Margaret Lee Meriwether

Margaret Meriwether's The Kin Who Count: Family and Society in Ottoman Aleppo, 1770-1840 presents a social and economic history of urban, upper-class women in the Ottoman Empire focusing on the Ottoman province of Syria, rather than the imperial center.

By examining three important economic relationships - household formation, marriage patterns, and inheritance practices - Meriwether aims to reconstruct the boundaries of the family as it existed for elite Aleppines in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Her project arises in response to the persistent belief - in both academic and popular circles - that 'the Middle Eastern family' existed as a unitary and unchanging object in all times and places and that it was characterized by its large size, emphasis on patrilineal relationships to the neglect of all others, and the systematic oppression of women. While Meriwether emphasizes the great diversity of practice that existed even amongst a small group of relatively homogenous elites, her general finding is that these stereotypes do not hold true for the subjects of her study.

Cross-cousin endogamous marriage, for example, is often considered a cornerstone of the 'Middle Eastern family.' However, Meriwether found that nearly seventy percent of the marriages in her sample group were exogamous marriages. Meriwether also reframes the issue of 'ideal' versus 'real' practices by showing how Islamic law provided a flexible system of strategies that families could utilize depending on their needs, rather than a rigid code of behavior that was always followed.

Although Meriwether incorporates travelers accounts and narrative histories, the records of the Aleppine qadi courts (makama shar'iyya) from the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries are her primary source of information. These records contain notices pertaining to marriage and divorce (although they do not, in the Aleppine case, contain marriage contracts), documents pertaining to wills and the establishment of endowments (awqaf), and records of property disputes that were brought before the court.

Meriwether engages in a refreshingly frank discussion of the significance of these sources and the difficulties they present, including the problems of bias and legal fiction. She subjects these sources to two methods: family reconstitution and historical ethnography. Family reconstruction is accomplished by restricting the records under consideration to those relating to individuals with family names. Although this drastically reduces the number of families that are considered (to 104), it is a clever move, as it allows Meriwether to draw conclusions about the size of lineages and conjugal families and the composition of households in the absence of birth records or statistical data for this period. Historical ethnography compares the economic behaviors or these reconstructed individuals and families to one another over time and attempts to discern patterns from the cumulative actions of individuals. When appropriate, Meriwether incorporates data collected on household formation, marriage patterns, and inheritance practices gathered from other Ottoman urban areas in order to highlight similarities and differences with Aleppo.

The nature of Meriwether's primary source of information means that she can observe only the 'kin who count' in economic and legal terms; while this is not insignificant, it cannot automatically be conflated with 'counting' emotionally. A further drawback is that the records in question do not contain copies of marriage contracts that would provide information concerning the amount of the mahr (sort of a dowry/bride price) and the way in which is was distributed, and conditions that may have been stipulated regarding polygamy, divorce, and other conjugal matters. In the absence of these records, Meriwether's ability to speak meaningfully about marriage and the position of women within the conjugal family is rather limited.

Meriwether examines Aleppine women not as a reified thing, but as actors within an institution that shapes and is shaped by legal, social, economic, and political developments within Aleppo specifically and the Ottoman Empire at large. While her descriptions of marriage and the household are, frankly, dull when compared to those provided in a work like Fanny Davis' The Ottoman Lady, the reader of Meriwether gains a much stronger sense of how these relationships were formed and why they were important to women. Although legal documents lack 'flavor,' they show Aleppine women as agents who controlled resources and made decisions about their lives and the lives of family members.

While Meriwether does not claim that the patterns she discerns in Aleppo will be replicated elsewhere, her analysis highlights the need for sustained re-examination of the assumptions underlying knowledge of families throughout the Middle East. Her incorporation of studies of families in Nablus, Damascus, Istanbul, and Cairo in various periods in order to highlight similarities and differences with Aleppo further reinforces the impression that it is difficult to speak about 'the Middle Eastern family' in anything but the most generic sense.

The reader's greatest frustration with Meriwether may be her reluctance to overstate her findings - she continuously emphasizes the diversity of practices found even amongst her limited sample of elite families. But this is a fascinating work of very careful scholarship that was actually a lot of fun to read.… (mehr)