The Hammam through Time and Space

Julie Peteet is professor emerita of anthropology at the University of Louisville. She is the author of Space and Mobility in Palestine, Landscape of Hope and Despair: Palestinian Refugee Camps, and Gender in Crisis: Women and the Palestinian Resistance Movement.

Peteet has written an impressive, and perhaps the definitive, book on the hammam in the Mediterranean region." - Faedah M. Totah, author of Preserving the Old City of Damascus "A beautifully written ethnography that does a great job of treating the subject of love and the ambivalence of romantic relationships." - Rachel Newcomb, author of Everyday Life in Global Morocco "An extraordinary journey into the worlds of the hammam! Peteet's interdisciplinary acumen is stunning, as she takes readers on a deep dive into the historical and contemporary import of bathing spaces and practices, flowing across time and space in gorgeous archival, intertextual, and ethnographic detail. With theoretical interventions rippling from the spatial to the sensorial, labor to sexuality, ritual to tourism, Peteet has gifted us an invigorating, definitive book on the hammam, past and present." - Lara Deeb, coauthor of Anthropology's Politics Disciplining the Middle East "Peteet has given us both a sweeping genealogy of baths across the Mediterranean world and a granular ethnography of the revival of hammams in twenty-first century Turkey and Jordan. She reveals baths as complex spaces of neighborhood community and labor, as symbols of national heritage and Ottomania, and as sensoria of the body." - Nora Elizabeth Barakat, Stanford University