242 paola sacchi and pier paolo viazzo
many rural parts of the Mediterranean and the Middle East, may have sometimes been
guilty of projecting their findings back into a past still plagued by much higher
mortality levels than at the time of their field research. On the other hand, they have
had unique opportunities to capture the subtle dynamics of family life in patriarchal
households (or indeed, for nomadic peoples, in patriarchal “tentholds” where kin live
in close spatial proximity) and to demonstrate the great strength of ideology—no
doubt also in the past—as a means of ensuring the reproduction of power relations in
the domestic realm. This is perhaps nowhere better visible than in Abu-Lughod’s
influential ethnographic study of the Awlad ‘Ali Bedouins of the Egyptian western
desert, which effectively shows how cultural ideals like the codes of honor for adult
men and modesty for women and the young, both closely tied to the worthiness of
one’s patrilineal descent group and framed as values in moral terms, can guarantee
“that individuals will desire to do what perpetuates the system” (Abu-Lughod, 1986: 238).
The image of the patriarchal family that emerges from these ethnographic studies
is far more nuanced than one might suppose. An essential point is that when girls are
given away in marriage into households headed by their husband’s father, they tend
to be subordinate not only to all the men but also to the more senior women, espe-
cially their mothers-in-law: commonly attested on the south-eastern shore of the
Mediterranean, this pattern was also to be found in the large joint-family households
of Tuscan sharecroppers up to recent times (Bianco, 1988). Kandiyoti’s insight that
the members of these households “bargain” for power and security in a domestic
context enmeshed in patriarchal ideology helps bring to light the other side of this
form of patriarchy, epitomized by the figure of the “powerful postmenopausal matri-
arch,” and in particular the cyclical nature of women’s power. Although the most
evident outcome of this bargain is women’s adhesion to codes of behavior (including
modesty and obedience) that uphold the collective interests of the kin group in
exchange for protection from brothers and sons, a thorough internalization of patri-
archal values by the women themselves is also encouraged by their anticipation of
inheriting the authority of senior women and having access to old-age security
(Kandiyoti, 1991: 32–33).
That women could play a very active role, or indeed hold considerable power, in
“patriarchal” societies has also been shown by several historical studies. In eighteenth-
century Egypt, for instance, the growth of Mamluk power both in Cairo and in pro-
vincial towns ultimately rested on the ability of patrilineal households to resist
fragmentation through a strengthening of the links between their male members.
This was largely achieved by arranging marriages and concubinal unions, which served
as a means of transmitting and preserving property within the same household and
simultaneously made wives and concubines lively economic and political subjects:
they enjoyed autonomy over their property, administered religious endowments
(waqfs) and built their own patronage networks (Fay, 1996). These studies show that
in pre-modern Egypt women belonging to the upper and middle strata of the popula-
tion could devote themselves to commercial activities and accumulate wealth, and
there is evidence that poorer women were also very much part of the economic life of
their communities as craftswomen, petty traders and providers of various services.
Paradoxically, if one considers that the dissolution of the patriarchal domestic order is
usually assumed to be a marker of modernization, women suffered a loss of status as
the modern bureaucratic Egyptian state arose and consolidated its power. In the first