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Daughters
of Tunis: Women, Family and Networks in a Muslim City Reviewed by Aysecan Terzioglu, Anthropology Department, CUNY-Graduate Center In Daughters of Tunis, Paula Holmes-Eber provides insightful comments on the social and economic lives of Muslim women in Tunis. She investigates the socialization patterns of women of Tunis as an important factor in shaping and confirming their identity and social position, as well as providing economic networks useful for survival strategies. Holmes-Eber's meticulous ethnographic research and the way in which she relates her study to the recent debates in anthropology makes Daughters of Tunis significant not only to Middle Eastern Studies but for social sciences in general. Through her detailed ethnography, Holmes-Eber enables us to visualize how the two most recent generations of urban Tunisian women live in public and private realms. Her discussions of the Tunisian home as one of the main public places and how the American sense of privacy is an unfamiliar concept in Tunis (15-16) are highly useful in terms of pointing to a different cultural construction of public and private spheres. The author also contrasts the conception of the Tunisian home as a lively political, social and economic domain with the American view of home as a private retreat that is distinctly separate from the public economic and political domain. Holmes-Eber's discussions as such enable non-Middle Eastern readers to relate to the social lives and concerns of women in Tunis. Her overview of the similarities and differences between Western women and Tunisian women also captures the diversity of the lived experience, while refuting the theory of "the clash of civilizations between East and West." Holmes-Eber also successfully challenges the stereotypic view
of Muslim women as completely oppressed by the patriarchal social
system. She describes the ways in which close human contact with
friends and family members in the house plays an important role
in shaping the social and economic lives of Tunisian women. Women
prepare elaborate meals for their guests, exchange gifts of similar
value, talk about the cost of important purchases such as cars,
and discuss job opportunities during house visits. They actively
participate in social life and live in their own social realm
with their own "rules, opportunities and hierarchies."
This realm is parallel to, but distinct from, the social realm
of men, as Leila Abu-Lughod has previously pointed out (1985).
Although we do not learn much about interactions between men and
women in this book, some factors, such as a woman's need for a
male escort when outside the home, also show the distinct separation
of men's and women's realms. This separation, however, does not
necessarily mean that women are powerless. Through the use of highly detailed and novel-like descriptions
of women's houses and social gatherings, Holmes-Eber successfully
captures the dynamic and complex social lives of women in Tunis.
Her innovative use of anthropological theory and method, such
as inserting herself in her study, makes the book a good example
of a possible way to update studies on family and community dynamics.
Rather than acting as an invisible ethnographer who claims neutrality,
Holmes-Eber talks about her friendly interactions with most of
the women she studies. This enables the reader to understand how
the women in Tunis integrate the author into their social life,
as well as how the author's perspective influences her interactions
with them. The fact that the author's ethnographic study lacks sufficient
historical and cultural context makes it difficult for the reader
to understand certain aspects of Tunisian women's social life.
At the beginning of her book, for example, Holmes-Eber mentions
that Tunisia has been rapidly developing in social and economic
terms since Bourgiba's regime. Legal reforms regarding divorce
and polygyny have improved women's economic and social power.
However, despite Holmes-Eber's attempt to complement her study
of the "micro-politics of everyday life" of Tunisian
women with a quantitative survey, it is hard to build a bridge
between women's lives and what is going on in Tunis as a whole. Partly due to the problem of contextualization, Holmes-Eber draws a rather rosy picture of these women's social lives, which include more support and empowerment than conflict and rivalry. Stereotypical phrases, such as "the time-honored Arab custom of hospitality" (122), which are not used in a critical sense, also damage the analytical level of the discussion in this study, which is based on well-done ethnographic research. I highly recommend Daughters of Tunis to the readers who have a basic knowledge of the recent historical and social changes in the Middle East, because they will be better able to contextualize what is discussed in the book. If readers would like to learn more about the legal, religious debates and social movements in modern Tunisia, I recommend Kevin Dwyer's Arab Voices: The Human Rights in the Middle East (1991), which is a good complement to the Daughters of Tunis. Aysecan Terzioglu is a fifth year Ph.D. student in Cultural Anthropology at CUNY- Graduate Center, and received her M. A. in Sociology from Bogazici University in Istanbul, Turkey. Her areas of expertise and interest include the Middle East, as well as social theory and illness. References: Dwyer, Kevin. 1991. Arab Voices: The Human Rights Debate in the Middle East. Comparative Studies on Muslim Societies, No. 13. Berkeley: University of California Press. |