Post-modern ethnography, historical materialism, and decentring the (male) authorial voice: A feminist conversation

Histoire Sociale

Volumn 32, Issue 64, 1999, Pages 273-292

  Iacovetta, Franca ^a  

^a NONE

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EID: 0039035884     PISSN: 00182257     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: None     Document Type: Review

References (37)

1. Nancy Cook, "The Thin Within the Thick: Social History, Postmodern Ethnography, and Textual Practice", Histoire sociale/Social History, vol. 32, no. 63 (1999), pp. 85-101.
2. Although these terms are not identical, many scholars, including Cook and myself, have tended to use them interchangeably.
3. Many thanks to Paul Rutherford and Richard Lee for some stimulating conversations on these topics. Cook's footnotes contain the relevant literature, including Lynn Hunt, ed., The New Cultural History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989).
4. Among the recent collections edited by socialist feminist historians is Kathryn McPherson, Cecilia Morgan, and Nancy M. Forestell, eds., Gendered Pasts: Historical Essays in Femininity and Masculinity in Canada (Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1999); see especially their introduction.
5. E. P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1963). To avoid overly long footnotes, full citations to the work of authors cited here, unless otherwise specified, are in Such Hardworking People (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen's University Press, 1992) or my "Manly Militants, Cohesive Communities and Defiant Domestics: Writing About Immigrants in Canadian Historical Scholarship", Labour/ Le Travail, vol. 36 (Fall 1995).
6. E. P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1963). To avoid overly long footnotes, full citations to the work of authors cited here, unless otherwise specified, are in Such Hardworking People (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen's University Press, 1992) or my "Manly Militants, Cohesive Communities and Defiant Domestics: Writing About Immigrants in Canadian Historical Scholarship", Labour/ Le Travail, vol. 36 (Fall 1995).
7. E. P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1963). To avoid overly long footnotes, full citations to the work of authors cited here, unless otherwise specified, are in Such Hardworking People (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen's University Press, 1992) or my "Manly Militants, Cohesive Communities and Defiant Domestics: Writing About Immigrants in Canadian Historical Scholarship", Labour/ Le Travail, vol. 36 (Fall 1995).
8. Barbara Taylor, Eve and the New Jerusalem: Socialism and Feminism in the Nineteenth Century (London: 1984); Ellen Ross, Love and Toil: Motherhood in Outcast London, 1870-1918 (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993). Ross described her Thompson-inspired material feminist approach as "a rhetorical strategy in which many statements are made by accumulating detail: a belief in the significance of the material world to shape individual lives; and an aesthetic pleasure in and respect for the past. The identities of my historical subjects - as women, mothers, and participants in the collective 'experience' of their class - I have taken as givens here, though in another kind of study, these might well be open to question" (p. 10).
9. Barbara Taylor, Eve and the New Jerusalem: Socialism and Feminism in the Nineteenth Century (London: 1984); Ellen Ross, Love and Toil: Motherhood in Outcast London, 1870-1918 (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993). Ross described her Thompson-inspired material feminist approach as "a rhetorical strategy in which many statements are made by accumulating detail: a belief in the significance of the material world to shape individual lives; and an aesthetic pleasure in and respect for the past. The identities of my historical subjects - as women, mothers, and participants in the collective 'experience' of their class - I have taken as givens here, though in another kind of study, these might well be open to question" (p. 10).
10. As a PhD student in history at York University (1981-1988) I turned to the Social and Political Thought programme for one of my three comprehensive fields of study. A graduate seminar in Marxist cultural studies (where we read and debated the work of key British scholars such as Raymond Williams and Raphael Samuel) and a reading course on E. P. Thompson and his critics (both feminist and not) let me develop further an interest - first kindled in undergraduate courses at York on Marxist theorists, Latin American revolutionary and feminist politics, Franz Fanon and African decolonization struggles - in what Samuel aptly called People's History and Socialist Theory (London, 1981).
