UNDER WESTERN EYES 61 before the initiation are constituted within a different set of social relations compared to Bemba women after the initiation. To treat them as a unified d by the fact of their excha to deny the sociohistorical and cultural specificities of their existence and the differential value attached to their exchange before and after their initiation. It is to treat the initiation ceremony as a ritual with no political implications or effects. It is also to assume that in merely describing the structure of the marriage contract, the situation of women is exposed Women as a group are positioned within a given structure, but there is no attempt made to trace the effect of the marriage practice in constituting women within an obviously changing network of power relations. Thus, women are assumed to be sexual-political subjects prior to entry into kinship structures Women and Familial systems Elizabeth Cowie(1978), in another context, points out the implications of this sort of analysis when she emphasizes the specifically political nature of kinship structures which must be analyzed as ideological prac tices which designate men and women as father, husband, wife, mother, sister, etc. Thus, Cowie suggests, women as women are not located within the family. Rather, it is in the family, as an effect of kinship structures, that women as women are constructed, defined within and by the group. Thus, for instance, when Juliette Minces(1980)cites the patriarchal family as the basis for an almost identical vision of women"that Arab and Muslim societies have, she falls into this very trap(see especially p. 23) Not only is it problematical to speak of a vision of women shared by Arab and Muslim societies (i.e, over twenty different countries)without addressing the particular historical, material, and ideological power struc tures that construct such images, but to speak of the patriarchal family or the tribal kinship structure as the origin of the socioeconomic status of women is to again assume that women are sexual-political subjects prior to their entry into the family. So while on the one hand women attain value or status within the family, the assumption of a singular patriarchal kinship system(common to all Arab and Muslim societies)is what apparently structures women as an oppressed group in these so cieties! This singular, coherent kinship system presumably influences an other separate and given entity, women. "Thus, all women, regardless of class and cultural differences, are affected by this system. Not only are all arab and Muslim women seen to constitute a homogeneous oppressed group, but there is no discussion of the specific practices within the family which constitute women as mothers wives, sisters, etc. Arabs and mus lims, it appears, don't change at all. Their patriarchal family is carried
Power, Representation and feminist Critique over from the times of the prophet Mohammed. They exist, as it were outside histe Women and Religious Ideologies A further example of the use of"women"as a category of analysis is found in cross-cultural analyses which subscribe to a certain economic reductionism in describing the relationship between the economy and factors such as politics and ideology. Here, in reducing the level of com parison to the economic relations between"developed and developing countries, any specificity to the question of women is denied. Mina Mo dares ( 1981), in a careful analysis of women and Shi ism in Iran, focuses on this very problem when she criticizes feminist writings which treat Islam as an ideology separate from and outside social relations and prac tices, rather than a discourse which includes rules for economic, social, and power relations within society. Patricia Jeffery's(1979)otherwis informative work on Pirzada women in purdah considers Islamic ideology a partial explanation for the status of women in that it provides a justi fication for the purdah. Here, Islamic ideology is reduced to a set of ideas whose internalization by Pirzada women contributes to the stability of the system. However, the primary explanation for purdah is located in the control that Pirzada men have over economic resources, and the per sonal security purdah gives to Pirzada women By taking a specific version of Islam as the Islam, Jeffery attributes singularity and coherence to it. Modares notes, ' Islamic Theology'then becomes imposed on a separate and given entity called'women. A further unification is reached Women(meaning all women), regardless of their differing positions within societies, come to be affected or not affected by Islam. These conceptions provide the right ingredients for an unproble- matic possibility of a cross-cultural study of women"(63). Marnia Lazreg makes a similar argument when she addresses the reductionism inherent in scholarship on women in the Middle east and North africa a ritual is established whereby the writer appeals to religion as the cause of gender inequality just as it is made the source of underdevelopment in much of modernization theory. In an uncanny way, feminist discourse on women from the Middle East and North Africa mirrors that of theologians'own nterpretation of women in Islam The overall effect of this paradigm is to deprive women of self-presence of being. Because women are subsumed under religion presented in funda- mental terms, they are inevitably seen as evolving in nonhistorical time. They irtually have no history. Any analysis of change is therefore foreclosed (1988,87)