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PAKISTAN Zenana: Everyday Peace in a Karachi Apartment Building, by Laura A. Ring. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press 2006. 82 pages. Gloss, to p. 184. Notes to p. 192. Bibl. to p. 201. Index to p. 211. $55.
Reviewed by Beena Sarwar
Laura A. Ring's study of social patterns and relationships in a multi-ethnic situation in Pakistan, Zenana, focuses on three main themes - tension, anger, and intimacy that are each essential to peace.
The stage for these themes is set in the first chapter, "A Day in the Life," which I found useful to refer to in order to understand the relationships and characters that form the basis of Ring's thesis. An underlying thread running through these themes is the complexity of ritual exchange or reciprocity. A groundbreaking study, A Punjabi Village in Pakistan (New York: Columbia University Press, 1960), conducted in Pakistan, 1949-55, by Margaret Mead's Turkish protegee Zekiye Eglar focused on women as the center of ritualized reciprocity. Ring, living for a year as a Fulbright scholar with her Pakistani husband and pre-school son in a modern multi-ethnic apartment building, finds similar patterns and much complexity in this closed unit of contemporary, urban Karachi. The women interact peacefully despite the ethnic tensions that routinely disrupt Karachi, using the vehicle of gift and service exchange (helping each other out) on a mutually understood reciprocal basis that their...