Feminist anthropology is a four-field approach
to anthropology (archeological, biological,
cultural, linguistic) 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 (see Margaret Mead and
Hortense Powdermaker), 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, Voices.
== History ==
Feminist anthropology has unfolded through
three historical phases beginning in the 1970s:
the anthropology of women, the anthropology
of gender, and finally feminist anthropology.Prior
to these historical phases, feminist anthropologists
trace their genealogy to the late 19th century.
Erminnie Platt Smith, Alice Cunningham Fletcher,
Matilda Coxe Stevenson, Frances Densmore—many
of these women were self-taught anthropologists
and their accomplishments faded and heritage
erased by the professionalization of the discipline
at the turn of the 20th century.
Prominent among early women anthropologists
were the wives of 'professional' men anthropologists,
some of whom facilitated their husbands research
as translators and transcriptionists.
Margery Wolf, for example, wrote her classic
ethnography "The House of Lim" from experiences
she encountered following her husband to northern
Taiwan during his own fieldwork.While anthropologists
like Margaret Mead and Ruth Benedict are representatives
of the history of feminist anthropology, female
anthropologists of color and varying ethnicities
also play a role in the theoretical concepts
of the field.
Hortense Powdermaker, for example, a contemporary
of Mead's who studied with British anthropological
pioneer Bronislaw Malinowski conducted political
research projects in a number of then a-typical
settings: reproduction and women in Melanesia
(Powdermaker 1933), race in the American South
(Powdermaker 1939), gender and production
in Hollywood (1950), and class-gender-race
intersectionality in the African Copper Belt
(Powdermaker 1962).
Similarly, Zora Neale Hurston, a student of
Franz Boas, the father of American anthropology,
experimented with narrative forms beyond the
objective ethnography that characterized the
proto/pseudo- scientific writings of the time.
Other African American women made similar
moves at the junctions of ethnography and
creativity, namely Katherine Dunham and Pearl
Primus, both of whom studied dance in the
1940s.
Also important to the later spread of Feminist
anthropology within other subfields beyond
cultural anthropology was physical anthropologist
Caroline Bond Day and archeologist Mary Leakey.
The anthropology of women, introduced through
Peggy Golde's "Women in the Field" and Michelle
Rosaldo and Louise Lamphere's edited volume
Woman, Culture, and Society, attempted to
recuperate women as distinct cultural actors
otherwise erased by male anthropologists'
focus on men's lives as the universal character
of a society.
Male anthropologists, Golde argued specifically,
rarely have access to women in tribes and
societies because of the sexual threat they
pose to these women.
As such, they receive the stories of men about
women in instances when women are present
at all.
The male anthropologists' ignorance and the
indigenous men's domination congeal to create
instances where, according to Rosaldo and
Lamphere, the asymmetry between women and
men becomes universal.
A second anthropology of women would arise
out of American engagements with Friedrich
Engels' The Origin of the Family, Private
Property and the State, arguing that this
universal asymmetry was not timeless, but
a product of capitalist relations that came
to dominate the global mode of production
through colonialism.
As both approaches grew more vocal in their
critique of male ethnographers' descriptions
as one-sided, an 'add women and mix' approach
to ethnography became popular, whereby women
were not necessarily described at detail,
but mentioned as part of the wider culture.In
the wake of Gayle Rubin and her critique of
"the sex/gender system," the anthropology
of women transformed into an anthropology
of gender.
Gender was a set of meanings and relationships
related to but not isomorphic with biological
sex.
Women was not a universal community or category
that was self-evident.
Following the rise of women of color feminism,
the anthropology of gender critiqued the early
goals of first-wave feminists and anthropologists
as overly concerned with bourgeois social
ambitions.
It did so through a move from documenting
the experience of women as a universal population
to interpreting the place of gender in broader
patterns of meaning, interaction, and power.
This includes the work of women anthropologists
Henrietta Moore and Ethel Albert.
Moore contended that anthropology, even when
carried out by women, tended to "[order] the
world into a male idiom [. . .] because researchers
are either men or women trained in a male
oriented discipline".
Anthropology's theoretical architecture and
practical methods, Moore argued, were so overwhelmingly
influenced by sexist ideology (anthropology
was commonly termed the "study of man" for
much of the twentieth century) that without
serious self-examination and a conscious effort
to counter this bias, anthropology could not
meaningfully represent female experience.
Today, feminist anthropology has grown out
of the anthropology of gender to encompass
the study of the female body as it intersects
with or is acted upon by cultural, medical,
economic, and other forces.
This includes the expansion of feminist politics
beyond cultural anthropology to physical anthropology,
linguistic anthropology, and archeology, as
well as feminist anthropology becoming a site
for connecting cultural studies, history,
literature, and ethnic studies.
== Feminist Archaeology ==
Feminist archaeology initially emerged in
the late 1970s and early 80s, along with other
objections to the epistemology espoused by
the processual school of archaeological thought,
such as symbolic and hermeneutic archaeologies.
Margaret Conkey and Janet Spector’s 1984
paper Archaeology and the Study of Gender
summed up the feminist critique of the discipline
at that time: that archaeologists were unproblematically
overlaying modern-day, Western gender norms
onto past societies, for example in the sexual
division of labor; that contexts and artifacts
attributed to the activities of men, such
as projectile point production and butchering
at kill sites, were prioritized in research
time and funding; and that the very character
of the discipline was constructed around masculine
values and norms.
