Dislodging a world view: Challenge and counter-challenge in the relationship between feminism and anthropology

Australian Feminist Studies

Volumn 1, Issue 1, 1985, Pages 1-25

  Strathern, Marilyn ^a  

^a NONE

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[No Author keywords available]

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EID: 84945796797     PISSN: 08164649     EISSN: 14653303     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1080/08164649.1985.10382902     Document Type: Article

References (67)

1. M.J. Boxer, ‘For and about women: the theory and practice of women's studies in the United States’, in N.O. Keohane, M.Z. Rosaldo and B.C. Gelpi (eds.), Feminist Theory: A Critique of Ideology (Harvester Press) Sussex, 1982
2. E.g.: P. Caplan and J.M. Bujra, Women United, Women Divided: Cross-Cuftural Perspectives on Female Solidarity (Tavistock) London, 1978; R.R. Reiter, Towards an Anthropology of Women (Monthly Review Press) New York, 1975; K. Young, C. Wolkowitz and R. McCullagh (eds.), Of Marriage and the Market, Women's Subordination in International Perspective (C.S.E. Books) London, 1981
3. E.g.: J.M. Atkinson, ‘Anthropology [Review Essay]’, Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, 8, (1982), 236–58; M. Etienne and E. Leacock (eds.), ‘Introduction’ to Women and colonization. Anthropological Perspectives (Praeger) New York, 1981; N. Scheper-Hughes ‘Introduction: the problem of bias in androcentric and feminist anthropology’ Women's Studies, 10, (1983), 109–16; A.L. Tsing and S.J. Yanagisako, ‘Feminism and kinship theory’, Current Anthropology, 24, (1983), 511–16
4. E.g.: J.F. Collier and M.Z. Rosaldo, ‘Politics and gender in simple societies’, in S.B. Ortner and H. Whitehead (eds.), Sexual Meanings (Cambridge University Press) New York, 1981; K. Sacks, Sisters and Wives: The Past and Future of Sexual Equality (Greenwood Press) London, 1979
5. The interesting case of E. Ardener's paper on ‘The problem of women’ is apposite here: it was written to elucidate certain features of model building, retrospectively becoming a contribution to feminist literature, e.g. in S. Ardener (ed.), Perceiving Women (Wiley & Sons) New York, 1975. S. Ardener's interests in the anthropology of women antedate the 1970s, and she rarely describes her work as feminist. See E. Ardener, ‘Belief and the problem of women’, in J.S. La Fontaine (ed.), The interpretation of ritual (Tavistock) London, 1972, reprinted in S. Ardener, op. cit.
6. Cf. Atkinson, op. cit.
7. J. Clifford, ‘On ethnographic authority’, Representations. 1, (1983), 118–46
8. cf, J. Shapiro, ‘Cross-cultural perspectives on sexual differentiation’, in H. Katchadourian fed), Human Sexuality. A comparative and developmental perspective (California University Press) Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1979
9. J. Shapiro, ‘Anthropology and the study of gender’, in E. Langland and W. Gove (eds.), A Feminist Perspective in the Academy (Chicago University Press) Chicago, 1983
10. T. Kuhn, The structure of scientific revolutions (Chicago University Press) Chicago, 1962, 2nd edition 1970
11. D.J. Haraway, ‘In the beginning was the word: the genesis of biological theory’, Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, 6, (1981) 469–481; H. Longino and R. Doell, ‘Body, bias and behaviour: a comparative analysis of reasoning in two areas of biological science’, Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, 9, (1983), 206–27
12. E. Langland and W. Gove (eds.), A Feminist Perspective in the Academy: the Difference It Makes (University of Chicago Press), Chicago, 1981, 2nd edition, 1983
13. This is social/cultural anthropology. Longino and Doell put a positive, though not unquestionmgly so, case for physical anthropology in so far as ‘feminist anthropologists have developed alternative accounts of human evolution that replace androcentric with gynecentric assumptions while remaining within the methodological constraints of their discipline’; see Longino and Doell, op. cit., 226
14. Langland and Gove, op. cit., 2
15. Boxer, op. cit., 260
16. M. Hughes and M. Kennedy, ‘Breaking out—women in adult education’, Women's Studies International Forum, 6, (1983), 261–69
17. Langland and Gove, op. cit., 3–4
18. E. Janeway, ‘Who is Sylvia? On the loss of sexual paradigms’, Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, 5, (1980), 588
19. E.S. Person, ‘Sexuality as the mainstay of identity: psychoanalytic perspectives’, Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, 5, (1980) 613
20. Kuhn, op. cit., 191
21. Boxer, op. cit., 258
22. E.g., S.M. Pflanz-Cook and E.A. Cook, ‘Mai of the Manga: man of the middle’, in W.L. Rodman and D.A. Counts (eds.), Middlemen and brokers in Oceania, ASA0 Monograph 9 (University Press of America), Lanham, 1983
23. Pflanz-Cook and Cook, op. cit., 241, quoting Kuhn
24. Janeway, op. cit.
25. Boxer, op. cit., 260
26. See Haraway, op. cit.
27. Janeway, op. cit., 575
28. Kuhn, op. cit., viii, 208
29. E.g. M. Barrett, Women's Oppression Today. Problems in Marxist Feminist Analysis (Verso) London, 1980; H. Eisenstein, Contemporafy Feminist Thought (Unwin Paperbacks) Sydney, 1984; J.B. Elshiain, Public man, private woman. Women in social and political thought (Princeton University Press) Princeton, 1981; J. Sayers, Biological Politics. Feminist and Anti- Feminist Perspectives (Tavistock) London, 1982
