Cover
Title
Copyright
Dedication
CONTENTS
List of illustrations
Acknowledgments
Prologue: There is more to beauty than meets the eye
Beauty universals and cultural particulars
Fatness and fattening cross-culturally
Preview of the book
PART I Entering the field
1 Coming into the Azawagh
The Azawagh
Who are the "Azawagh Arabs"?
Peace Corps prelude: Tchin Tabaraden
Fieldwork: Tassara
Stasis and change
2 Getting fat
Travelers and explorers, 1352-1936
French colonial officials in the Azawagh
Anthropologists on fattening in the Sahara
Getting fat in the Azawagh today
Aichatou
Talking about getting fat: leblūḥ and al-gharr
When does fattening begin?
Who fattens?
What to eat?
Why fatten?
PART II Self-representations
3 In the name of Allah, most benevolent, ever merciful
The centrality of Islam in Azawagh Arab life
Islam and Islams
The world Allah made
Islam and the body
Islam, gender, and the social fabric
Structures of Islamic life
Spirits
Heaven, and heaven on earth
Abetting God's order
Lived Islam
4 Ties of blood, ties of milk, ties of marriage
Kith and kin in daily life
Ahmed and Aminatou
The challenges of marriage
Ties of blood
Ties through men
Tribes
Ties through women
Milk kinship
Kinship and sentiment
Marriage
Divorce
Weddings
Fattening and marriage
5 "The men bring us what we will eat": herding, trade, and slavery
Material value and aesthetic values
Honor and pride
Caste in Moor society: slaves, freed slaves, artisans, and Arabs
Slavery
A license to leisure: women's "work"
Subsisting in the Sahara: men's work
Investment of milk from cows in women
Imbuing life with value
PART III Veiled logics.

6 The interior spaces of social life: bodies of men, bodies of women
Male bodies and female bodies
Azawagh Arab bodies
Metaphorical bodies
The connectedness of bodies to the world around them
The connectedness of bodies to non-bodily domains
Willful bodies
Heavenly bodies
7 The exterior spaces of social life: tent and desert
Orienting oneself in the world
The gendered geography of everyday life
The tent: women's world
Engendering space: center and periphery, stasis and movement
Engendering space: placehood
Town and desert: women's changing worlds
PART IV Negotiating life's challenges
8 Well-being and illness
Understanding disease: "hot" and "cold"
Hot and cold vs. Western biomedicine
The social consequences of hot and cold
Open women, closed men
Pregnancy, childbirth, and postpartum
The daily diet
Sex
Mind and body, women and men
Exercising agency
9 Beauty, sex, and desire
A review of the argument
Socializing sexuality
Feeding desire
Notes
Glossary
Bibliography
Index.