Self-similarity and its perils

Abstract

Vom Bruck tackles head-on what is, perhaps, the most ubiquitous subject in the anthropology of Islam: the covering of women’s bodies and the religious rationale that accompanies such practices of ‘veiling’. In North Yemen, photos of women, especially those of the elite, are carefully guarded against unwelcomed male gazes in the same way that women protect the boundaries of their physical bodies by covering them. Islam, however, does not exhaust the types of significance injected into photographs of women. The viewing, use and potential abuse of such photographs also feature in other strands of social life in which different sets of relationship (political, kinship, economic) are enacted.