30. Longino and Doell, op. cit.; e.g. N.M. Tanner, On becoming human. A model of the transition from ape to human and the reconstruction of early human social life (Cambridge University Press) Cambridge, 1981
31. R. Rapp, ‘Anthropology [Review Essay]’, Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, 4, (1979), 497–513; Scheper-Hughes, op. cit.
32. Atkinson, op. cit., 238
33. E.B. Leacock, ‘Women's status in egalitarian society: implications for social evolution’, Current Anthropology, 19 (1979), 247–75
34. Sacks, op. cit.
35. Ortner and Whitehead, op. cit.
36. Collier and Rosaldo, op. cit.
37. D. Bell, Daughters of the Dreaming (McPhee Gribble/George Allen & Unwin) Melbourne, 1984, 245–6
38. T.M.S. Evens, ‘Mind, logic and the efficacy of the Nuer incest prohibition’, Man (n.s.), 18, (1983), 111–33
39. Actually of course we have great problems with our notions of similarity and difference, and a propensity to collapse the one system into the other—to describe our social world as a natural world etc.
40. P. Rabinow, ‘Facts are a word of God’ (an essay review of J. Clifford's Person and myth: Maurice Leenhardt in the Melanesian world) in G.W. Stocking (ed.), Observers Observed: History of Anthropology Vol. 1 (University of Wisconsin Press) Wisconsin, 1983, 203
41. And the tension between scholarship itself and feminism has been lived a thousand times, indeed constituted the nature of recent scholarly feminist enquiry almost from the start; see Boxer, op. cit.
42. E.g. C. Register, ‘Literary criticism [Review Essay]’, Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, 6, (1980), 269
43. Keohane, Rosaldo and Gelpi, op. cit., vii
44. Rapp. op. cit., 500
45. Ibid., 503
46. Scheper-Hughes, op. cit., 115
47. M. Jackson, ‘Knowledge of the body’, Man (n.s.), 18 (1983), 327–45
48. Not necessarily to recover intentionality and subjectivity, but to apprehend the social effect of dispositions (habitual states) which embody structures; see P. Bobrdieu, Outline of a Theory of Practice (trans. R. Nice) (Cambridge University Press) Cambridge, 1977
49. G.H. Herdt, ‘Preface’ to Rituals of Manhood. Male initiation in Papua New Guinea (University of California Press) Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1982
50. E.g.: J.B. Elshtain, ‘Feminist discourse and its discontents: language, power, and meaning’, in Keohane, Rosaldo and Gelpi, op. cit.; C.A. Mackinnon, ‘Feminism, marxism, method and the state: an agenda for theory’, in Keohane, Rosaldo and Gelpi, op. cit.
51. On analogy with constructions of western knowledge itself—see Haraway, op. cit., 480 and G. Lloyd, ‘History of philosophy and the critique of reason’, Critical Philosophy, 1, (1984), 14. However, Keohane, Rosaldo and Gelpi delimit varieties of consciousness, of which consciousness of oneself as object of the attention of another is only one; see Keohane, Rosaldo and Gelpi, op. cit.
52. E.g.: M. Jackson, Allegories of the Wilderness. Ethics and ambiguity in Kuranko narratives (Indiana University Press) Blcomington, 1982; M.W. Young, Magicians of Manumanua. Living myth in Kaluana (University of California Press) Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1983
53. Clifford, ‘On ethnographic authority’, op. cit.
54. Rabinow, ‘Facts are a word of God’, op. cit., 196
55. P. Rabinow, Reflections on Fieldwork in Morocco (University of California Press) Berkeley, 1977
56. Clifford is a historian of anthropology, and he perhaps overdoes the presumption of authority. Most ethnographies are, I am sure, written more provisionally than they look. However, radical anthropology in general tends to include the destruction of its own past in its agenda. Here we may note that experience as a source of authority (‘fieldwork experience’ turning the anthropologist into an objective arbiter of the facts) is deliberately supplanted by the concept of experience as a constructive negotiation involving interaction between conscious subjects. Note, however, that Clifford differentiates them by calling the first a ‘paradigm of experience’ and the second a ‘paradigm of discourse’; the two compete with one another in his account as the proper basis for ethnography. See Clifford, ‘On ethnographic authority’, op. cit., 133
57. Rabinow suggests that it is not authenticity which Leenhardt's co-authored texts claim but ‘an ethically superior product of joint work’ (my emphasis); see Rabinow, ‘Facts are a word of God’, op. cit., 204. See also J. Clifford, ‘Fieldwork, reciprocity and the making of ethnographic texts: the example of Maurice Leenhardt’, Man (n.s.), 15, (1980), 518–32, and M. Young, op. cit., 34–5
58. R.N. Bellah, ‘Foreword’ to P. Rabinow, Reflections on fieldwork in Morocco (University of California Press) Berkeley, 1977, xii
59. Elshtain, ‘Feminist discourse and its discontents’, op. cit., 145
60. Rapp, op. cit., 511
61. Though one would not want to ignore the tradition of multiple perspectives; see R.M. Keesing, ‘Introduction’ to G.H. Herdt (ed.) Rituals of Manhood, Male Initiation in Papua New Guinea (University of California Press) Berkeley, 1982
62. Clifford, ‘On ethnographic authority’, op. cit., 136
63. Haraway, op. cit., 481
64. A similar point is made by Eisenstein; see Eisenstein, op. cit., xix
65. E.g.: Sacks, op. cit.; Barrett, op. cit.
66. G. Beer, Darwin's plots (Routledge & Kegan Paul) London, 1983
67. Cf. C.F. Epstein, ‘Women in sociological analysis: new scholarship versus old paradigms’, in Langland and Gove, op. cit.