For the first time, Arab women researchers perform field work in their own societies and discuss the experience. As a group, they also provide an excellent overview of the issues involved in a number of different Arab communities: Lebanon, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Iraq, Jordan, and a Bedouin community in the Egyptian Western Desert. Soroya Altorki and Camillia Fawzi El-Solh provide a rich contribution to the currently debated issues of gender and indigenous status in relation to research. This volume presents the field experiences of women of Arab descent as well as an examination of what is often simplistically misunderstood as a dichotomy between insider/outsider, subjectivity/objectivity. The complexity of the issue becomes apparent in fieldwork situations, where gender and indigenous status interrelate with a diversity of variables such as class origin, education, field-worker's age, marital status, religious affiliation, ethnic or minority status, as well as topic of research and national and religious politics. The six contributors to this volume have been trained as social scientists in U.S. or European universities. Four were raised and socialized in the Arab world (Altorki, El-Solh, Soheir Morsy, and Seteny Shami).