This article examines the way women's power and its relation to household dynamics have been addressed in the anthropology of the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) through the classical works of Deniz Kandiyoti and Camille Lacoste-Dujardin. We argue that the notion of “classic patriarchy” they have elaborated and used is predicated on a “collectivistic” and “culturalist” perspective on living arrangements. We show the perspective's shortcomings and suggest an alternative, “atomistic” framework developed by one of the authors, which we adapt to the MENA. We finally assess the heuristic value of this framework by studying a Tunisian peasant village typical of the feminization of agriculture now taking place, a process through which women have gained power.
Deniz Kandiyoti, “Bargaining with Patriarchy,”Gender & Society2, no. 2 (1988): 274-289; Deniz Kandiyoti, “Women and Household Production: The Impact of Rural Transformation in Turkey,” in The Rural Middle East: Peasant Lives and Modes of Production, ed. K. Glavanis and P. Glavanis (London: Zed, 1990), 183-94; Deniz Kandiyoti, “Islam and Patriarchy: A Comparative Perspective,” in Women in Middle Eastern History, ed. N. Keddie and B. Baron (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1991), 23-42; see also Deniz Kandiyoti, “Sex Roles and Social Change: A Comparative Appraisal of Turkey's Women,” Signs 3, no. 1 (1977): 57-73; and Camille Lacoste-Dujardin, Des mères contre les femmes: Maternité et patriarcat au Maghreb (1985; reprint, Paris: La Découverte, 1996).
2.
Michel Verdon, Rethinking Households: An Atomistic Perspective on European Living Arrangements (London: Routledge, 1998).
3.
Kandiyoti, “Bargaining with Patriarchy,”278-278.
4.
Lacoste-Dujardin, Des mères contre les femmes, 170ff-170ff.
5.
Mounira Charrad, State and Women's Rights: The Making of Postcolonial Tunisia, Algerian, and Morocco (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001).
6.
Amal Rassam, “Women and Domestic Power in Morocco,”International Journal of Middle East Studies12 (1980): 171-179.
7.
W. J. Goode, World Revolution and Family Patterns (London: Free Press of Glencoe, 1963); E. T. Prothro and L. N. Diab, Changing Family Patterns in the Arab East (Beirut, Lebanon: American University Press, 1974); and T. Stevenson, “Migration, Family and Household in Highland Yemen: The Impact of Socio-economic Political Change and Cultural Ideals on Domestic Organization,” Journal of Comparative Family Studies 28, no. 2 (1997): 14-53.
8.
L. Ben Salem, “Structures familiales et changement social en Tunisie,”Revue tunisienne de sciences sociales100 (1990): 165-180; L. Ben Salem and T. Locoh, “Les transformations du mariage et de la famille,” in Population et développement en Tunisie: La métamorphose, ed. J. Vallin and T. Locoh (Tunis, Tunisia: CERES, 2001), 143-69; A. Bouhdiba, “Points de vue sur la famille tunsienne actuelle,” Revue tunisienne de sciences sociales 11 (1967): 11-23; C. Camilleri, “Modernity and the Family in Tunisia,” Journal of Marriage and the Family 3 (1967): 590-95; J. Cuisenier, Économie et parenté (Paris: Mouton, 1975); and A. Demeersman, La famille tunisienne et les temps modernes (1967; reprint, Tunis, Tunisia: Maison tunisienne de l'Édition, 1972).
9.
Stevenson, “Migration, Family and Household,”14-15.
10.
Historian Lucette Valensi thus asserted that the basic unit of analysis of the social organization of the Tunisian peasantry during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries was the PEH, going as far as to deny any analytical value to the nuclear household and the individual. L. Valensi, Tunisian Peasants in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 25-25. Moreover, the field of family history in the MENA has hitherto remained rather embryonic when compared to Europe, for instance. Doumani explained this lack of interest precisely by the fact that both indigenous and scholarly discourses fundamentally assume that “modern” nuclear households have gradually displaced “traditional” PEHs. B. Doumani, “Introduction,” in Family History in the Middle East: Household, Property, and Gender, ed. B. Doumani (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2003).
11.