11. Feminist scholar Wenona Giles, a specialist of minority women, insightfully pointed out that, in addition to offering a feminist analysis of institution building and community politics and events, I might have more explicitly challenged conventional, male-defined notions of "community" by focusing on women's everyday acts and gossip and their relations with neighbourhood women, for example.
12. I discuss these points in more detail in "Gossip, Contest and Power: The Making of Postwar Suburban Bad Girls", Canadian Historical Review, vol. 80, no. 4 (December 1999), and in my essay in McPherson et al., Gendered Pasts. Catherine Hall made a similar point in the introduction to her White, Male, and Middle Class: Explorations in Feminism and History (New York: Routledge, 1992).
13. I discuss these points in more detail in "Gossip, Contest and Power: The Making of Postwar Suburban Bad Girls", Canadian Historical Review, vol. 80, no. 4 (December 1999), and in my essay in McPherson et al., Gendered Pasts. Catherine Hall made a similar point in the introduction to her White, Male, and Middle Class: Explorations in Feminism and History (New York: Routledge, 1992).
14. I discuss these points in more detail in "Gossip, Contest and Power: The Making of Postwar Suburban Bad Girls", Canadian Historical Review, vol. 80, no. 4 (December 1999), and in my essay in McPherson et al., Gendered Pasts. Catherine Hall made a similar point in the introduction to her White, Male, and Middle Class: Explorations in Feminism and History (New York: Routledge, 1992).
15. Robert Darnton, The Great Cat Massacre: And Other Episodes in French Cultural History (New York: Random, 1985). My well published colleague Nakanyike Musisi's forthcoming book on the Queen Mother of Kabaka (deposed because she took a commoner lover) is a wonderful recent example of feminist history drawn from oral history and fieldwork methods. So is Marc Epprecht's "The 'Unsaying' of Indigenous Homosexualities in Zimbabwe: Mapping a Blindspot in an African Masculinity", Journal of Southern Studies, vol. 24, no. 4 (December 1998), which also draws effectively on gay history and queer studies.
16. Robert Darnton, The Great Cat Massacre: And Other Episodes in French Cultural History (New York: Random, 1985). My well published colleague Nakanyike Musisi's forthcoming book on the Queen Mother of Kabaka (deposed because she took a commoner lover) is a wonderful recent example of feminist history drawn from oral history and fieldwork methods. So is Marc Epprecht's "The 'Unsaying' of Indigenous Homosexualities in Zimbabwe: Mapping a Blindspot in an African Masculinity", Journal of Southern Studies, vol. 24, no. 4 (December 1998), which also draws effectively on gay history and queer studies.
17. Regardless of their own theoretical or methodological approach, most historians remain impressed with the innovative ways in which Davis has used concepts from cultural anthropology (such as ritual, inversion, and rites of passage) to write about community and culture. See, for example, Lenard R. Berlanstein. ed., Rethinking Labor History: Essays on Discourse and Class Analysis (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1993), p. 3; Hunt, New Cultural History, which is dedicated to "Natalie Zemon Davis, inspiration to us all".
18. Regardless of their own theoretical or methodological approach, most historians remain impressed with the innovative ways in which Davis has used concepts from cultural anthropology (such as ritual, inversion, and rites of passage) to write about community and culture. See, for example, Lenard R. Berlanstein. ed., Rethinking Labor History: Essays on Discourse and Class Analysis (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1993), p. 3; Hunt, New Cultural History, which is dedicated to "Natalie Zemon Davis, inspiration to us all".
19. An excellent recent example is Nicholas Roger's impressive study, Crowds, Culture and Politics in Georgian Britain (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), especially his superb introduction.
20. For a valuable discussion of these issues, see Cynthia Comacchio's insightful review of Bettina Bradbury's Working Families (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1993) and related scholarship: "Beneath the Sentimental Veil: Families and Family History in Canada", Labour/ Le Travail, vol. 33 (Spring 1994).
21. For a valuable discussion of these issues, see Cynthia Comacchio's insightful review of Bettina Bradbury's Working Families (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1993) and related scholarship: "Beneath the Sentimental Veil: Families and Family History in Canada", Labour/ Le Travail, vol. 33 (Spring 1994).
