Janice Boddy's Women, Men, and the Zar Cult in Northern Sudan is now regarded as a classic of feminist anthropology.

Based on extensive fieldwork in rural Sudan during the late 1970s and early 1980s, the book explores the zar spirit-possession cult not as superstition or pathology, but as a sophisticated social and symbolic practice through which women negotiate marriage, fertility, bodily experience and authority within a deeply patriarchal society. Boddy's ethnography became influential precisely because it refused to reduce possession to either psychological illness or simple political resistance, instead showing how ritual creates its own social and moral world.

The book moves between intimate descriptions of ceremonies, everyday domestic life and broader discussions of gender, Islam, kinship and embodiment. Boddy pays particular attention to the ways bodies are culturally produced through ideas of heat, blood, fertility and transformation, making the work equally valuable to readers interested in medical anthropology, religion, feminist theory and the anthropology of the body. Decades after publication it continues to be widely cited, particularly in discussions of embodiment, ritual and gender, and remains one of the defining ethnographies of the region.

1990 University of Wisconsin Press paperback. Good condition with light shelf wear, creasing to the covers and a clean, unmarked interior aside from a few light pencil marks.