L. Blili Temime, Histoires de famille: Mariages, répudiations et vie quotidienne à Tunis (1875-1930) (Tunis, Tunisia: Script, 1999).
12.
F. T. Al-Thakeb, “The Arab Family and Modernity: Evidence from Kuwait,”Current Anthropology26, no. 5 (1985): 575-580; Goode, World Revolution and Family Patterns; and Prothro and Diab, Changing Family Patterns.
13.
Goode, World Revolution and Family Patterns, 124-124.
14.
R. Netting, R. Wilk, and E. J. Arnould, eds., Households: Comparative and Historical Studies of the Domestic Group (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984); Verdon, Rethinking Households; and Michel Verdon, “The Stem Family: Toward a General Theory,” Journal of Interdisciplinary History 10 (1979): 87-105.
15.
S. S. Davis, Patience and Power: Women's Lives in a Moroccan Village (Cambridge: Schenkman, 1983).
16.
For example, J. Collier, “Women in Politics,” in Woman, Culture and Society, ed. M. Z. Rosaldo and L. Lamphere (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1974), 89-96; L. Lamphere, “Strategies, Cooperation, and Conflict among Women in Domestic Groups,” in Rosaldo and Lamphere, Woman, Culture and Society, 97-112.
17.
Cuisenier, Économie et parenté; and L. Stamm Auerbach, “Women's Domestic Power: A Study of Women's Roles in a Tunisian Town” (Ph.D. diss., University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 1980).
18.
Lacoste-Dujardin, Des mères contre les femmes, 183-183, free translation.
19.
See also Camille Lacoste, “De la grande famille aux nouvelles familles,” in Maghreb: Peuples et civilisations, ed. Y. Lacoste and C. Lacoste (Paris: La Découverte, 1995), 117-123.
20.
Prothro and Diab, Changing Family Patterns.
21.
T. Aziz, Le fellah marocain. L'exemple d'une tribu berbère: les Beni M'tir. Du XIXè siècle jusqu'à nos jours (Saint-Étienne, France: Université de Saint-Étienne, 1994).
22.
W. C. Young and S. Shami, “Anthropological Approaches to the Arab Family: An Introduction,”Journal of Comparative Family Studies28, no. 2 (1997): 1-13.
23.
Martin Latreille, “Thinking Honor and the Sexual Division of Labor with and against Bourdieu: A Tunisian Case” (Montréal, n.d.).
24.
J. Collier, “Women in Politics”; D. Dwyer and J. Bruce, eds., A Home Divided: Women and Income in the Third World (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1988); N. Folbre, “Hearts and Spades: Paradigms of Household Economics,” World Development 14 (1986): 245-55; Lamphere, “Strategies, Cooperation, and Conflict”; and D. Singerman and H. Hoodfar, eds., Development, Change, and Gender in Cairo: A View from the Household (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996).
25.
D. D. Gilmore, “Anthropology of the Mediterranean Area,”Annual Review of Anthropology11 (1982): 175-205.
26.
In a recent attempt to rekindle the study of family and household in the MENA, Khadr and El-Zeini have suggested decomposing households into “basic family units” (BFUs); Z. Khadr and O. El-Zeini, “Families and Households: Headship and Co-Residence,” in The New Arab Family, ed. N. S. Hopkins (Cairo:American University in Cairo Press, 2003), 140-164. The authors defined the BFU as “individuals residing in the same household who are either married, or are blood related up to the second degree within a maximum of two generations.” Households containing a single BFU form nuclear-family households, whereas those with more than one BFU form extended-family households; in the latter case, each BFU is called a subfamily. Some members of extended households, such as married sons, belong to two subfamilies (that of their parents and their own). Yet BFUs are too inclusive, because residential atoms should not overlap within the same household.
27.
J. Ermisch and E. Overton, “Minimal Household Units: A New Approach to the Analysis of Household Formation,”Population Studies39 (1985): 33-54.
28.
Kandiyoti, “Women and Household Production,”189-189.
29.
Ibid., 191.
30.
S. Triki, Budget-temps des ménages ruraux et travail invisible des femmes rurales en Tunisie (Tunis, Tunisia: CREDIF, 2000).
