Bodies, Walls, and Power: Tracking Shifts in Power on Ushaiger Women Through the Spatial Dimension

Abstract

Given that bodies are restricted to power of a certain time, power shifts have been tracked through societies’ movement in the temporal dimension (history). Yet, power on bodies is also bound to space and power transformations can be anthropologically traced in spatial changes (urbanization). Bodies and spaces are deeply intertwined and change in one reconfigures power on the other. The ethnography conveys this entanglement in spatial relations (factors), such as class, geographic kinship and gender, that shaped power on women and granted their freedom of mobility in Ushaiger, a village in Najd central region of Saudi Arabia. Ushaigeri urbanized women in Riyadh experienced new spatial relations- beyond ideological discourses- that reconfigured power on their mobility and reconstructed bodies' modesty and spaces' privacy from symbolized concepts in villages during the early twentieth century to thorough physical manifestation of modesty and privacy in Riyadh during the late twentieth century.