Reviews for Women of Deh Koh: Lives in an Iranian Village

The average rating for Women of Deh Koh: Lives in an Iranian Village based on 2 reviews is 4.5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2018-02-25 00:00:00 Cecil Sansbury One of the best ethnographies ever written As a student, graduate student, and professional, I have been reading anthropology for over 50 years. Some of that reading is necessarily in theory, in books that deal with new ideas and concepts or attempt to overturn the old. But, to broaden one's horizons, to keep abreast of how people are writing, and to get material to use for classes, an anthropologist has to read a certain number of ethnographies every year. So, I suppose I may say, however immodestly, that I have read quite a few ethnographies. A lot, actually. Of all such books that I have read in the last fifty years, I would say that Friedl's WOMEN OF DEH KOH ranks in the top three or four. I never read a review of it, I stumbled on it in a bookstore, I am not an Iran-specialist. But this is just a gem of a book. If you want to understand the workings of an Iranian village, not from the usual anthropological perspective of neat categorizations and summings-up of the ethnographer's work, but from poetical prose that seems to come from the womens' mouths, then you must read this book. The author allows the women to speak more than almost anyone else I have ever read. The book could be a novel, but it is not at all, the author defines her presence, explains how she wrote the book. It is divided into 12 chapters, each devoted to a separate woman, but the others appear again and again, fleshing out the bones of the story, making the village come alive in their interactions. Any student of anthropology would love to read this book and for teachers it is an excellent ethnography to show what the field is really all about. If you have nothing to do with anthropology, but are interested in Iran or, if you are just surfing around looking for a good book, choose this one ! Oh, God, if You could only have let me write like Erika Friedl !

Review # 2 was written on 2021-01-20 00:00:00 Beverly Valk Friedl gives one of the best and most empathetic studies of traditional village women's lives. She lets the women explain their struggles, accomplishments, and frustrations, as their lives were in the 1980s. For example, she finds that many village girls went to school until about grade three, then were forced to drop out before they grew sexually attractive, to protect them from aroused males. But it seems this concern to avoid sexual abuse commonly went hand-in-hand with desire to exploit the girls for cheap or free labor: "… locally, women are said to 'belong in the house,' yet one sees many women out on apparently legitimate errands, often all day and far from home … a girl is taken out of school after third grade because it is not right for her to be among strangers, but the next day she is working in an outpost camp in the mountains, in full view of women, men, relatives, and strangers alike." (p. 196) Where we might expect to find retiring, victimized women, Friedl describes a host of feisty, hard-working, commonly bossy women: "in everyday life …, men commonly admit that their wives or mothers control everything in the household'being omniscient, respected, feared and loved, all at the same time'like the stereotypical Jewish mother." (p. 151)