22. See, for example, her The Alchemy of Race and Rights (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1991).
23. I shall trust that my readers will accept that I am in no way suggesting that these are monolithic terms.
24. Suzanne Fleishman, "Gender, the Personal, and the Voice of Scholarship: A Viewpoint", Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, vol. 23, no. 4 (Summer 1998). Thanks to Cynthia Wright for alerting me to this article.
25. For a very recent (and both humorous and moving) example, see Karen Dubinsky's second monograph, The Second Greatest Disappointment: Honeymooning and Tourism at Niagara Falls (Toronto: Between the Lines, 1999).
26. Personal prefaces or acknowledgements can have a profound and enduring influence on readers. I note, for instance, the responses of students and instructors to Bradbury's personal and moving introduction to her important and widely used Working Families, a study of wage-earning families in industrialized Montreal in which life-cycle approaches, quantitative methods, and daily survival strategies receive serious attention. "In ways I could never have anticipated and would never have wished, she tells us, "my own experiences followed the structure I had set out for the book, which proceeds from marriage, through an examination of the work roles of husbands wives, and children, to an examination of how people managed in crises like the death of a husband or wife." As historian Marlene Epp put it, "it stays with you."
27. Frank Colantonio, From the Ground Up: An Italian Immigrant's Story (Toronto: Between the Lines, 1997). When the publisher asked me to help promote the book, I happily agreed because it offered me a concrete way of thanking a man who had helped me earn my doctorate and publish a book. His book is a line example of the power of insider knowledge.
28. For a valuable sample of strategies, see Sherna B. Gluck and Daphne Patai, eds., Women's Words: The Feminist Practice of Oral History (New York: Routledge, 1991 ); Dorothy Smith, The Everyday World as Problematic: A Feminist Sociology (Boston: North Eastern University Press, 1987).
29. For a valuable sample of strategies, see Sherna B. Gluck and Daphne Patai, eds., Women's Words: The Feminist Practice of Oral History (New York: Routledge, 1991 ); Dorothy Smith, The Everyday World as Problematic: A Feminist Sociology (Boston: North Eastern University Press, 1987).
30. Marjorie Shostack, Nisa: Portrait of a !Kung Woman (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1981).
31. Gracia Clark, Onions Are My Husband: Survival and Accumulation by West African Market Women (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1994), p. xi. My thanks to my African history colleague Sean Hawkins for this and other works in feminist ethnography.
32. Ruth Behar, Translated Woman: Crossing the Border with Esperanza's Story (Boston: Beacon Press, 1993), and The Vulnerable Observer: Anthropology that Breaks Yours Heart (Boston: Beacon Press, 1996); Julie Cruikshank in collaboration with Angela Sidney, Kitty Smith, and Annie Ned, Life Lived Like a Story: Life Stories of Three Yukon Elders (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 1990).
33. Ruth Behar, Translated Woman: Crossing the Border with Esperanza's Story (Boston: Beacon Press, 1993), and The Vulnerable Observer: Anthropology that Breaks Yours Heart (Boston: Beacon Press, 1996); Julie Cruikshank in collaboration with Angela Sidney, Kitty Smith, and Annie Ned, Life Lived Like a Story: Life Stories of Three Yukon Elders (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 1990).
34. Ruth Behar, Translated Woman: Crossing the Border with Esperanza's Story (Boston: Beacon Press, 1993), and The Vulnerable Observer: Anthropology that Breaks Yours Heart (Boston: Beacon Press, 1996); Julie Cruikshank in collaboration with Angela Sidney, Kitty Smith, and Annie Ned, Life Lived Like a Story: Life Stories of Three Yukon Elders (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 1990).
35. Fleishman, "Gender, the Personal, and the Value of Scholarship".
36. In somewhat different ways, Ruth Roach Pierson addressed these and other related points in her insighftul essay, "Experience, Difference, Dominance, and Voice in the Writing of Canadian Women's History", in Karen Offen, Ruth Roach Pierson, and Jane Rendall, eds., Writing Women's History: International Perspectives (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991).
37. Franca Iacovetta, Roberto Perin, and Angelo Principe, eds., Enemies Within: Italian and Other Internees in Canada and Beyond (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 200).