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Arab Family Studies
Critical Reviews
Edited by Suad Joseph
Hardcover $150.00L
| 978-0-8156-3559-8
| 2017
Paper $69.95s
| 978-0-8156-3558-1
| 2017
ebook 978-0-8156-5424-7
A comprehensive review of available scholarship on Arab
families, detailing the major themes, methods, and case
studies.
"A stunning collective achievement. This is a landmark in the social study of the Arab world—breathtaking in its encyclopedic coverage of past scholarship yet utterly visionary in the new directions it charts for the critical study of family in the Arab world. Expert contributors at the cutting edge of their fields redefine the core issues, moving us beyond tired clichés about culture to exhilarating appreciations of the dynamic ways ‘the Arab family’ lies at the nexus of the politics of states, economies, and meaning."—Lila Abu-Lughod, department of anthropology, Columbia University
"A monumental piece of scholarship, obviously years in the
making. Undoubtedly, it will be an invaluable resource for
anyone carrying out research or teaching on family and kinship
in the Arab world."—Julie Peteet, professor of anthropology and director of the Middle East
and Islamic Studies program, University of Louisville
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Suad Joseph is Distinguished Research Professor of Anthropology and Gender,
Sexuality, and Women’s Studies at the University of California, Davis.
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Book Description »[Close »]
Family remains the most powerful social idiom and one of the most
powerful social structures throughout the Arab world. To engender
love of nation among its citizens, national movements portray the nation
as a family. To motivate loyalty, political leaders frame themselves
as fathers, mothers, brothers, or sisters to their clients, parties, or the
citizenry. To stimulate production, economic actors evoke the sense
of duty and mutual commitment of family obligation. To sanctify
their edicts, clerics wrap religion in the moralities of family and family
in the moralities of religion. Social and political movements, from
the most secular to the most religious, pull on the tender strings of
family love to recruit and bind their members to each other. To call
someone family is to offer them almost the highest possible intimacy,
loyalty, rights, reciprocities, and dignity.
In recognizing the significance of the concept of family, this stateof-
the-art literature review captures the major theories, methods, and
case studies carried out on Arab families over the past century. The
book offers a country-by-country critical assessment of the available
scholarship on Arab families. Sixteen chapters focus on specific
countries or groups of countries; seven chapters offer examinations
of the literature on key topical issues. Joseph’s volume provides an indispensable
resource to researchers and students, and advances Arab
family studies as a critical independent field of scholarship.
View other series books on Gender, Culture, and Politics in the Middle East.
8 1/2 x 11, 624 pages, 1 black-and-white illustration, 3 tables, notes,
bibliography, index
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