Zenana, written by Laura Ring, an anthropologist, explores women's lives in a lower-middle-class and multi-ethnic urban apartment block in Karachi that is home to Baluchi, Pashto, Urdu and Sindi-speaking families. Ring convincingly demonstrates through a consideration of women's everyday ‘emotion talk’ that the experience of life in the building is seen by its inhabitants both as being a new and sometimes trying experience. Ring documents the new forms of gendered sociality emerging in this urban space, especially those connected to modern conceptions of intimacy, which, she argues, are actively created and inculcated by the apartment building women. In so doing, the author contributes to wider anthropological work on the relationship between emotion and political action, as well as the new study of new social forms in urban spaces.

Zenana is a well-written and highly readable book that neither assumes prior knowledge of the literature on Karachi or Pakistan nor simply rehearses old debates about Pakistan's political history. Ring, rather, introduces the reader to issues central to Pakistani society through a careful consideration of ethnographic vignettes. Doing so, she problematises much received wisdom about the country's political culture. Particularly revealing, for example, is her interpretation of Pakistan's infamous ‘Hudood ordinances’—legislation introduced by General Zia's government under which women and men could be sentenced to flogging and death on adultery charges. The Hudood ordinances, Ring suggests, were not best understood simply in terms of women's virtue as being a ‘problem in need of a solution’. Rather, they formed an important ‘symbolic site of competing modes of authority, expressed around discordant notions of anger’. The Pakistan state seeks to render anger associated with infractions on personal honour as ‘strictly juridical’. In contrast, for many apartment block women, such expressions of male anger represent a ‘value’ that signifies ‘masculine power, efficacy and superiority’ (p. 121). These different discourses of anger point towards the ways in which official understandings of Pakistan ‘national community’ distinguish between respectable (sharif) and barbaric men, as much as they do between respectable and unrespectable women.

The book includes four major ethnographic chapters. These focus on the ways in which women both produce and challenge what Ring terms the ‘everyday peace’ of life in the apartment building. Chapter 2 introduces the rhythms of daily life for the women living in the apartment building. Chapter 3 provides a more in-depth account of the practices of exchange deployed by women to forge relations with one another and maintain the peaceful nature of everyday block life. Women are central to the everyday maintenance of peace, she argues, for it is they who forge relations of exchange with one another. At the same time, they also embark on ‘labours of emotional regulation and management’ through which they seek to handle the tension that inevitably flows through such circuits of exchange. Chapter 4 addresses another side of the everyday peace of the apartment block: women's ‘labors of peace are caught up in a web of discursive and affective cultural formations that promote, or make possible, masculine violence’ (p. 102). In this chapter Ring explores the significance of what she terms ‘angry men stories’. Through these stories she argues that women seek to manage and control male anger, and, in so doing, forestall the ever-looming spectre of male violence. At the same time, however, women are also complicit in reproducing the discourse of male anger and, therefore, generating the emotions they so subtly seek to manage. Chapter 5 explores the ways in which apartment building life and living with semi-unknown neighbours provides women ‘with new opportunities and transformed idioms for intimacy’ (p. 128). Ring explores these idioms through a consideration of the ways in which women ‘read’ one another's thoughts and emotions and are drawn into friendships with those they have ‘shared’ ‘breaches of self-boundaries’ (p. 168). These emergent discourses of intimacy, expressed in terms of ‘confessional knowledge’ and the sharing of moods and sentiments, always emerge, however, in suspended competition with other very different values, notably those of ‘reticence, silence, inviolability and secrecy’ associated with pardah.

Zenana is a timely and important contribution to the understanding of Pakistani society. Ring's study of emerging forms of urban sociality builds on the work of other significant studies of ‘emotion talk’ undertaken in Pakistan's rural settings. As a result, her consideration of what is new to women's emotional lives and what reflects the persistence of values long noted by anthropologists as important to everyday life in the country is well considered. At the same time, by focusing on the everyday peace of life in an apparently unlikely setting—Karachi—Ring's study adds both depth and breadth to understanding of the form taken by the work that goes into making and managing ethnic distinctions and boundaries in the city. More broadly, the book is an important addition to the expanding body of work on the lives of urban Muslim women within and beyond South Asia. Much of this work focuses on the importance of Islamic piety movements to women's lives in such settings. Yet many of these accounts fail to explore the ambiguities and complexities of women's everyday lives beyond the mosque or prayer group. By emphasising the inconsistencies of everyday life and sensitively treating the ways in which apartment building women seek to handle the push and pull of these, Ring's account is a significant contribution to anthropological understanding of the transformations that middle class domestic space and sociality are currently going in the urban centres of the Muslim world.

Zenana is more, however, than a contribution to regional literature on Pakistan or to the study of women's lives in the Muslim world. Conceptually, Ring's study contributes in important ways to the ever-expanding body of work seeking to understand the relationship between emotions and political agency. She challenges approaches that see violence as being a creative or generative discharge of built-up tension and peace either as something that emerges in the ‘wake of spent creativity’ (p. 178) or arises automatically from natural feelings of love and benevolence. Instead, Ring problematises the assumptions on which such ways of understanding the emotions have been rooted: the interplay between ‘tension’ and ‘release’ to everyday life, as well as the origin and role played by emotions in violent conflict. Flows of tension, she suggests, are central for the ‘exploratory play’ out of which sociality emerges. Peaceful sociality, in turn, depends on the everyday maintenance and handling of this tension, as well as the navigation of the different types of ‘emotion norms’ these tensions embody. Everyday peace, she argues, is neither prior to social life nor simply the calm after the generative violent storm, but the product of continual ‘effortful labour’ (p. 179) and, thus, something worthy of urgent anthropological attention.

Inevitably, perhaps, there are some problems: its use of the term ‘male anger’ as a rhetorical and conceptual device sometimes gives the impression that Pakistani ‘masculinity’ is defined in a static and rather culturally determined way by its violent undertones; we learn of a woman attending Qur'anic teaching groups with her husband and another who teaches Islamic studies in an English-medium fee-paying school, yet the ways in which Ring's fellow building dwellers experience, perceive and act within their city beyond the walls of the apartment block are largely excluded from the text; and at points one wonders exactly how far it is possible for anthropologists to conjecture on the types of shifts in ‘subjectivity’ that Ring documents in her book. Even elderly village women in northern Pakistan I speak to frequently pepper their talk with English phrases such as ‘tension’ and ‘heart failure’ so if middle class women living in Karachi apartment buildings use similar terms how far does this really tell us about the emergence of a (distinctively) modern form of the subject?

Zenana raises important questions in anthropological theory and method. As a lively contribution to the expanding body of work on urban forms of Muslim life in Pakistan, this book will be of interest to scholars of South Asia and the wider Muslim world. At the same time, it provides excellent ethnographic access for both students and scholars into anthropological debates concerning the study of emotion's place in political life, the emergence of modern forms of subjectivity, and the role played by middle class women in the management, navigation, embodiment and negotiation of the tensions associated with this complex and unfinished process.