"Drawing on the philosophy of speech acts as well as interpretive theory, Rosen shows how, for the people of this Muslim community, reality consists of the network of obligations formed by individuals out of a repertoire of relational possibilities whose defining terms are comprised by a set of essentially negotiable concepts. He thus demonstrates that the bonds of family, tribe, and political alliance take shape only as the bargains struck in and through the malleable terms that describe them take shape that statements about relationship are no more true than a price mentioned in the marketplace until properly validated that the relations between men and women, Arabs and Berbers, Muslims and Jews test the limits of interpersonal negotiation and that the concepts of time, character, and narrative style are consonant with a view of reality as bargained-for network of obligations"--The publisher's description.