ABSTRACT
A trend in the social sciences has accredited the notion that culture holds the key to understanding what a simpleminded economism failed to grasp, namely that there is no causal relationship between material change and social change. I When pushed to its logical conclusion, this view transforms culture into a preformed totality having a determining power over the minds uf those who are assumed to live not in it but under it. Yet culture, in colonial and postcolonial societies, as elsewhere. is a reflexive process shaped by individuals interacting in variolls social spheres and at different tcmporallcvcls, and shaping them in turn. When seen as a process, culture is inextricable not only from material life, but also from consciousness, a phenomenon easily forgotten in the feminist literature on women in the Middle East.
