The Detailed Style: The Marsh Arabs
by Wilfed Thesiger

March 2, 2008

Wilfred Thesiger leaves no doubt about why he chose to spend a good part of seven years living among the marsh Arabs in southern Iraq: he enjoyed it. He writes exactly that in the preface to The Marsh Arabs (published in 1964). In the last chapter of the book he similarly notes that although the government was suspicious about his motivation for being in the marshes, "...the villagers, who had come to rely on me, knew that I was simply there to enjoy myself, and help them if I could" (217). Along with this assertion comes a disavowal of anything like anthropology: "I am not an anthropologist nor indeed a specialist of any kind" (13).

I find this un-academic style of Thesiger exhilarating. The weight of theoretical models and academic citation is absent. Thesiger was fascinated by tribal ways of life and preceded to write perceptively about them.. but there is no effort spent on impressing anyone in a university. He clearly has his eyes on the past models of English Orientalism.. Edward William Lane, Richard Burton, T.E. Lawrence.. (and a few more names could be tossed in). One of the hallmarks of this tradition is palpable pride in getting physical actions described just right.

Bedu always roll rice into a solid ball in the palm of the hand before popping it into their mouths, but here they used only the tips of the fingers. I noticed they ate rice with the chicken, and bread with the fish. [50]

Plenty more such passages could be provided, related to putting up a reed house or building a boat or hunting wild boar. I enjoy this kind of detail-oriented writing.. but I also recognize that it stems from a particular tradition.

It is as if these writers had internalized the notion that external details of life are the standard of true knowledge of any culture. To set down accurately the way people sit, the hand motion they use to greet someone, and even the way people shit.. that is the real task of the travel writer. Incidentally, this detailed style is also what separates these writers from academic anthropologists, who seek patterns and interpretation more than raw description.

When discussing Edward William Lane's Manners and Customs of the Modern Egyptians this term I made the point that this work is as close as we can get to a running video camera in the 19th century. The marriage procession is not just mentioned, but described with such details that a later reader could almost re-create the event. And maybe that is part of the point: these were writers who were, yes, intensely competitive and willing to show off their knowledge.. but who also somewhere in their head knew that they were viewing a world that could not last long.. and that in fact was fading even as they set down in writing their hard won details.

Thesiger certainly has this sense of impending doom. It leaps out all over the place. At the end of a marvelous description of the tradition mudhif, or guest house, Thesiger writes:

Probably within the next twenty years, certainly within the next fifty, they will have disappeared forever. [208]

Or writing about government officials who hunted gazelles in their automobiles:

Riding down that way from Kurdistan, I had seen herds of fifty and more gazelles, but soon they would all be wiped out in Iraq, as the onager and the lion had been before them. [211]

In this setting the documentation of a way of life could understandably become a priority. The work comes to resemble a time capsule that can be used to re-imagine, if not re-create, something that is gone. That implicit use of the work as an imagination aid for the reader transforms what could be thought of as just show-offy into something truly valuable.