Last December Zina Sawaf defended her PhD thesis in Anthropology and Sociology of Development, entitled “Encountering the State: Women and Intimate Lives in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia” at the Graduate Institute. Professor Isabelle Schulte-Tenckhoff presided the committee, which included Professor Riccardo Bocco, Thesis Director, and Professor Pascal Menoret, from Brandeis University, MA, United States. Her thesis is an ethnographic study of embodied encounters between women and the processes, offices and officials of the state as well as its documentary practices in Riyadh. It shows how Saudi society, through women and their intimate lives, encounters the state by turning to it as a source of justice, or by experiencing it as an unpredictable impediment to their causes.
Can you describe your research and its major findings?
My thesis is an ethnography of divorce and feminine agency. It shares the experiences and interactions of women as they navigate the bureaucratic arena in order to initiate and obtain divorce or other divorce-related rights, including alimony and communication. In the process, they come to draw on a range of practices including reporting and recording abuse, and filing and petitioning state offices through documents, letters and paper proofs. I find that even though they are embedded within the established male guardianship system and enter into drawn-out processes of negotiation with the judiciary that often do not neatly match their expectations, they depend upon themselves first and foremost and develop new ways of “being-with” themselves, their families and ultimately the state. Indeed, and throughout these encounters, women are central actors in renegotiating and redrawing new boundaries around their intimate lives.
How did you choose this research topic?
As often happens during long-term fieldwork, the ethnographer turns her attention towards the overbearing conditions of the field that make themselves felt and known. Although I set out to study familial interrelations, widespread gender segregation and surveillance in Riyadh limited my interactions by and large to women.
Within the domestic and familial spaces I moved into, I continually came into contact with divorcées. With the national rate of divorce frequently making headline news, such as “Eight Cases of Divorce Every Hour in Saudi”, it is not uncommon for women to divorce and remarry once, twice and thrice. In order to file for and obtain divorce, however, women fight an uphill battle as they negotiate both family and state power on the one hand, and contend with bureaucratic fights, court dates and anxieties over documentation, or the lack thereof, on the other hand. This contrasts dramatically with the physical and poetic labour exerted by women during the pre-modern state period in order to seek conjugal separation. While women often do not succeed in obtaining divorce today, in large part due to their disempowerment by law and order, they nonetheless redefine their “being-with” the state, and recreate their lifeworlds through matrilineal links, constituting a “counter-society”.
Can you tell us about the policy relevance of your research?
When petitioning state offices and interacting with officials, women are invited to take up the position of self-possessed claimants and rights-bearing individuals. As a woman seeks to separate from her husband, however, it becomes unclear who is legally accountable for her – her husband or her agnatic kin, such as her father, brother or even son. What is more, a woman is made vulnerable, which is not the same as being made victim, a priori by her embeddedness within the overlapping and unfair male guardianship and legal systems. The latter tend to privilege men and prioritise reconciliation over the wishes of a woman initiating and seeking divorce.
My research speaks of her increasingly complicated bureaucratic and juridical position, which requires new policies to do justice to her social and family affairs, and to ensure her right of becoming a juridical person. One example is the recent decision to issue family cards to women who are divorced or widowed. The card identifies a divorcée or widow as the head of family and proves her relationship to all her children, even if they are of different fathers. The decision is intended to ease governmental, administrative and legal procedures for her particularly vis-à-vis institutions that necessitate the confirmation of the identities of her dependents.
How will you remember your doctoral experience?
The year I lived in Riyadh between 2013 and 2014 was one of the most adventurous and unpredictable years of my life. Although Saudi Arabia shares cultural affinity with, and geographical proximity to, my native Lebanon, I was amazed by how different the two countries are. While many countries of the Levant, including Lebanon, Syria and Iraq, increasingly contend with sectarian fault lines, I was surprised to find that in Saudi other kinds of fault lines were equally alive, those between the hadar (settled urbanites) and the Bedouin, and between people who can claim tribal belonging and people who cannot claim tribal belonging. These fault lines point to the predominant oral and nomadic heritage of central Arabia, one that is no longer as resonant in the cities of the Levant.
As for writing the actual thesis, it was marked by much self-doubt and suffering. While the fieldwork experience was by nature social and imponderable, the writing experience was very much an individual and intractable process. I was ultimately able to wed the two experiences in a moving narrative that not only reflected upon being in Riyadh, and doing fieldwork in Riyadh, but also relayed the multiple and ongoing negotiations undertaken by women in and from Riyadh vis-à-vis the state, their families and ultimately themselves.
What are you doing now?
I am a lecturer in anthropology at the American University of Beirut, and I aim to spend the coming year turning my thesis into a book manuscript for publication by a university press. I also intend to write and publish shorter academic articles derived from my thesis chapters.
Full citation of the PhD thesis: Sawaf, Zina. “Encountering the State: Women and Intimate Lives in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia”. PhD thesis, Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies, 2016.
Illustration: Riyadh, 12 April 2014. Photo by Zina Sawaf.