The beautifully wrought and effectively argued first chapter of The Stains of Culture provides an important portent of the book’s continued course. Ruth Tsoffar aims, in this introduction, to undertake two projects associated with a small, often marginalized group of Jews known as Karaites. First, she embarks upon an ethnography of reading, claiming that for Karaites (whose name, she claims, translates roughly to "those who read [the Hebrew Bible] literally") "reading is an act that produces body and text; it produces the Karaite way of life" (1). Then she maps this concept of reading--and all the power issues that accompany a marginal group’s experience of a hegemonic text--onto an ethnography of Karaite women’s discourses of purity. She pulls these two projects together by relating the female Karaite experience within Karaite culture, and the general Karaite experience within mainstream Jewish culture, noting that her book "is not only the study of the female Karaite body but also a study of the complementary relationship between hegemonic and marginal cultures" (19).
Tsoffar, a sensitive ethnographer, promises a lot in her sparkling first chapter. Like many other first ethnographies, however, her compound inquiry into the Karaite community tends to overreach, leading to a follow-up that varies widely in its presentation. This unevenness is an editorial issue as much as it is an issue of ethnography: Tsoffar simply stuffs too much into some of her chapters, seemingly to satisfy both paths of inquiry she has laid out while trying (sometimes too hard) to link her findings to the constructions of canonical scholars. The resulting ethnography offers a valuable addition to both Karaite and gender studies literature, but often feels too thinly stretched to address both its complex projects completely.
Chapter One establishes the tensions inherent in the two-pronged approach. To provide background on the ethnography proper, Tsoffar contributes a well-researched history of the Karaites and their relationship with "Rabbanite" Jews (i.e., Jews who adhere to rabbinic commentaries on the Hebrew Bible, who constitute the large majority of the Jewish population). Admirably, Tsoffar offers this history with a parallel historiography--an important addition due to the Karaites’ vastly different portrayals in mainstream Jewish history (written by Rabbanites) and in local Karaite history. This approach, however, also requires her to deal with the diasporic nature of the Karaite population (with histories in Egypt, Israel, and the United States), identity negotiations with neighboring groups of Jews, and a subaltern stream of women’s history needed to support the rest of the ethnography. The complexity of this account makes it apparent how many plates Tsoffar is spinning at once, and suggests the difficulty involved in bringing them all together.
Subsequent chapters deal with this tension by moving somewhat awkwardly from explorations of Karaite society into explanations of purity discourses among Karaite women. Chapter Two, for example, begins with an account of a Karaite Sabbath morning service (51-55), shifts into a discussion of how the Karaite body is constructed (55-59), offers an ethnographic portrait of an elderly Karaite woman (59-66), and then concludes by reproducing a dialogue between several women (of at least two generations) on the Karaite convention of abstaining from sexual intercourse on the Sabbath (66-74). Each section is interesting on its own; but when brought together, they lack a coherent (or even stated) logical structure that leaves the reader guessing as to their relevance.
Other chapters proceed similarly. Chapter Three offers a strong descriptive background of the fieldwork process, even as it also includes a detailed and somewhat speculative foray into a linguistic analysis of female menstruation vocabulary. Chapter Five, on the relationship between biblically-sanctioned periods of uncleanliness and the actual duration of women’s menstruation, appears to lack an ending. And in Chapter Six, Tsoffar includes a diagram of a children’s prayer mnemonic that has little apparent connection to the discussion at hand save its use of the same common scriptural passage women recite at the end of their periods (157). These odd choices ultimately chip away at the fine ethnographic material Tsoffar presents.
Also serving as an impediment to the book’s logic is Tsoffar’s periodic reliance on speculative theory, sometimes introduced in the middle of ethnographic descriptions. During Chapter Seven, for instance, Tsoffar imposes psychological paradigms upon a tale of social negotiation between a menstruating woman and a lactating woman. She brings in Durkheim, Douglas, Irigaray, Bal, and other theorists to present interesting perspectives on the social drama; yet by mapping them onto a Karaite worldview Tsoffar seems to consign the tale to outsider intellectual paradigms, eroding the ethnography into a somewhat dubious case of psychological profiling. Similarly, in the following chapter, Tsoffar resorts to unsupported Freudian language to explain a key point of her argument: "Psychologically, [a mother] feeding herself [her own milk] will mean that she is threatening to turn into her own mother and to regress, a regression that would lead to a rejection of the child" (185). These moments, combined with a number of self-guided attempts at resolving theological and linguistic issues (120, 167) and unsupported appeals to apparent truisms of feminist theory (97, 146), become distractions that serve in this reviewer’s estimation to homogenize rather than highlight characteristics of Karaite women’s lives.
Thus, while this ethnography presents an important portrait of a small and unique community, it also bears significant flaws that affect its impact. Tsoffar clearly has a lot of skill as a writer and researcher, and at its best, The Stains of Culture can be incisive, thought-provoking, logically sound, and well-written. May this work serve as a promising start to a wonderful academic career.
--------
[Review length: 922 words • Review posted on February 15, 2007]