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Social Science Cultural

Tournaments of Value

Sociability and Hierarchy in a Yemeni Town

by (author) Anne Meneley

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.

Anne Meneley's profile page