Tournaments of Value: Sociability and hierarchy in a Yemeni town

Abstract

Michael reviews "Tournaments of Value: Sociability and hierarchy in a Yemeni town" by Anne Meneley.

Tournaments of Value: sociability and hierarchy in a Yemeni town ANNE MENELEY, 1996

Toronto, University of Toronto Press

216 pp., 0 8020 0883 6, hb 34.00; 0 8020 7868 0, pb 14.00

Anne Meneley did anthropological fieldwork in Zabid, a town in the Tihama region of Yemen, during 1989 and 1990. She writes about that research in her book on the visiting practices of Zabidi women. Meneley's book is important to the literature on Yemeni women. It comes after a long gap in book-length reported research on Yemeni women. While there are several classics in the literature on Yemeni women, her predecessors did their field research some 2025 years earlier [1]. One of the most important contributions Meneley's book makes is that women are acting in the public domain. Too much of the literature on women in gender-segregated societies, particularly on Middle Eastern women, arbitrarily places women's actions in the so-called private or domestic domain where the most importance their activities take in terms of male dominated society is as information carriers. Meneley makes it quite clear that Zabidi women act in the public domain, and though separate from men's public domain, nevertheless carry a great deal of the burden of creating and maintaining the public reputation and status of the elite, bayt kabir, families through their visiting and displays of hospitality. The book is largely devoted to describing elite women's visiting patterns and the effects of visiting and hospitality on bayt kabir status.

This process is enacted within a hierarchical social structure that is tenaciously upheld in secular terms, but minimised in the context of pious Islam. The tension between the secular hierarchy which emphasises status differences between households as well as between people of high status and people of low status (mazayanah and akhdam occupational classes[2]), and the social egalitarianism of Islam adds another dimension to the competition Meneley describes. Meneley notes several forms of hierarchical relations in Zabidi society: (1) those between men and women; (2) those between elite and non-elite families; and (3) between the elite families themselves. Hospitality and generosity, conspicuous consumption, modest comportment, and piety each have an effect on the process that determines which Zabidi families belong to the ba kabir and whether or not they maintain that status. Unfortunately her descriptions are all from the perspective of the elite.

Some of the best parts of this book are the narrative descriptions of interactions and events. Meneley's narratives are compelling, and many of them resonate with my own experience with women's visiting in Sana'a. Superficially, women's visiting might be viewed as only a pleasant, leisure activity. Through Meneley's stories we see women's gatherings in an entirely different light.

However, there are a number of flaws that mar what could have been a fine ethnography. Meneley's descriptions are excellent, but there is little analysis in the whole of the book. Meneley emphasises that the women's visiting she describes is part of a process that includes exchange, bargaining, and manipulation. None of these concepts is well situated in any theoretical framework or analysed satisfactorily. She fails to link her descriptions to literature or models which would have informed and enriched her argument. For example, she cites Lancaster [3], but not in relation to his excellent discussion of the generation of genealogies, which has many analogous aspects to the process she describes.

I think there are serious problems in Chapter 3; The Bayt: Family and Household, in which she confuses the definitions of family and household. She defines a family as the people who live in the moral space (undefined) of the house and who share a budget and a reputation. Then, she tells us that the family includes married sisters (of which generation is not clear) living in other households. By her own definition the married sisters would therefore share a budget with their brothers and parents, a logical impossibility. Meneley would have been well advised to consult Yanagisako [4] and the Netting, Wilk and Arnould [5] volume, amongst others, to clarify her thinking about households and family.

This book is a slightly reworked dissertation and unfortunately retains many of that document's characteristics. Many of the footnotes should have been incorporated into the text. Some cited works do not appear in the bibliography, an error that carries over from the dissertation.

The author's inclusion of local Arabic terminology is useful. However, there is one enigmatic example whereby she refers to a woman's garment, the shaydar, as a chador, which is an Iranian term and garment. In fact, her description of the shaydar, worn as an outer garment when a woman is on the street, is inconsistent. She sometimes equates it with a sharshaf, or a ballo, which are entirely different garments. All are theoretically worn for modesty, but the shaydar can be adjusted to reveal a woman's dress in quite a provocative manner, while the sharshaf is a skirt and cape essentially enclosing a woman in a black tent. However, the fabric, decoration and tailoring of all these garments signal the wearer's status and wealth, if not identity. Since clothing and jewellery are important markers for status and piety, as Meneley herself notes, it is unfortunate she adds confusion to an already much misunderstood Middle Eastern garment.

While there is a map of Yemen there is no map of Zabid or of the neighbourhoods she describes. There are no diagrams, graphic representations, or tables, though these would have enhanced the author's descriptions and elucidated her elusive argument. Some parts of the book seem disjointed and disorganised. Some of the narrative descriptions, in spite of their evocativeness, are repetitive, like the description of a wedding, which appears in nearly the same words in the preface and in Chapter 6.

Despite these criticisms, scholars interested in Middle Eastern women or Yemeni society should read Meneley's book. It is highly readable and gives some insight into a part of Middle Eastern society generally hidden to most observers.

BARBARA J. MICHAEL, American Institute for Yemeni Studies, USA

NOTES

[1] Susan Dorsky (1986), Wvomen of 5Amran: a Middle Eastern ethnographic study (University of Utah Press) (fieldwork 1978); Carla Makhlouf (1979), Changing Veils: women and modernization in North remen (University of Texas Press); Martha Mundy, Domestic Government: kinship, communiy and polity in North remen (I.B. Tauris) (fieldwork 1973 1977). Delores Walters has written a dissertation, not yet published, `Perceptions of social inequality in the Yemen Arab Republic, 1987'.

[2] Mazayanah are those in low-class occupations (butchers, barbers, etc.) and akhdam are traditionally menial servants.

[3] William O. Lancaster (1981) The Rwala Bedouin Today (Cambridge University Press) (2nd edn, 1997, by Waveland).

[4] Sylvia J. Yanagisako (1979) Family and household: the analysis of domestic groups, Annual Rew of Anthropology, 8, pp. 161-205.

[5] Robert McC. Netting, Richard R Wilk & Eric J Arnould (1984) Households: comparative and historical studies of the domestic group (University of California Press).