John Gulick

Migrant and Native Married Women in the Iranian City of Isfahan

The subject is 165 married women and the comparison of two groups among them: 63 migrants and 102 city natives. Virtually the same in average age (about 26) and average number of years married (11), the migrant and native groups are similar in most of the patterns of behavior studied, as suggested by average age at marriage (15.5 and 14.3 years), number of pregnancies (5.5 and 4.9), and number of living children (3.6 and 3.3). Types of household composition are similar, as are frequencies of contact with relatives generally. Differences between the two groups are: smaller proportion of natives illiterate (46.5% vs. 68.3%), native preference for somewhat fewer children and fewer natives not having practiced contraception, and more native emphasis on education for elementary-school-age daughters. These differences may indicate urban influences and incipient culture change. However, the differences are slight. We attribute the predominant similarities to the migrant womens move, mostly with their husbands, from a domestic, female-secluded, sexsegregated rural environment to a protected domestic environment in the city, similar to the one they left and to that of the city-native women.

VARIETIES OF DOMESTIC SOCIAL ORGANIZATION IN THE IRANIAN CITY OF ISFAHAN

The two principal purposes of this paper are to present substantive information on some varities of domestic social organization in a major Middle Eastern city and to help clarify problems in defining varities of domestic social organization. A brief discussion of these problems of definition is necessary at the outset of this paper. Despite the existence of a vast literature on “the family,” imprecision continues to be a weakness of many studies that attempt to use varieties of domestic social organization as analytic variables. Inconclusive or confusing “findings” are often the consequence. For example, Burch and Gendell’ have shown how some studies attempting to correlate women’s fertility rates with the types of families of which they are members produce confusing or contradictory results because, among other things, the family types were defined too vaguely. If the problem were merely one of taxonomy for its own sake, yet another discussion of the subject might seem superffuous, for the major sources of the trouble have been recognized for some time. They include the failure to distinguish between coresident and non-coresident extended families and the very real difficulties of distinguishing, in a body of synchronic data, cyclic developmental phases within a single normative structure (e.g., coresident patrilocal extended family) from a plurality of normative structures (e.g., nuclear, stem, and extended families). However, resolutions of the problem in the abstract have not been carried over very well into specific analyses of data. Consequently, many studies that attempt to use “family types” as indices of urbanization, or modernization or social stratification, or some combination of these, often fail to sharpen our generally fuzzy conceptions of these important processes. Still groping in this fuzziness, many anthropologists are tempted to make shortcuts to clarity and rigor by statistically manipulating quantitative materials (e.g., “household size”). As any good quantitative analyst knows, however, such shortcuts can have insidious results unless the variables are precisely defined in the first place. The increasing availability of quantitative data, such as national censuses and surveys in countries where there has not been any such information until recently, intensifies the temptation to take shortcuts. Therefore, it becomes all the more important

Still searching for urban anthropology

Abner Cohen, ed. Urban Ethnicity. London: Tavistock Publications. Association of Social Anthropologists, Monograph No. 12, 1974. xxiv + 391 pp. Tables, references, and index.

Tripoli: A Modern Arab City.

16.00. George M. Foster and Robert V. Kemper, eds. Anthropologists in Cities. Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1974. viii + 261 pp. Charts and bibliography.

Mothers' Influence on Daughters' Orientations toward Education: An Egyptian Case Study

6.95 (paper).