Tribeswomen of Iran: Weaving Memories among Qashqa'i Nomads (International Library of Iranian Studies) [Hardcover]

Julia Huang (Author)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 1845118324 | ISBN-13: 978-1845118327 | Publication Date: May 12, 2009

Since the revolution in 1979, the Islamic Republic of Iran has permitted very few Western scholars to conduct research in the country. Here Julia Huang provides a remarkable account of local tribal Iranian life, depicting a community largely beyond the scope and reach of foreign travellers and the Western media. The Qashqa’i nomads are migrant pastoralists--Huang documents their difficult livelihoods and lifestyles, their society and culture, and explains how this Turkic-speaking group relates to the wider Iranian society and the Islamic Republic. Focusing on a small group of women, she shows us how they adapt to a rapidly changing world while retaining tribal values and a distinctive ethnolinguistic identity as one of Iran’s national minorities. Engagingly written and documenting a disappearing way of life, Tribeswomen of Iran is essential reading for all those interested in Iran, the Middle East, anthropology, nomadism and gender.

Editorial Reviews

Review

Tribeswomen of Iran takes the reader into the empty sectors of southwestern Iran. There, Huang describes earth and sky and a tribal people closely linked by kinship, history, and the new challenges that come from the Islamic regime in Tehran and from modernity itself. A work of power and complexity it is memoir, ethnography, and a work of literature. Tribeswomen of Iran is of such nuance and importance that I believe it may well do what the matriarch Falak says when she observes her youngest daughter bent over a loom: Writing is more important than weaving a carpet. When we finish a carpet and cut it off the loom, we have to give it away to someone, and then we never see it again. But writing lasts forever - William Honeychurch, Assistant Professor of Anthropology, Yale University. Huang is a well-trained ethnographer and a highly disciplined observer, and this intensely engaging and readable book is clear evidence of her brilliant and wonderfully curious mind. As an Iranian-American scholar, I was enormously touched by Huang's descriptions of tribal women's lives in Iran and by her desire to represent accurately and to correct wrong perceptions about the people among whom she has lived for so many years. I am sure that readers will find enchanting Huang's observations as a child growing up with nomads in Iran - Shahla Haeri, Director of the Women's Studies Program and Associate Professor of Anthropology, Boston University.

About the Author

Julia Huang lived among the Qashqa’i nomadic pastoralists in southwestern Iran for extended periods of her childhood and adolescence between 1991 and 2004. She is the author of a chapter in Nomadic Societies in the Middle East and North Africa (2006; edited by Dawn Chatty) and the co-author of an article on Iran in "Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa, and the Middle East" (2006). She has a received a Fulbright Fellowship for research in Turkey and works with an NGO in the Caucasus and Central Asia. Proficient in Turkish, Persian and French, she is pursuing a degree in anthropology at Yale University.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 288 pages
• Publisher: Tauris Academic Studies (May 12, 2009)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1845118324
• ISBN-13: 978-1845118327
• Product Dimensions: 8.5 x 5.6 x 1.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #398,033 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Discover books, learn about writers, read author blogs, and more.