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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...