Abstract
This chapter draws on ethnographic research conducted with frontline women security service workers in Karachi, Pakistan. Women security service workers enable Pakistani women citizens to maintain purdah (a form of gendered privacy) in their interactions with the state (and its allies) but do so at the cost of their own privacy and respectability. While investigating how these frontline women navigate the dignity dilemmas their purdah-violations produce, the author felt compelled to adopt various modalities of purdah herself, including interdependence, privation, and self-defense. Although this incorporation of purdah’s modalities in ethnographic practice was very generative, it was also fraught with questions surrounding power and representation. The chapter reflects on these tensions, describing them as a two-boat dilemma—the predicament native-born sociologists face when they try to deploy tools and methods forged in the West to study their home societies in the name of a foreign social science.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Similar content being viewed by others
Notes
- 1.
Scholars typically use college education as a proxy for middle-class status. However, such an operationalization is complicated in Pakistan, where questions of status complicate the meaning of class. I define these women as working class in order to distinguish them from the working poor (janitorial staff, unskilled labor) and from the relatively affluent middle class who study at English medium private schools or women who are employed in the officer cadre that requires passing civil service examinations. A handful of my participants possessed two-year college degrees, even though their jobs did not require such qualifications, though most had only completed high school (a degree locally referred to as Intermediate). Moreover, these women lived primarily in neighborhoods (like Lyari) that are considered low income or working class, and had parents, siblings, and spouses working jobs that are seen as working class, such as taxi driver, mechanic, or clerk.
- 2.
The training program was put on indefinite hold, and I was therefore forced to work in Karachi instead.
- 3.
“Headquarters” refers to the offices of senior police officers—often those who joined via the civil service route. These offices are different from station houses, which are intended to process those accused of crime and to interface with the public.
- 4.
Local tea shops, known as dhabas, are rarely hospitable to women. Thus, middle-class feminists in 2013 initiated a movement called Girls at Dhabas, a social media intervention that seeks to start a conversation about women’s lack of access to public space in Pakistan.
- 5.
Women have begun driving motorbikes, the most prevalent form of transport for the working class in Karachi, but it is still rare to see women do so.
References
Abu-Lughod, Lila. 2002. Do Muslim Women Really Need Saving? Anthropological Reflections on Cultural Relativism and Its Others. American Anthropologist 104 (3): 783–790. https://doi.org/10.1525/aa.2002.104.3.783.
Ali, Nosheen. 2019. Delusional States : Feeling Rule and Development in Pakistan’s Northern Frontier. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Chatterjee, Patralekha. 2019. Hysterectomies in Beed District Raise Questions for India. The Lancet (British Edition) 394 (10194): 202–202. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0140-6736(19)31669-1.
DeVault, Marjorie L. 1999. Liberating Method: Feminism and Social Research. Philadelphia, Temple University Press.
Gottfried, Heidi. 1996. Feminism and Social Change : Bridging Theory and Practice. Urbana: University of Illinois Press.
Haque, Riffat. 2020. The Institution of Purdah: A Feminist Perspective. Pakistan Journal of Gender Studies. 1 (1): 47–71.
Harding, Sandra G. 1992. Whose Science? Whose Knowledge?: Thinking from Women’s Lives. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.
Hartsock, Nancy C.M. 1998. The Feminist Standpoint Revisited and Other Essays. Boulder, Colo: Westview Press.
Hill Collins, Patricia. 2009. Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment. 2nd ed. New York: Routledge.
Hoang, Kimberly Kay. 2015. Dealing in Desire: Asian Ascendancy, Western Decline, and the Hidden Currencies of Global Sex Work. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. https://doi.org/10.1525/9780520960688.
Husain, Fauzia. 2020. Halal Dating, Purdah, and Postfeminism: What the Sexual Projects of Pakistani Women Can Tell Us About Agency. Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 45 (3): 629–652. https://doi.org/10.1086/706470.
Kugelman, Michael. 2017. Why Pakistan Hates Malala. Foreign Policy, August 15. https://foreignpolicy.com/2017/08/15/why-pakistan-hates-malala/.
Linder, Marc, and Nygaard Ingrid. 1998. Void Where Prohibited : Rest Breaks and the Right to Urinate on Company Time. Ithaca, NY: ILR Press.
Masood, Ayesha. 2019. Doing Gender, Modestly: Conceptualizing Workplace Experiences of Pakistani Women Doctors. Gender, Work, and Organization 26 (2): 214–228. https://doi.org/10.1111/gwao.12308.
Mirza, Jasmin. 2002. Between Chaddor and the Market : Female Office Workers in Lahore. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Naples, Nancy A. 2013. Feminism and Method: Ethnography, Discourse Analysis, and Activist Research. Taylor and Francis. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315889245.
Narayan, Uma. 1998. Essence of Culture and a Sense of History: A Feminist Critique of Cultural Essentialism. Hypatia 13 (2): 86–106. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1527-2001.1998.tb01227.x.
Papanek, Hanna. 1973. Purdah: Separate Worlds and Symbolic Shelter. Comparative Studies in Society and History 15 (3): 289–325. https://doi.org/10.1017/S001041750000712X.
Phadke, Shilpa, Khan Sameera, and Ranade Shilpa. 2011. Why Loiter? : Women and Risk on Mumbai Streets. New Delhi: Penguin Books.
Sehgal, M. 2009. The Veiled Feminist Ethnographer: Fieldwork Among Women of India’s Hindu Right. In Women Fielding Danger: Negotiating Ethnographic Identities in Field Research, ed. M. Huggins and M. Glebbeek, 325–352. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers.
Simmel, Georg. 1906. The Sociology of Secrecy and of Secret Societies. The American Journal of Sociology 11 (4): 441–498. https://doi.org/10.1086/211418.
Skidmore, M. 2009. Secrecy and trust in the affective field: Conducting fieldwork in Burma. In In Women Fielding Danger : Negotiating Ethnographic Identities in Field Research, ed. Martha Knisely Huggins and Marie-Louise Glebbeek. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers.
Smith, Dorothy. 1993. Knowing a Society from Within: A Woman’s Standpoint. In Social Theory: The Multicultural and Classic Readings, ed. Charles Lemert. Boulder, CO: Westview Press.
Taj, Farhat. 2004. Policing in Purdah: Women and Women Police Station, Peshawar, NWFP, Pakistan. Bergen: Center for Women’s and Gender Research, University of Bergen.
Visweswaran, Kamala. 1994. Fictions of Feminist Ethnography. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2022 The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Husain, F. (2022). Veiled Sociology: The Epistemologies of Purdah and Two-Boat Ethnography. In: Radhakrishnan, S., Vijayakumar, G. (eds) Sociology of South Asia. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-97030-7_6
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-97030-7_6
Published:
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-030-97029-1
Online ISBN: 978-3-030-97030-7
eBook Packages: Social SciencesSocial Sciences (R0)