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Editors | Ruth Behar Deborah A. Gordon |
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Country | United States |
Language | English |
Subject | Social studies Women's studies Gender studies |
Genre | Non-fiction |
Publisher | University of California Press |
Publication date | 1995 |
Media type | |
Pages | 457 pages |
ISBN | 0520202082 |
Women Writing Culture is a 1995 book on the role of women in anthropology, the practice of ethnographic writing, feminist anthropology, and the gender and racial politics of the canon of recognized works in anthropology. Edited by Ruth Behar and Deborah Gordon, the book collects work from female anthropologists such as Louise Lamphere, Faye V. Harrison, Lila Abu-Lughod, Catherine Lutz, Kirin Narayan, Aihwa Ong, and Anna Tsing. Women Writing Culture has been cited as part of anthropology's "literary turn" and is stated by Keridwen Luis to highlight the longstanding involvement of female ethnographers in self-reflective, experimental, collaborative and literary forms of anthropological writing, and propose "the creation of a feminist canon" in anthropology. [1] The project emerged as a counterpoint to Writing Culture, a 1986 anthology that was a key text in the literary turn.
Essays within the book highlight the work of ethnographic work of Elsie Clews Parsons, Ruth Benedict, Margaret Mead, Ella Deloria, and Zora Neale Hurston, which Behar calls a "women's literary tradition within anthropology." [2] The authors of Women Writing Culture criticized a masculinized approach in anthropological scholarship, the exclusion of women from academia and the silencing of their authorial voices. It brought a feminist perspective to anthropological theory, teaching of the history of the discipline, and the practice of ethnographic observation and writing. [3] The book also incorporated critiques within feminism to address the marginalization and oppression of women of color and lesbians. [3] In the book's introduction Behar also states that the works of women are questioned in many ways and are not taken seriously and that the book is a product of a "double crisis": the crisis of anthropology and the crisis of feminism. [4] She also states that one of the main goals was to “decolonize the power relations inherent in the representation to the Other”. [5]
The authors argue that poetry and arts are necessary to express themselves, and to denounce the ravages that colonialism made into their lives. As junior faculty, mothers, wives, untenured, graduate students, first generation scholars, argue that they have in their minds an awakening for the history of anthropology, and as their individual trajectories, their contributions are diverse, and are seeking for an "anthropology without exiles." [6] The book also responds to the feminist crisis represented in the book This Bridge Called my Back by Cherrie Moraga and Gloria Anzaldua which at the beginning was a project coming from outside of academy, when the both authors did not have tenure and struggled to survive in hard living conditions.
This book is compounded by 4 major sections:
Women Writing Culture took three forms: a 1991 seminar at the University of Michigan, a 1993 special issue of the journal Critique of Anthropology, and the 1995 book. These were organized, in part, in response to the 1986 book Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography , edited by James Clifford and George E. Marcus. [7] Writing Culture, which is a series of essays, presents epistemological debates about which and how are the proper ways of conducting research, beginning with the search of what was described as so-called “objectivity”, the search and the construction of the authorial voice, the need for reflexivity during the process of research. Writing Culture applied a literary critique to prior anthropological writing, and called for new literary techniques to be applied to ethnography. Women Writing Culture was intended to offer a critique of both this book and the proclaimed novelty of approaches by arguing that both are symptoms of the exclusion of works by women from the mainstream of anthropological scholarship.[ citation needed ]
Behar intended the book to raise awareness about the marginalization of the exclusion of the female contributors' works. She stated that the book was "multivoiced, and includes biographical, historical, and literary essays, fiction, autobiography, theater, poetry, life stories, travelogues, social criticism, fieldwork accounts, and blended texts of various kinds." [8] She further asserted that the only woman contributor for Writing Culture was Marie Louis Pratt, who was not an anthropologist but a literary critic, pointing out that the absence of women voices in the book was due to the lack of value given to women's anthropological production, which was often seen as less professional than men's. [9]
Since its release Women Writing Culture has been cited as an example of how "feminist concern with the production and representation of knowledge provides an especially appropriate platform from which to question conventional styles of writing and representing." [10]
The book has received reviews from American Ethnologist , the NWSA Journal , and American Anthropologist , among others. [11] [12] [13]
Anthropology is the scientific study of humanity, concerned with human behavior, human biology, cultures, societies, and linguistics, in both the present and past, including past human species. Social anthropology studies patterns of behavior, while cultural anthropology studies cultural meaning, including norms and values. A portmanteau term sociocultural anthropology is commonly used today. Linguistic anthropology studies how language influences social life. Biological or physical anthropology studies the biological development of humans.
Cultural anthropology is a branch of anthropology focused on the study of cultural variation among humans. It is in contrast to social anthropology, which perceives cultural variation as a subset of a posited anthropological constant. The term sociocultural anthropology includes both cultural and social anthropology traditions.
Margaret Mead was an American cultural anthropologist who featured frequently as an author and speaker in the mass media during the 1960s and the 1970s.
Ruth Fulton Benedict was an American anthropologist and folklorist.
