Arab Routes: Pathways to Syrian California. Sarah Gualtieri (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2019). Pp. 206. $80.00 cloth. ISBN: 9781503606173

Abstract

feminist conceptions of agency as resistance to power and authority (p. 5, 54, 162, 172n14). But this application of Mahmood's framework is for the most part unconvincing. For Mahmood, agency has an internal relationship with docility: one becomes a pious subject through subjecting oneself to pious norms and pious practice. But Hashemi's interlocutors are calculating, means-end rational actors who perform docility to achieve social capital. The face-savers, that is, are agents who use docility for their own worldly ends.The first four chapters of the book emphasize the importance of outward presentations of social compliance within one's social network, such that one can ostensibly claim victories at the face-game regardless of one's inner goodness. It is not until the final chapter of the book that Hashemi addresses how the repetitive compliance with the face-rules, in the struggle to live dignified lives, can also lead to the internalization of sanctioned codes of conduct (p. 156). With repeated work, some face-savers become hardworking, and with compliance to rules of chastity they may internalize its values. However, there is a significant difference between conforming to these moral codes of conduct and managing appearances through hyper-consumerism and expensive cosmetic surgeries to gain social capital and mobility. Subsuming moral virtue and consumerist appearance-management under a single rubric of agentic conformism glosses over the fact that these are entirely different social orientations that presume different models of selfhood, only one of which has parallels in the women's mosque movement.Moreover, as Hashemi's rich and detailed descriptions indicate, the rules of social propriety espoused by certain state apparatuses are hegemonic among the local communities of Hashemi's interlocutors, such that the face-rules around family, chastity, and public etiquette are aligned with what many of the youth consider to be good, dignified conduct. What does not find its way into her analytic of the face-system, however, is how the face-rules are an amalgamation of standards and values that result from multiple coimbricating discursive formations. Some of these are the product of a revolutionary emphasis on community, sacrifice, and virtue, while others are oriented toward the neoliberal values of consumerism, entrepreneurship, and self-sufficiency. Attending to the multiplicity of discursive formations within which state policies and subjects are formed may have facilitated a more analytically coherent response to the tensions Hashemi identifies between "conformism" and "resistance," "performance" and "reality." It would also mitigate some of the generalizations of the face-system that border on culturalism by showing how these tensions play out differently among different youth groups or "subcultures" (p. 37).Overall, Manata Hashemi's Coming of Age in Iran, is a rich book, rare in its attention to life outside the capital and the circles of the elite and middle class. It should be read by anthropologists and ...