ABSTRACT
In assembling these materials, I wanted to do more than simply bring together the remembered lives of six people and highlight their relations to objects. The format of these lives, narrated around an object and full of dualistic metaphors, challenges a universalist view of “life histories” as self-evident “documents” that one can simply find, record, and bring home from the field (Frank 1979, 1995). It also encourages us to go beyond a view that personal experience and “the ethnography of the particular” will only convince us of our own shared humanity. The lives of these men and women are full of recognizable conflicts over questions of identity and the relations between personal freedom and responsibility that may help to deconstruct regional stereotypes about matriliny, patriliny, or “the traffic in women.” Though Lila Abu-Lughod sought to have her efforts to “write women's worlds” interpreted in the framework of a “tactical humanism” (1991, 1993) that would dissolve cultural difference, I prefer to lay the emphasis on the forms of difference that emerge in these biographical and autobiographical accounts.
