Key and Peripheral Roles of Noble Women in a Middle Eastern Plains Village

Abstract

attempt to generalize for the Middle East, but will present data on the key and peripheral roles of women in a sedentarized landowning lineage community located in a plain on the TurkishSyrian border.? The position of women from landowning lineages quite naturally differs from that of sharecropping women and more resembles the position of urban women from aristocratic families. In particular we will examine the de jure and de facto control of land by women of this noble lineage with special importance given to the occasion in which a woman of the patrilineage-usually a widow with sons-substitutes for a deceased husband in the control of resources, and secondly we will indicate the relevance of this substitution in lineage organization. Let us first examine the role of the lineage in landownership. As groups became sedentarized, approximately a century ago, the interplay of a ranking system among sheep herders, the struggle for land, and the new and intensified relations with the Ottoman urban-based bureaucracy, produced a progressive stratification in which successful lineages became owners of land, while weaker unsuccessful lineages became sharecroppers. The pattern of settlement of these groups resulted in villages and fringe villages. In the former a strong patrilineal core holds its land as a closed corporation, and lineage segments expand into neighboring 1 The native language of the community is Arabic, the dialect that spoken in eastern Syria, the region from which their ancestors migrated. Both Arab and Kurdish ancestors figure in their genealogy. The majority of the men speak Turkish as a second language due to- the fact that the region has been under Turkish control since 1939, and also that their village borders a Turkish agha's village. Fieldwork was conducted in the area