31.
Latreille, “Thinking Honor”; and Martin Latreille, “Rmāyniyya: Féminisation de l'agriculture et condition féminine dans le Nord-Ouest tunisien” (Ph.D. diss., Université de Montréal, 2006). The nature of the impact of the male labor migration on women's power and status varies from one case to another. Some studies reveal that it has had negative repercussions or, at best, that it did not really improve the fate of women. See M. Abaza, The Changing Image of Women in Egypt (Cairo: American University in Cairo Press, 1987); P. R. Baduel, Société et émigration temporaire au Nefzaoua (Sud Tunisien) (Paris: CNRS, 1980); and C. Myntti, “Yemeni Workers Abroad: The Impact on Women,” MERIP Reports 124 (1984), 11-16. Others show that, on the contrary, it has had a rather favorable impact. See J. Brink, “The Effect of Emigration of Husbands on the Status of Their Wives: An Egyptian Case,” International Journal of Middle East Studies 23 (1991): 201-11; M. Hammam, “Labour Migration and the Sexual Division of Labour,” MERIP Reports 95 (1981): 5-11; A. Kadioglu, “The Impact of Migration on Gender Roles: Findings of Field Research in Turkey,” International Migration 32, no. 4 (1994): 533-60; C. Keely and B. Saket, “Jordanian Migrant Workers in the Arab Region: A Case Study of the Consequences for Labor-Supplying Countries,” Middle East Journal 38, no. 4 (1984): 685-711; L. Khaled, “Migration and Women's Status: The Jordan Case,” International Migration 33, no. 2 (1995): 235-43; F. Khafagy, Socio-economic Impact of Emigration from a Giza Village, in Migration, Mechanization, and Agricultural Labor Markets in Egypt, ed. A. Richards and P. L. Martin (Boulder, Colo.: Westview, 1983); F. Khafagy, “Women and Labour Migration: One Village in Egypt,” MERIP Reports 124 (1984): 17-21; H. Khattab and S. El Daief, Impact of Male Migration on the Structure of the Family and the Roles of Women, Regional Paper no. 16 (Giza, Egypt: Population Council, 1982); E. Taylor, “Egyptian Migration and Peasant Wives,” MERIP Reports 124 (1984): 3-10; and P. Weyland, Inside the Third World Village (London: Routledge, 1993).
32.
Three of the 122 households in Rmāyniyya neither owned nor rented land, and thus were not considered family farms.
33.
S. Bouattour, Les femmes en Tunisie 2000 (Tunis, Tunisia: CREDIF, 2002).
34.
If we add to this figure those who moved away from the group after the death of the patriarch but during the lifetime of his widow, the total increases from 52.3 percent to 64 percent (N = 55).
35.
If we pushed patrilocal and patrilineal logic to its extreme and assumed that the brothers whose parents are both dead shared a roof, there would only be forty households in Rmāyniyya, of which thirty-six would be complex households!
36.
Latreille, “Thinking Honor.”
37.
Brink, The Effect of Emigration of Husbands; S. Ferchiou, “‘Invisible Work,’ Work at Home: The Condition of Tunisian Women,” in Middle Eastern Women and the Invisible Economy, ed. R. Lobban Jr. (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1998), 187-97; Kadioglu, The Impact of Migration; Keely and Saket, Jordanian Migrant Workers; and Taylor, Egyptian Migration.
38.
His older brother had already left his father's house, and his youngest brother's wedding not only was recent (in 2000) but also had been celebrated in a manner that raised questions on the integrity of the bride and groom.
39.
We should note that the latter herself comes from a multiple extended family. But here, the patriarch acts as the farm head. Interestingly, however, his eldest daughter-in-law has much influence within the group. Apart from the fact that she has a strong personality, her mother-inlaw is aging and weakening, and her sister-in-law had just married and, moreover, done so in particular circumstances (she was reputed to have been pregnant before the wedding, and to have had an abortion). The eldest daughter-in-law and her husband had previously separated from the group, but, acknowledging her importance within the household, her father-in-law had implored her to return, notably promising to grant her more power, to which she acquiesced.
