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Live and Die Like a Man: Gender Dynamics in Urban Egypt
Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
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About this ebook
An anthropologist deconstructs the notion of masculinity using twenty years of field research in the Cairo neighborhood of al-Zawiya.
Watching the revolution of January 2011, the world saw Egyptians, men and women, come together to fight for freedom and social justice. These events gave renewed urgency to the fraught topic of gender in the Middle East. The role of women in public life, the meaning of manhood, and the future of gender inequalities are hotly debated by religious figures, government officials, activists, scholars, and ordinary citizens throughout Egypt. Live and Die Like a Man presents a unique twist on traditional understandings of gender and gender roles, shifting the attention to men and exploring how they are collectively “produced” as gendered subjects. It traces how masculinity is continuously maintained and reaffirmed by both men and women under changing socio-economic and political conditions.
Over a period of nearly twenty years, Farha Ghannam lived and conducted research in al-Zawiya, a low-income neighborhood not far from Tahrir Square in northern Cairo. Detailing her daily encounters and ongoing interviews, she develops life stories that reveal the everyday practices and struggles of the neighborhood over the years. We meet Hiba and her husband as they celebrate the birth of their first son and begin to teach him how to become a man; Samer, a forty-year-old man trying to find a suitable wife; Abu Hosni, who struggled with different illnesses; and other local men and women who share their reactions to the uprising and the changing situation in Egypt.
Against this backdrop of individual experiences, Ghannam develops the concept of masculine trajectories to account for the various paths men can take to embody social norms. In showing how men work to realize a “male ideal,” she counters the prevalent dehumanizing stereotypes of Middle Eastern men all too frequently reproduced in media reports, and opens new spaces for rethinking patriarchal structures and their constraining effects on both men and women.
Praise for Live and Die Like a Man
“In a book that lives up to its name, anthropologist Ghannam explores what it means to be a man . . . . Her thick descriptions, amassed over 20 years of research, will make readers laugh, cry, and gasp at the lives of these individuals . . . . By examining the construct of manhood, Ghannam is charting new territory in Middle Eastern studies. Summing Up: Highly recommended.” —CHOICE
“With its focus on masculinity, Farha Ghannam’s thoughtful ethnography, Live and Die Like a Man, makes important interventions into the anthropological scholarship on gender, childhood, and family in the Middle East . . . . Her ethnographic sensibility perfectly grasps the dynamic and complex intertwining of male and female ways of being and self-presentation and how that interrelationship forms men’s lives.” —International Journal of Middle East Studies
Watching the revolution of January 2011, the world saw Egyptians, men and women, come together to fight for freedom and social justice. These events gave renewed urgency to the fraught topic of gender in the Middle East. The role of women in public life, the meaning of manhood, and the future of gender inequalities are hotly debated by religious figures, government officials, activists, scholars, and ordinary citizens throughout Egypt. Live and Die Like a Man presents a unique twist on traditional understandings of gender and gender roles, shifting the attention to men and exploring how they are collectively “produced” as gendered subjects. It traces how masculinity is continuously maintained and reaffirmed by both men and women under changing socio-economic and political conditions.
Over a period of nearly twenty years, Farha Ghannam lived and conducted research in al-Zawiya, a low-income neighborhood not far from Tahrir Square in northern Cairo. Detailing her daily encounters and ongoing interviews, she develops life stories that reveal the everyday practices and struggles of the neighborhood over the years. We meet Hiba and her husband as they celebrate the birth of their first son and begin to teach him how to become a man; Samer, a forty-year-old man trying to find a suitable wife; Abu Hosni, who struggled with different illnesses; and other local men and women who share their reactions to the uprising and the changing situation in Egypt.
Against this backdrop of individual experiences, Ghannam develops the concept of masculine trajectories to account for the various paths men can take to embody social norms. In showing how men work to realize a “male ideal,” she counters the prevalent dehumanizing stereotypes of Middle Eastern men all too frequently reproduced in media reports, and opens new spaces for rethinking patriarchal structures and their constraining effects on both men and women.
Praise for Live and Die Like a Man
“In a book that lives up to its name, anthropologist Ghannam explores what it means to be a man . . . . Her thick descriptions, amassed over 20 years of research, will make readers laugh, cry, and gasp at the lives of these individuals . . . . By examining the construct of manhood, Ghannam is charting new territory in Middle Eastern studies. Summing Up: Highly recommended.” —CHOICE
“With its focus on masculinity, Farha Ghannam’s thoughtful ethnography, Live and Die Like a Man, makes important interventions into the anthropological scholarship on gender, childhood, and family in the Middle East . . . . Her ethnographic sensibility perfectly grasps the dynamic and complex intertwining of male and female ways of being and self-presentation and how that interrelationship forms men’s lives.” —International Journal of Middle East Studies
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Reviews for Live and Die Like a Man
Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
3/5
2 ratings1 review
- Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5The strength of this ethnographic discussion of the process involved in constructing a masculine role/identity is the years of fieldwork on which it relies. The start of chapters is padded with obligatory theoretical review, but in the end these are easily passed over, and add little to the description. I was surprised by an almost conspicuous absence of two topics that one might have expected to be at least mentioned in a discussion of masculinity in Egypt: Terrorism and homosexuality. On homosexuality, she says that in twenty years of fieldwork she never met one. Given that Cairo was the site, and not a rural community, that seems especially dubious. It probably speaks to the unrepresentativeness of her sample; it is unclear in what other ways this has impacted her conclusions. As for terrorism, for this not even to be mentioned is again curious. Given the quite high incidence of terrorist attacks within Egypt, it is incredible that no one had any opinion, or ever talked about it, especially in the context of how men were expected to behave.So the work is not without flaws, but it also offers the occasional interesting insight.
Book preview
Live and Die Like a Man - Farha Ghannam
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