Whose Religion, Whose Gender, Whose Culture?

168 SHOFAR Fall 1995 Vol. 14, No.1 Whose Religion, Whose Gender, Whose Culture? by Marina Rustow Department of Religion Columbia University Priestess, Mother, Sacred Sister: Religions Dominated by Women, by Susan Starr Sered. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994. 330 pp. $27.50. Change Within Tradition Among Jewish Women in Libya, by Rachel Simon. Seattle and London: University ofWashington Press, 1992. 230 pp. $30.00. Demonizing the Queen of Sheba: Boundaries of Gender and Culture in Postbiblical Judaism and Medieval Islam, by Jacob Lassner. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1993. 281 pp. $19.95. In Priestess, Mother, Sacred Sister, Susan Starr Sered demonstrates how in remote corners of the world, official, universal, male-dominated religions vie for ascendancy with "marginal" beliefs-superstition, magic, sorcery, shamanism. More often than not, these struggles take place within the same household: men practice the official religion and women the unofficialone. Sered refuses to grant lesser standing to what other scholars might have relegated to the category of mere superstition, but, as she notes, this was not easy given the data available to her. Anthropologists do not always think to seek out female religious subcultures, and when they do, they often miss "essential elements of women's religiOUS beliefs and rituals" (p. 280). With that in mind, Sered chose to examine women's religions rather than female-oriented streams within larger male-dominated traditions (such as monasticism). Sered's observations bear directly on an issue that perennially perplexes students of religion, namely, what constitutes religious experience? While classics ofthe field such as William James's 1be Varieties of Religious Experience have taken individual mystical experiences as evidence of contact with the sacred, Sered suggests that the seemingly mundane concerns of women's religions-food, illness, bereavement, motherhood-make them no less "noble, virtuous, and estimable" (p. 281). The domestic setting as ritual sphere confounds the separation between the transcendent and the everyday, and thereby displaces an Review Essays 169 axiom ofreligious studies since Durkheim and Eliade: the division between sacred and profane. Rather, Sered argues, in women's religions, the sacred is in the profane. Sered funhermore protests anthropologists' failure to see that through rituals that occur in the home and focus on the everyday, women's religions grapple directly with transcendent questions. At worst, such evaluations suggest that women are mired in "this-worldly" concerns (the term is Max Weber's) and fail to think their way through the big questions because they are not as capable as men of abstract thinking. It is true, Sered argues, that women's religions focus more on interpersonal relationships than on individual contact with the divine. But, she asks, is the male emphasis on transcendence to be seen as normative, or "could it be that possession trance is a normal and healthy pan of human experience, but men have trouble with it because they have a problem with relationships?" (p. 281). The religions Sered documents are as disparate as Korean shamanism and nineteenth-century American spiritualist seances, but all of them exist as counterpoints to male-dominated religions that leave women little opportunity for leadership and, Sered emphasizes, do little to address their immanent concerns. In Egypt and the Sudan, women affected by a variety of physical ailments are diagnosed as suffering from spirit possession, and treatment consists of induction into the zar cult. Initiation marks the beginning of a long process of accommodation, not exorcism, achieved through ritual reenactments of possession. Although official Islam roundly condemns the zar cult for dealing with "devils," zar adepts see the two religions as intertwined. Indeed, spirit-possession ceremonies have been known to open with public incantations of qur'anic verses. Sered notes an abundance of cases of Muslim leaders who decry zar practices but are forced to accept them when their wives fall ill to zar possession and hold cult rituals under their very roofs. True, the zar cult includes men of secondary social standing as well as women, and so can be called a religion of the socially subordinate, but, Sered asks, is it accurate to call it marginal? Or does it appear so only from an androcentric perspective? Although Sered notes that...