Zenana: Everyday Peace in a Karachi Apartment Building (review)

Abstract

Laura A. Ring, Zenana: Everyday Peace in a Karachi Apartment Building. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, October, 2006, 224 pp. Louis Wirth famously described urban social relations as anonymous. view that city dwellers are largely strangers one another has been widely challenged by sociologists, anthropologists, and historians since 1950s. Nonetheless, while stranger is no longer a problem for ethnographer who arrives find groups and networks flourishing, living among strangers remains an existential problem for many urban residents. In Karachi, a city riven by ethnic and sectarian violence since 1980s, such problems take on added significance. In her gracefully written and incisively argued book, Laura Ring contends that everyday efforts of women in Karachi transform neighbors into-if not quite kin-something other than strangers, are labors of peace. problems of what Ring calls have received less attention than they deserve, largely because ethnographic studies of cities have tended be oriented around ethnic and/or economically marginal neighborhoods whose residents are often tied one another by more than locality. book's setting is a multi-story, lower-middle class apartment building, pseudonymously called The Shipyard, sheltering nearly fifty families with members of most major ethnic groups of Pakistan (Pattans, Baluchis, Punjabis, Sindhis) pursuing a variety of livelihoods (government doctors and engineers, teachers, shopkeepers). Such multistory apartment buildings have risen only in last three decades, but have quickly become common in this expanding city. Most of their residents have moved from old neighborhoods in city center or from peripheral one- or two-story colonies that are rather homogeneous (at least at scale of lane), settled by kin, caste, ethnic, and sectarian groups. Ring shows how residents, with partial success, attempt to draw familiar social forms into new space of apartment (15). One man is desperate rent apartment next his for his brother in order reconstitute a joint family household (the rental agent refuses, Two brothers, side by side, they'd never leave! [15]). As in other sorts of neighborhoods, residents make fictive kin of their neighbors through use of kin terms (bhai [brother], baji [sister], bhabi [brother's wife]). focus of study is on women's neighboring practices (4) in zenana. Zenana literally means women's space, but in Ring's account it is not a fixed physical space but a realm of women's sociality existing at sufferance of men, expanding with their absence and contracting with their presence. Unlike most participant observers, who are more observers than participants, author was fully involved in this world. She moved into apartment building with her three-year-old son and husband, a Karachi Shia with Sindhi and Muhajir parents. As she notes, I did not simply 'act' of interested, active neighbor...! (often unselfconsciously) lived part (30). Like most ethnographers, she uses her own ignorance and reactions as a foil for residents' understandings and emotions, but not as an outsider. She is of flow of activity-gossiping, exchanging foods, visiting, fixing a leaky water tank, advising a couple on character of a boy whom they are considering marrying their daughter, rushing out one door during an electrical fire while men go out another. Ring argues both Western liberal ideology (figuring home as a private, feminine realm, cut off from world of [2]) and post-colonial studies (concentrating on Indian reformist views of domestic as sites of cultural authenticity untouched by colonial power) have missed broader political significance of what takes place within zenana. These approaches have failed explore the spaces and social relations of dwelling-of household, apartment building, neighborhood, backyard, balcony-as sites of political processes, not just of gendered and generational conflict but of class, ethnic, racial, and national struggles (3). …