Ethnic violence is a widespread concern, but we know very little about
the micro-mechanics of coexistence in the neighborhoods around the world where
inter-group peace is maintained amidst civic ...strife. In this ethnographic study of a
multi-ethnic, middle-class high-rise apartment building in Karachi, Pakistan, Laura
A. Ring argues that peace is the product of a relentless daily labor, much of it
carried out in the zenana, or women's space. Everyday rhythms of life in the
building are shaped by gender, ethnic and rural/urban tensions, national culture,
and competing interpretations of Islam. Women's exchanges between households --
visiting, borrowing, helping -- and management of male anger are forms of creative
labor that regulate and make sense of ethnic differences. Linking psychological
senses of tension with anthropological views of the social significance
of exchange, Ring argues that social-cultural tension is not so much resolved as
borne and sustained by women's practices. Framed by a vivid and highly personal
narrative of the author's interactions with her neighbors, her Pakistani in-laws,
and other residents of the city, Zenana provides a rare glimpse into contemporary
urban life in a Muslim society.
Fertile Bonds Joseph, Suzanne E
2013, 2016, 2013-09-30, 2017-01-10
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With an average of over nine children per family, older cohorts of Bedouin in the Bekaa Valley of Lebanon have one of the highest fertility rates in the world. Many married couples in this ...pastoral community are close relatives--a socially advantageous practice that reflects the deep value Bedouins place on kinship.
To outsiders, such family norms can seem disturbing, even premodern. They attract assumptions of Arab backwardness, poverty, and sexism. Astoundingly, however, Fertile Bonds flips these stereotypes. Anthropological demographer Suzanne Joseph shows that in this particular group, prolific birth rates coincide with moderate death rates and high levels of nutrition. Despite differences in gender, class, and occupation, members of Bekaa Bedouin society rely heavily on kinship ties, sharing, and reciprocity, and experience a high degree of social and demographic equality.
This story, unfamiliar to many, is one that is fading as traditional nomadic livelihoods give way to encapsulation within the state. With the help of this surprising, nuanced study--one of the first of its kind in the Middle East--knowledge of such marginalized pastoral groups will not vanish with the disappearance of their way of life. Joseph’s book expands our understanding of peoples far removed from consolidated government control and provides a broad analytical lens through which to examine demographic divides across the globe.
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Family Matters Nzegwu, Nkiru Uwechia
2012, 2006, 20060101
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Prior to European colonialism, Igboland, a region in Nigeria, was a nonpatriarchal, nongendered society governed by separate but interdependent political systems for men and women. In the last one ...hundred fifty years, the Igbo family has undergone vast structural changes in response to a barrage of cultural forces. Critically rereading social practices and oral and written histories of Igbo women and the society, Nkiru Uwechia Nzegwu demonstrates how colonial laws, edicts, and judicial institutions facilitated the creation of gender inequality in Igbo society. Nzegwu exposes the unlikely convergence of Western feminist and African male judges' assumptions about "traditional" African values where women are subordinate and oppressed. Instead she offers a conception of equality based on historical Igbo family structures and practices that challenges the epistemological and ontological bases of Western feminist inquiry.
In conflict zones from Iraq and Afghanistan to Guatemala and Somalia, the rules of war are changing dramatically. Distinctions between battlefield and home, soldier and civilian, state security and ...domestic security are breaking down. In this especially timely book, a powerful group of international authors doing feminist research brings the highly gendered and racialized dimensions of these changes into sharp relief. In essays on nationalism, the political economy of conflict, and the politics of asylum, they investigate what happens when the body, household, nation, state, and economy become sites at which violence is invoked against people. In particular, these hard-hitting essays move us forward in our understanding of violence against women—how it is perpetrated, survived, and resisted. They explore the gendered politics of ethno-nationalism in Sri Lanka, the post-Yugoslav states, and Israel and Palestine. They consider "honor killings" in Iraqi Kurdistan, armed conflict in the Sudan, and geographies of violence in Ghana. This volume augments feminist analysis on conflict zones and contributes to transnational coalition-building and feminist organizing.
Anthropologist Sandya Hewamanne spent time in a Sri Lankan free trade zone (FTZ) working and living among the workers to learn about their lives. "They were poor women from rural areas," Hewamanne ...writes, "who migrated to do garment work in transnational factories of a global assembly line. Their difficult work routines and sad living conditions have been examined in detail. When I was with them I often wondered whether anyone noticed the smiles, winks, smirks, gestures, tones of voice, the movies they saw, or the songs they sang." Hewamanne deftly weaves theories of identity, globalization, and cultural politics throughout her detailed accounts of the workers' efforts to negotiate ever shifting roles and expectations of gender, class, and sexuality.
