Page 1 of 5 Critical Review of Jannice Boddy and Saba Mahmood’s article “Feminist Theory, Embedment and the Docile agent: Some Reflection on the Egyptian Islamic Revival. By Tushar Kanti Baidya Janice Boddy in her work deals with the villagers in Northern Sudan. She explicitly states, “It is not necessarily good or desirable to have a spirit” (Boddy, 1988) which completely places her within a new domain of those who advocate the Lewis model. Boddy takes the opposite approach from the prior anthropological work and states that spirit possession cannot be defined solely by itself, but in context with a woman’s entire position in the community. Boddy, realizes that nothing is straightforward, and that no society, even Western, is ever clearly divided and categorized. To assume that an African society is any different would be preposterous. There are many thought that she has described which may not be possible to mention but I am going to describe the key points of her writing below. 1. Boddy views spirit possession instead as a feminine trait stemming from the fact that women are freer than men to pursue religious folk beliefs outside Islam, whereas in most other aspects of life, they are more confined than males. In addition, dealing with village matters, women are submissive to men, but possession is a chance for women to regain a piece of that freedom. Boddy, does not advocate that women use this freedom to try to gain an advantage over men, but instead paints a picture of Sudanese society as a delicate balancing act between the sexes where “everything is resonant with implicit meanings” (Boddy, 1988). 2. In Boddy’s theory, women are possessed only after an illness; they do not fabricate spirit possession in order to subvert the male population. Everything is a balance between the sexes, and spirit possession is merely a part of that, not a result of it; it is a part of harmonizing various social institutions. 3. Janice Boddy argues that “women have preponderance in possession rituals because most of the illnesses that are being treated involve women’s issues—sterility, stillbirths, nursing, menstruation complications, etc.”(Boddy, 1988). Therefore it is the domain of women not because of any desire to have an exclusively female social group, but because men cannot possibly relate to the issues in question. Boddy also gleans over that fact that possessed