HOODFAR, Homa, BETWEEN MARRIAGE AND MARKET: Intimate Politics and Survival in Cairo

Abstract

HOODFAR, Homa, BETWEEN MARRIAGE AND MARKET: Intimate Politics and Survival in Cairo. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1997, 320 pp., $16.95 softcover / $45.00 hardcover. This wise and scholarly ethnographic work is the result of a field study conducted among more than sixty households in three densely populated areas of downtown Cairo between 1983 and 1994. Using the domestic nuclear household as the unit of analysis the author clearly shows how the financial and cultural constraints of the wider society shape survival strategies of working class families and how, in turn this broad range of activities affects their own standard of living as well as the economy itself In contrast to the many studies of Islamic societies with their emphasis on limitations imposed by religious ideology, Dr Hoodfar contends and sets out to prove that women's low level of participation in the formal labor force is more often the result of rational economic assessment of the real costs and net benefits than the result of patriarchal pressures and reluctance to flout Muslim customs of seclusion. As a trained anthropologist and an Iranian woman, raised in Tehran, the author is able to evaluate choices in terms, seldom grasped by Western ethnographers, unfamiliar with the highly elaborated female arenas of power characteristic of sex segregated societies. Using the colorful and culturally apt metaphor of a game of backgammon, to illustrate the way in which strategies, involving a combination of luck and assessment of available options, must take into account pre-existing and possibly shifting conditions, the author gives a multidimensional historical, demographic, social and economic overview of Egypt, the city of Cairo and the Gulf States. This enables the reader to evaluate more fully decisions made by the subjects of the study. Since aspects of this context changed considerably over the eleven year course of the study, the author prefaces each chapter with relevant updates, such as the opening up or closing of job markets and setting up or the dismantling of government programs. This is particular helpful, for example, in understanding the decision of men, who leave their families in Cairo to seek lucrative employment in the Gulf States and of women, who sometimes find it more profitable to invest time in going after subsidized food, health and education benefits than to seek paid work. The author uses therefore a very broad definition for the economic contribution of women to the household income, which avoids simplistic, symbolic equations of housework with work done by men, and involves instead an analysis of the financial impact on the household of all domestic food preparation and preservation, childrearing as a long-term investment, cash-saving activities of all kinds and dealing with public institutions. …