The Women of Deh Koh: Lives in an Iranian Village

I found this book to be on the verbose side. Her flowery, overly descriptive sentences go on and on and on. These are some of the longest sentences I have ever read! I found myself skimming through all the sentences used to describe, maybe, ONE thing...like a building and where things are located and what it looks like.For example: Page 82: "Many thick cushions with gigantic flowers stitched on white covers lay along the walls on a thick rug, portraits of the Imam Khomeini and other dignitaries on one blue wall serenely looked across to posters of fat cows in lush meadows and a boat sailing on a lake of uncommonly vivid blue, and the window was graced with a curtain displaying rows of bleating roebucks with bloated red heads." OMG! Okaky, it'd be fine if there were a FEW sentences like that...but page after page? If I didn't concentrate entirely, I would start to space out! While the subject matter is interesting to me, the writing is just way too detailed in its descriptions to be called an enjoyable experience. Too many descriptive adjectives ruin the narrative. Nevertheless, for people who are interested in the lives of women in other countries, this is an important book.I got to a chapter where I couldn't keep all the 'characters' straight. I gave up and threw out the book. It's no fun reading when you have to work at figuring out who's who. This might be a great book for an anthropologist, though.

This is an excellent book for a reader who really wants to know how a typical Iranian villager lives. Series of short fascinating stories about different people in one small village.

Was a textbook for a college class.

As a student, graduate student, and professional, I have been reading anthropology for about 40 years. Some of that reading is necessarily in theory, in books that deal with new ideas and concepts or attempt to overturn the old. But, to broaden one's horizons, to keep abreast of how people are writing, and to get material to use for classes, an anthropologist has to read a certain number of ethnographies every year. So, I suppose I may say, however immodestly, that I have read quite a few ethnographies. A lot, actually. Of all such books that I have read in the last forty years, I would say that Friedl's WOMEN OF DEH KOH ranks in the top three or four. I never read a review of it, I stumbled on it in a bookstore, I am not an Iran-specialist. But this is just a gem of a book. If you want to understand the workings of an Iranian village, not from the usual anthropological perspective of neat categorizations and summings-up of the ethnographer's work, but from poetical prose that seems to come from the womens' mouths, then you must read this book. The author allows the women to speak more than almost anyone else I have ever read. The book could be a novel, but it is not at all, the author defines her presence, explains how she wrote the book. It is divided into 12 chapters, each devoted to a separate woman, but the others appear again and again, fleshing out the bones of the story, making the village come alive in their interactions. Any student of anthropology would love to read this book and for teachers it is an excellent ethnography to show what the field is really all about. If you have nothing to do with anthropology, but are interested in Iran or, if you are just surfing around looking for a good book, choose this one ! Oh, God, if You could only have let me write like Erika Friedl !

In "Women of Deh Koh" Ericka Friedl presents us with the stories of twelve different Iranian village women, using situations, she says "in which many women find themselves, wish to find themselves, or hope never to find themselves at one stage or another in their lives." She lays out the stories from the woman's point of view, touching on subjects such as rape, arranged marriage, polygamy, but never once asking for sympathy or understanding. From Perijan with a late child to Sarah who's husband took another wife to Parvane with a mental illness, we become a part of these women's lives and get a glimpse of their intricate social structure and how they support each other. While the stories are about different women, many of the other women are present in the stories, so we quickly feel as if we know these women, as if they are our friends.This book is a wonderful example of the "show, don't tell" concept one of my English teachers always tried to get across to us. Friedl never "tells" us anything, but rather lets us come to our own understandings from reading about the everyday lives of these women. This book completely changed my perspective of Islamic women. From reading other books (namely the "Princess" series) I thought that women under Islam were downtrodden, oppressed, and desperately needed to be liberated. Naive, I know, however that is largely the image presented to us. After reading this book however, I realized that my stereotypes of Islamic women were for the most part, wrong. The women in "Women of Deh Koh" don't feel sorry for themselves, and neither should we.Ericka Friedl is a gifted writer, and ties all the women's stories together beautifully. I have read the book close to 20 times, and have walked away more fulfilled each time. This is, perhaps, the best book I've ever read.