[
    {
        "id": 212415,
        "series_id": 26,
        "series_slug": "histsyn-rashkb-journal-engine",
        "series_title": "RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊",
        "series_use_hku_proxy": false,
        "document_key": "RAS-1990",
        "page_number": 357,
        "title": "RAS-1990",
        "content_text": "334\n\nWhen you buy a book in your field — in my case women — you often do so simply because it is there and you have to have it. It is only when you get it home and start to weigh it up that you start to form judgements. If it concerns something I am writing about at the time, I look first at the bibliography and index. More generally, I look first at the illustrations to get a feel of a book, then at the preface and acknowledgements to get a feel of the writer. A book concentrating on marriage from whatever perspective, or about wherever in the world, should give out a whiff of something fascinating in that distinctive aspect of society. In this respect, The Bartered Brides starts well. There are three pictures captioned ‘A married couple ask to have their picture taken’ (p. 135). If in that particular case the bride was bartered, then both partners were, it seems, happy with the deal. Their warm feelings for each other, and their sense of fun, are delightfully apparent.\n\n—\n\nThe author, anthropologist Nancy Tapper, from whose doctoral thesis the book is derived, starts her acknowledgements, 'My debts to Richard Tapper are limitless' (p. xix); she then elaborates on their long and fruitful collaboration in both fieldwork and writing among the Maduzai of Afghanistan. ‘This woman has a head start in an attempt to analyse marriage,’ was my reaction, whether or not she is going to find for or against the marriage system of the tribal people about whom she writes, \"We care very deeply for them\" (p. xx). What is more important about this book is that, since the recent upheavals in Afghanistan, it is a unique record of a way of life that has inevitably disappeared; it is a memorial.\n\nThis introduction may have given the impression that Bartered Brides is a book for the general reader; that is not so. It is an academic one — scholarly, indeed — intended for those actively pursuing interests in gender studies, anthropology (including politics and economics), and Afghanistan. This last category includes Central Asia, for the Maduzai, one of the major tribes of the Durrani Pashtuns, are an Islamic Turkic people.\n\nThe problems of the anthropologist in observing a society and then of explaining it to the reader start, as Tapper explains, with translation. The fact that some terms are apparently easily translatable into English brings its own difficulties with, for example, the term 'marriage' itself. To point out such difficulties is to hint at the...",
        "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1990.txt",
        "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/d79206299",
        "rank": 0
    },
    {
        "id": 212416,
        "series_id": 26,
        "series_slug": "histsyn-rashkb-journal-engine",
        "series_title": "RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊",
        "series_use_hku_proxy": false,
        "document_key": "RAS-1990",
        "page_number": 358,
        "title": "RAS-1990",
        "content_text": "335\n\nacademic scope and complexity of what follows. The concepts of honour a man's prestige, achieved partly by controlling the women of his household and shame the ability of a woman to undermine the man's honour, and precipitate a public scandal (with the power implicit in that) are central and fascinating themes drawn out of Durrani society. Thus the skeins of women's subordination within a patriarchal system start to unravel.\n\nIf those can be seen as horizontal themes, then the vertical ones are suggested by the inclusion of historical material over a period of 50 years which allows an exploration of social change within marriage. That leads to suggested explanations for concurrent changes in other areas of social organisation and environment. Even more distinctive, the Durrani marriage forms an integral part of political relations at all levels, from the household to the ethnic group: it is both the cause and consequence of political activity. The goal is political and economic security and continuity, both in this world and the next. Thus the brideprice, which enables the acquisition of new wives, is the economic pivot.\n\nOne of the most poignant examples of women as commodity, exemplified by marriage, is the fact that women of different households only cooperate in productive work when it comes to the preparation of the trousseau. From the trousseau will come recognition for the bride in her marital home. And yet, she can be given she plus another woman in compensation for a killing. A woman given in exchange for a brideprice suggests higher status on the part of the bride taker, than that of two men who exchange two women as brides.\n\nLIZ\n\nBut, the point in the study that I am now emphasising, woman as commodity, suggests that I am in danger of beginning to treat a scholarly book in an unscholarly way. I am indicating my unfitness coolly to observe and record and analyse; I am putting my Western feminist sentiments inappropriately in the picture. I wonder why that wife looks so contented in the photograph; perhaps no one has told her she is a mere commodity: but when she finds out for herself, and its implications, and works out solutions to what will then be a problem, someone may be in trouble!\n\nSUSANNA HOE",
        "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1990.txt",
        "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/d79206299",
        "rank": 0
    }
]