Book Reviews : Janice Boddy, Wombs and Alien Spirits: Women, Men, and the Zār Cult in Northern Sudan. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1990, $45.00 (cloth), $23.95 (paper)
Abstract
Book ReviewsJanice Boddy, Wombs and Alien Spirits: Women, Men, and the Zār Cult in Northern Sudan. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1990, $45.00 (cloth), $23.95 (paper) SAGE Publications, Inc.1991DOI: 10.1177/002071529103200312 Renate Barber Oxford Polytechnic Oxford, UK This study of a contemporary village in Northern Sudan was carried out in the classical anthropological tradition of participant observation. The author, who is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at the University of Toronto, has carried out her fieldwork in the late 1970s and early 80s. The study of village life affords an understanding of how gender opposition, which is a prominent feature of this Muslim society, is both complementary and juxtaposed in order to arrive at a cohesive and all-embracing social world. In this context super- and subordination are less vertical than horizontal sections, and property is gendered property on the public/private divide. Personhood is so embedded in the group that it is irrefutably gendered. There is as little room for just male as for just female perceptions. Gender complementariness creates concepts of reality in which the joint enterprise is social and biological reproduction. Within this framework all careers are gendered. The world of women is enclosed, domesticated, pure, fertile and highly