Feminist literary criticism is literary criticism informed by feminist theory, or more broadly, by the politics of feminism. It uses the principles and ideology of feminism to critique the language of literature. This school of thought seeks to analyze and describe the ways in which literature portrays the narrative of male domination by exploring the economic, social, political, and psychological forces embedded within literature. This way of thinking and criticizing works can be said to have changed the way literary texts are viewed and studied, as well as changing and expanding the canon of what is commonly taught. It is used a lot in Greek myths.
Ethnography is a branch of anthropology and the systematic study of individual cultures. Ethnography explores cultural phenomena from the point of view of the subject of the study. Ethnography is also a type of social research that involves examining the behavior of the participants in a given social situation and understanding the group members' own interpretation of such behavior.
Ruth Behar is a Cuban-American anthropologist and writer. Her work includes academic studies, as well as poetry, memoir, and literary fiction. As an anthropologist, she has argued for the open adoption and acknowledgement of the subjective nature of research and participant-observers. She is a recipient of the Belpré Medal.
Feminist anthropology is a four-field approach to anthropology that seeks to transform research findings, anthropological hiring practices, and the scholarly production of knowledge, using insights from feminist theory. Simultaneously, feminist anthropology challenges essentialist feminist theories developed in Europe and America. While feminists practiced cultural anthropology since its inception, it was not until the 1970s that feminist anthropology was formally recognized as a subdiscipline of anthropology. Since then, it has developed its own subsection of the American Anthropological Association – the Association for Feminist Anthropology – and its own publication, Feminist Anthropology. Their former journal Voices is now defunct.
Helena Wulff is professor of social anthropology at Stockholm University. Her research is in the anthropology of communication and aesthetics based on a wide range of studies of the social worlds of literary production, dance, and the visual arts.
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Marcia Claire Inhorn is a medical anthropologist and William K. Lanman Jr. Professor of Anthropology and International Affairs at Yale University where she serves as Chair of the Council on Middle East Studies. A specialist on Middle Eastern gender and health issues, Inhorn conducts research on the social impact of infertility and assisted reproductive technologies in Egypt, Lebanon, the United Arab Emirates, and Arab America.
Smadar Lavie is a Mizrahi U.S.-Israeli anthropologist, author, and activist. She specializes in the anthropology of Egypt, Israel and Palestine, emphasizing issues of race, gender and religion. Lavie is a professor emerita of anthropology at the University of California, Davis, and a visiting scholar at the Department of Ethnic Studies, University of California, Berkeley. Lavie received her doctorate in anthropology from the University of California at Berkeley (1989) and spent nine years as assistant and associate professor of anthropology at the University of California, Davis. She authored The Poetics of Military Occupation, receiving the 1990 Honorable Mention of the Victor Turner Award for Ethnographic Writing, and Wrapped in the Flag of Israel: Mizrahi Single Mothers and Bureaucratic Torture receiving the 2015 Honorable Mention of the Association of Middle East Women's Studies Book Award Competition. Wrapped in the Flag of Israel's first edition was also one of the four finalists in the 2015 Clifford Geertz Book Award Competition of the Society for the Anthropology of Religion. She also co-edited Creativity/Anthropology and Displacement, Diaspora, and Geographies of Identity. Lavie won the American Studies Association's 2009 Gloria Anzaldúa Prize for her article, “Staying Put: Crossing the Palestine-Israel Border with Gloria Anzaldúa,” published in Anthropology and Humanism (2011). In 2013, Smadar Lavie won the “Heart at East” Honor Plaque for lifetime service to Mizraḥi communities in Israel-Palestine.
The anthropologist Leon E. Stover says of science fiction's relationship to anthropology: "Anthropological science fiction enjoys the philosophical luxury of providing answers to the question "What is man?" while anthropology the science is still learning how to frame it". The editors of a collection of anthropological SF stories observed:
Anthropology is the science of man. It tells the story from ape-man to spaceman, attempting to describe in detail all the epochs of this continuing history. Writers of fiction, and in particular science fiction, peer over the anthropologists' shoulders as the discoveries are made, then utilize the material in fictional works. Where the scientist must speculate reservedly from known fact and make a small leap into the unknown, the writer is free to soar high on the wings of fancy.
Ethnocinema, from Jean Rouch’s cine-ethnography and ethno-fictions, is an emerging practice of intercultural filmmaking being defined and extended by Melbourne, Australia-based writer and arts educator, Anne Harris, and others. Originally derived from the discipline of anthropology, ethnocinema is one form of ethnographic filmmaking that prioritises mutuality, collaboration and social change. The practice's ethos claims that the role of anthropologists, and other cultural, media and educational researchers, must adapt to changing communities, transnational identities and new notions of representation for the 21st century.
Ara Wilson is a university professor and author.
Roger Lancaster is a professor of anthropology and cultural studies at George Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia, where from 1999 until 2014 he directed the Cultural Studies PhD Program. He is known for his writing in LGBT studies, gender/sexuality, culture and political economy, and critical science studies. His research tries to understand how sexual mores, racial hierarchies, and class predicaments interact in a changing world.
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