Women Writing Culture

Abstract

Editors Behar and Gordon claim their initial impetus for this project was a feminist response to Writing Culture (University of California Press, 1986) which had made a clarion call for a innovative, experimental and reflexive ethnography, yet had excluded mention of the work of women anthropologists (past and present) because their failed to fit the requirement of being feminist and textually (Behar, p. 7). The 23 chapters in Women Writing Culture accomplish much than a mere retort to Writing Culture by addressing various crises in anthropology and feminism and presenting them in ethnographic that is both creative and critical. The three contributions in Part One, Beyond Self and exemplify forms of women's ethnographic writing. Kondo's use of the dramatic form to explore and push at the boundaries of representation, privilege and politics among women of colour is beautifully conceived, yet, like any play, is probably powerfully experienced in the theatre than as text/script. Writing autobiographically, Behar anguishes over questions of and ethics in the anthropological representation of the when the othered is one's self/family. Narayan's narrative account of Charity--woman, anthropologist, academic, wife, writer--who is besieged by her male students, her husband, the androcentric canon in anthropology, even the academy itself, to become one or to become the Other is a moving depiction of being a woman culture. The eight articles in Part Two, History, Another Canon, constitute the real heart of this volume inasmuch as they reclaim and celebrate women doing and anthropology against the grain of a male-centred discipline. Here we are given fresh insight into the lives and works of women such as Margaret Mead, Ruth Benedict, Ruth Landes and E.C. Parsons and some less familiar, such as Mourning Dove, experimental writer ahead of her time, [a] trickster who paid a heavy price for her deep play at the boundaries of gender, culture, and truth (Finn, p. 143). We read too of Ella Cara Deloria who worked for years as research assistant and informant to Boas, but could not get her fusion of fiction and ethnography published in her lifetime. Cole captures the essence of this section by pointing out the imperative to re-read these women's lives and works, not only for their innovative and noncanonical styles of writing and substantive and theoretical contributions, but also to recognize how the hegemonic practices which marginalized these women and their work continue to effectively erase much current theoretical work on race and gender (p. 181). The question raised by the five essays in Part Three, Does Anthropology Have a Sex?, must be answered in the affirmative, and that sex is male. Writing theory, the foundation of any discipline, is celebrated as an art (as opposed to the craft of ethnography) and coded and fieldwork can be coded masculine, heroic, adventurous (Lutz pp. 255, 256). Anthropological wives were/are incorporated into their husbands' work and their participation in field work is not acknowledged; wives are muted, subsumed and merged with the husband's (Tedlock, p. 270). Despite an ideological assertion that feminist revision does embrace men who wish to see reality in engendered terms, Newton and Stacey explore how feminist theory often ms.represents an essentialized and generalized Male Other, thus making it exceedingly difficult for feminists to establish political alliances with those progressive men. It is, indeed, time for mainstream feminism to make the shift from identity politics to politics across identities (p. 289). If such a shift is not made, then Dubois, a graduate student of anthropology and the only male contributor here, is correct to assume his story has already been written by an engendered anthropology ironically closed to a more gendered understanding of male social theory . …