public and private politics: women in the Middle Eastern world¹

Abstract

The main questions examined in this paper are: (1) What is the notion of power as this has been used by ethnographers writing about nomadic and sedentary societies of the Middle East? (2) Given this notion of power, what are the images of women and power in the domestic and public domains? (3) What are the epistemological consequences to ethnography if we re‐think our notions of power and recognize its special features as a particular kind of social relation—reciprocity of influence—rather than as an embodied quality institutionalized in kinds of social structures?