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Contemporary Ethnography
Gender on the Market

Gender on the Market

Moroccan Women and the Revoicing of Tradition

by Deborah Kapchan

Published by: University of Pennsylvania Press, Inc.

Series: Contemporary Ethnography

Imprint: University of Pennsylvania Press

352 Pages, 18 illus.

Web PDF
9780812202434
Published: November 2010

Description
Contents
Praise

Selected by Choice magazine as an Outstanding Academic Book for 1996

Gender on the Market is a study of Moroccan women's expressive culture and the ways in which it both determines and responds to current transformations in gender roles. Beginning with women's emergence into what has been defined as the most paradigmatic of Moroccan male institutions—the marketplace—the book elucidates how gender and commodity relations are experienced and interpreted in women's aesthetic practices.

Deborah Kapchan compellingly demonstrates that Moroccan women challenge some of the most basic cultural assumptions of their society—especially ones concerning power and authority.

List of Figures
Transcription and Transliteration
Acknowledgments: Possession by Three Spirits
Introduction: The Dialogic Enterprise of Women in Changing Social Contexts

PART ONE. WOMEN IN THE MARKET
1. In the Place of the Market
2. Shtara: Competence in Cleverness
3. Words of Possession, Possession of Words: the Majduba
4. Words About Herbs: Feminine Performance of Oratory in the Marketplace
5. Reporting the New, Revoicing the Past' Marketplace Oratory and the Carnivalesque

PART TWO. GENDER ON THE MARKET
6. Women on the Market: The Subversive Bride
7. Catering to the Sexual Market: Female Performers Defining the Social Body
8. Property in the (Other) Person: Mothers-in-Law, Working Women, and Maids
9. Terms of Talking Back: Women's Discourse on Magic
10. Conclusion: Hybridization and the Marketplace

Appendix 1: Discourse of the Majduba
Appendix 2: Discourse of the 'Ashshaba
Glossary
Bibliography
Subject Index
Author Index

"Kapchan's splendid enthnographic study of women's performance genres in Beni Mellal, Morocco, is an outstanding contribution to gender studies and to the understanding of Middle Eastern society. . . . Through the idiom of social performance, Kapchan paints a vivid picture of the changing domains of household and family. . . . This book will be useful to a broad audience, including those concerned with discourse analysis, the anthropology of gender, and the contemporary Middle East and North Africa."—Choice