By analyzing how these workers claim political subjectivity, Hewamanne'sStitching Identities in a Free Trade Zonechallenges conventional notions about women at the bottom of the global economy. The book offers a fascinating journey through the vibrant subaltern universe of Sri Lankan female migrant workers, from the FTZ factory shop floor to boarding houses, from urban movie theaters to temples and beaches and back to their native rural villages.Stitching Identities in a Free Trade Zonecaptures the spirit with which women confront power and violence through everyday poetics and politics, exploring how female workers construct themselves as different while investigating this difference as the space where deep anxieties and ambivalences over notions of nation, modernity, and globalization get played out.
This book invites-no, demands-a response from its readers. It is impossible not to be drawn in to the provocative (often contentious) discussion that Harvey Mansfield sets before us. This is the ...first comprehensive study of manliness, a quality both bad and good, mostly male, often intolerant, irrational, and ambitious. Our "gender-neutral society" does not like it but cannot get rid of it.Drawing from science, literature, and philosophy, Mansfield examines the layers of manliness, from vulgar aggression, to assertive manliness, to manliness as virtue, and to philosophical manliness. He shows that manliness seeks and welcomes drama, prefers times of war, conflict, and risk, and brings change or restores order at crucial moments. Manly men in their assertiveness raise issues, bring them to the fore, and make them public and political-as for example, the manliness of the women's movement.After a wide-ranging tour from stereotypes to Hemingway and Achilles, to Nietzsche, to feminism, and to Plato, the author returns to today's problem of "unemployed manliness." Formulating a reasoned defense of a quality hardly obedient to reason, he urges men, and especially women, to understand and accept manliness, and to give it honest and honorable employment.
Cowboys are an American legend, but despite ubiquity in history and popular culture, misperceptions abound. Technically, a cowboy worked with cattle, as a ranch hand, while his boss, the cattleman, ...owned the ranch. Jacqueline M. Moore casts aside romantic and one-dimensional images of cowboys by analyzing the class, gender, and labor histories of ranching in Texas during the second half of the nineteenth century.As working-class men, cowboys showed their masculinity through their skills at work as well as public displays in town. But what cowboys thought was manly behavior did not always match those ideas of the business-minded cattlemen, who largely absorbed middle-class masculine ideals of restraint. Real men, by these standards, had self-mastery over their impulses and didn't fight, drink, gamble or consort with "unsavory" women. Moore explores how, in contrast to the mythic image, from the late 1870s on, as the Texas frontier became more settled and the open range disappeared, the real cowboys faced increasing demands from the people around them to rein in the very traits that Americans considered the most masculine.Published in Cooperation with the William P. Clements Center for Southwest Studies, Southern Methodist University.
The Dynamics of 'Race' and Gender Haleh Afshar, Mary Maynard / Haleh Afshar, Mary Maynard
1994, 20121012, 2012, 2012-10-12, 19940101
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During the past decade, feminism and women's studies have been forced to acknowledge the diversities of women's experiences, as well as the patriarchal oppression that they share. The emphasis on ...difference has shattered the illusion of homogeneity and sisterhood which previously characterized white, middle-class Westernized feminist politics and analysis.; There is relatively little work which concentrates on the inter-relationships of race and gender in general, and the consequences of racism, for women of different backgrounds, in particular. "The Dynamics of Race and Gender" aims to contribute to the debate and understanding in this area. Emphasis has been given to age, class, disability, race and sexuality. The contributors to this volume are from different religious, cultural and ethnic backgrounds, giving a balanced and broad ranging perspective on this important social question.; Organized around three main themes, which are; issues of theory and method, questions of identity, racism and sexism at work, the chapters of this book indicate how the processes of race and gender interrelate in highly complex and contradictory ways. Demonstrating the benefits to be gained from analysing the interplay of various axes of differentiation in specific empirical and historical locations, and in doing so, under- scoring the point that diversity among women cannot be seen as a static phenomenon.
Gender, politics, and society in Ukraine Hankivsky, Olena; Salnykova, Anastasiya
Gender, politics, and society in Ukraine,
c2012, 20121231, 2017, 2012, 2012-12-31, 2013-04-02, 20120101
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Gender, Politics, and Society in Ukraine is particularly innovative in its exploration of both women's and men's experiences and the ways in which gender relations shift over time in societies ...undergoing transitions to democracy.
