to switch between spending time with the men and spending time with the women, as the two groups were often separated and had very different expectations and behaviors. She ended up focusing her studies on the women’s community, but observed the men’s community and the relationships and codes formed between the two groups from a woman’s perspective. Bourgois also had difficulty with knowing how to understand the stories of both men and women in El Barrio in East Harlem. In In Search of Respect Bourgois describes his concerns about being able to understand and record…show more content… These differences can also be seen in typical family structures. Bourgois argues that single mothers would create the most stability for a child, that marriage/long term partners is not always the best option. He says, “too many abusive fathers present in nuclear households terrorizing children and mothers. If anything, women take too long to become single mothers once they have babies” (Bourgois, 287). Unlike the Bedouin people, in which a family is centered around a father, his brothers, and his sons, a family in El Barrio is often centered around a mother and her child. This is in part because of the gender roles of women and men. In El Barrio Bourgois says that there was a redefinition of masculine dignity “around promiscuity, conspicuous violence, and ecstatic substance abuse” (288), which is quite different from the code of honor in the Bedouin people. Because of how they are expected to behave to have dignity, many men in El Barrio described by Bourgois are unstable father figures, leaving the women as the main
