VIRTUAL London.

Abstract

The conventional paradigm links power relations and ideological discourses as factors influencing embodied experiences. Consequently, social scientists analyse bodies as historical products, tracing shifts in power dynamics within the temporal dimension, history. This paper shifts the focus to bodies as products of space, where power relations are not abstract but situated in the real environment. Since bodies are bound to space, transitions in power could also be tracked within spatial changes such as urbanisation and migration. Ideological religious discourses have been prominent themes in literature studying the lives of Saudi women from the eighteenth century to the present day. We provide a counterargument to ideological lenses by emphasising the significance of geography and the environment on Saudi women’s daily movement and their embodied meanings of modesty and privacy. The ethnography focuses on Saudi Arabian senior women formerly residing in villages of mud in the central region, Najd, which had ‘no strangers’. By highlighting geography and the environment as foundational aspects of relations, we ecologically explore ‘geographic kinship,’ which shaped women’s freedom of daily movement and their relaxed modesty and privacy. We scrutonise the lives of these women who transitioned from Najdi villages to Riyadh, a city of ‘strangers,’ as part of the urbanisation process. By framing urbanisation as a spatial change, we uncover shifts in power dynamics, evident in the transformation of their daily movement and the embodiment of modesty and privacy. The ethnography demonstrates that embodied experiences are not solely influenced by ideological discourses but are also intricately tied to the ecology of the world we live in.