Tournaments of Value
Sociability and Hierarchy in a Yemeni Town
- Publisher
- University of Toronto Press
- Initial publish date
- Sep 2016
- Category
- Cultural, Women's Studies, Marriage & Family, Religion, Politics & State
-
Hardback
- ISBN
- 9781487501341
- Publish Date
- Sep 2016
- List Price
- $89.00
-
Paperback / softback
- ISBN
- 9781487521325
- Publish Date
- Aug 2016
- List Price
- $43.95
-
Paperback / softback
- ISBN
- 9780802078681
- Publish Date
- Oct 1996
- List Price
- $30.95
-
eBook
- ISBN
- 9781442690745
- Publish Date
- Oct 1996
- List Price
- $27.95
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Description
A significant contribution to our understanding of the varied experience of women in the Islamic Middle East, Tournaments of Value gives a careful description of a world of female socializing, and the velocity, energy, and elaborateness of this remarkable female social world.
Meneley’s data challenges assumptions about the cross-cultural validity of a division between household and community, between domestic and public domains. She demonstrates the fluidity of social life, the shifting nature of community organization, and in doing so provides a welcome counterpoint to more rigid formulations of Middle Eastern social structure usually expressed in ethnographies.
Tournaments of Value incorporates vignettes to illustrate more analytical points and to enliven the text, allowing the reader to enter fully into the rich world of Zabid in Yemen. This expanded 20th anniversary edition introduces this seminal work on Middle Eastern ethnography and women’s studies to a new generation of readers.
About the author
Anne Meneley is the co-editor, with Don Kulick, of Fat: The Anthropology of an Obsession (Tarcher Penguin, 2005). She is an associate professor of anthropology at Trent University, Peterborough, Ontario.