Transcript Politics of Ethnography: Feminism and Anthropology

Politics of Ethnography:
Feminism and Anthropology
The Gendered nature of our fields has been
left to women anthropologists to ponder and
feminist scholars to critique, and even then
their work has been largely ignored. Neither
the burgeoning body of ethnographic
literature by women writers nor feminist
theorising about the difference gender makes
have set the discipline agenda (Bell 1993: 1).
What is the relationship between
feminism and anthropology?
• Ignorance of contribution of women in the
discipline
• Anthropological genealogies(male
oriented))
• Their contribution to reflexivity (ignored or
appropriated)
Women and reflexivity
• Powdermaker (1966)
• Mead (1977)
• Personal experience (autobiography)
The Challenges from without
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Minorities
Women
Decentred authority
Forced to become reflexive
The reflexive turn
• Crack in the Mirror by Myerhoff and Ruby
1982)
• to examine a field problem
• to examine anthropology itself
• to look at anthropology as a tool for
gathering data
• to publicly examine the anthropologist's
response to the field situation
On Australian Aboriginal Women
• Male
ethnographer…
• Profane
• Economically
unimportant
• Excluded
• Marginal
• Female
ethnography…
• Central role
• Important in ritual
• Respected
• Non-marginal
Three layers
• Bias imported by the male
ethnographer
• The bias inherent in the society
studied
• The bias inherent in Western
culture
Deconstruction of gender
symbolism and sexual
stereotypes
• Men associated with culture and women
with nature; physiology
• Women social roles; domestic domains
• Concept of pollution
Deconstructing the structure of
male bias by
• Focusing on women
• Building data: about women by women
• Reworking and redefining anthropological theory
Ardener (1975) and the theory of
“Muted Groups”
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control over modes of expression
Male dominated structures
--ways of communicating (linguistic concepts)
--ways of writing (mankind for humankind)
--dominant ideology
--different world views
Problems with the assumption of a
privileged status (women studying
women)
• Ghettoization of feminist anthropology
• --too specialized --image problem
• The assumption of a universal category of
“women”
• --not the same in all cultures
• Perception of ethnocentrism
• --a bias in favor of one culture ( that of the woman
anthrop)
Discussion Question
• What are the advantages and disadvantages
of a feminist anthropology in ethnographic
knowledge?