For example, women were generally encouraged
to pursue laboratory studies instead of fieldwork
(although there were exceptions throughout
the history of the discipline) and the image
of the archaeologist was centered around the
rugged, masculine, “cowboy of science”.Recently,
feminists in archeology have started to confront
the issue of sexual assault during "field
work" through scholarly research on the social
life of archeologists.
The Biological Anthropology Field Experiences
Web Survey, open to bioarcheologists, primatologists,
and other subfields, revealed that 19% of
women are sexually assaulted during fieldwork,
with 59% of anthropologists—male and female—experiencing
sexual harassment.
== Feminist Cultural Anthropology ==
Feminist cultural anthropology deals with
the concept of feminism through the lens of
cultural anthropology.
When combining these two fields of study,
cultural anthropology can be approached in
a non-binary way.
New information pertaining to research and
knowledge from a scholarly perspective also
has no restrictions.
This field of study may impact feminism and
women and gender studies as well because it
provides feminist analyses of culture from
an anthropological perspective.In the 1970s,
women started attending undergraduate and
graduate universities where the social sciences,
which were at one time largely dominated by
men, were now being practiced by men and women
alike.
With more women in the social science disciplines,
they started having an impact on how some
issues were being dealt with in the social
science fields, such as the emphasis on gender
studies and the integration of women’s rights
issues into these studies.
Women entering the social science fields had
such a large impact on the feminist anthropology
movement because before the 1980s, female
anthropologists mostly focused on aspects
such as family, marriage, and kinship.
Many female anthropologists reacted to this
stereotype placed on them, as they wanted
to focus on broader aspects of culture in
the scholarly community.
When feminist anthropology first developed,
it was intended to be the subdiscipline of
the anthropology of women.
However, feminist cultural anthropology arose
as a subfield itself when anthropologists
started to realize that women's and gender
studies weren’t published as frequently
as other topics in anthropology.
As feminist anthropology began being practiced
by more people and cultural aspects such as
race, values, and customs started being considered,
focuses on personal identity and differences
between people in varying cultures became
the main idea surrounding feminist cultural
anthropology.
With this advance, female anthropologists
started focusing on all aspects of gender
and sex and how they vary culturally.
With a focus on feminism through an anthropological
lens, women’s role in society and their
contributions to the social sciences formed
itself a new subfield known as feminist cultural
anthropology.
== Relationship with Feminism ==
The relationships of feminist anthropology
with other strands of academic feminism are
uneasy.
By concerning themselves with the different
ways in which different cultures constitute
gender, feminist anthropology can contend
that the oppression of women is not universal.
Henrietta Moore argued that the concept of
"woman" is insufficiently universal to stand
as an analytical category in anthropological
enquiry: that the idea of 'woman' was specific
to certain cultures, and not a human universal.
For some feminists, anthropologist Michelle
Rosaldo wrote, this argument contradicted
a core principle of their understanding of
relations between men and women.
Contemporary feminist anthropologist Marilyn
Strathern argues that anthropology, which
must deal with difference rather than seeking
to erase it, is not necessarily harmed by
this disagreement, but notes nonetheless that
feminist anthropology faces resistance.Anthropology
engages often with feminists from non-Western
traditions, whose perspectives and experiences
can differ from those of white European and
American feminists.
Historically, such 'peripheral' perspectives
have sometimes been marginalized and regarded
as less valid or important than knowledge
from the western world.
Feminist anthropologists have claimed that
their research helps to correct this systematic
bias in mainstream feminist theory.
On the other hand, anthropologists' claims
to include and engage with such other perspectives
have in turn been criticised - local people
are seen as the producers of local knowledge,
which only the western anthropologist can
convert into social science theory.
Because feminist theorists come predominantly
from the west, and do not emerge from the
cultures they study (some of which have their
own distinct traditions of feminism, like
the grassroots feminism of Latin America),
their ideas about feminism may contain western-specific
assumptions that do not apply simply to the
cultures they investigate.
Rosaldo criticizes the tendency of feminists
to treat other contemporary cultures as anachronistic,
to see other parts of the world as representing
other periods in western history - to say,
for example, that gender relations in one
country are somehow stuck at a past historical
stage of those in another.
Western feminists had, Rosaldo said, viewed
women elsewhere as “ourselves undressed
and the historical specificity of their lives
and of our own becomes obscured”.
Anthropology, Moore argued, by speaking about
and not for women, could overcome this bias.
Marilyn Strathern characterised the sometimes
antagonistic relationship between feminism
and anthropology as self-sustaining, since
“each so nearly achieves what the other
aims for as an ideal relation with the world.".
Feminism constantly poses a challenge to the
androcentric orthodoxy from which anthropology
emerges; anthropology undermines the ethnocentricism
of feminism.
== The 'double difference' ==
Feminist anthropology, Rayna Rapp argues,
is subject to a 'double difference' from mainstream
academia.
It is a feminist tradition – part of a branch
of scholarship, sometimes marginalized as
an offshoot of postmodernism and deconstructionism
and concerned with the experiences of women
– who are marginalized by an androcentric
orthodoxy.
At the same time it addresses non-Western
experience and concepts, areas of knowledge
deemed peripheral to the knowledge created
in the west.
It is thus doubly marginalized.
Moore argues that some of this marginalization
is self-perpetuating.
By insisting on adhering exclusively to the
'female point of view', feminist anthropology
constantly defines itself as 'not male' and
therefore as inevitably distinct from, and
marginal to, mainstream anthropology.
Feminist anthropology, Moore says, effectively
ghettoizes itself.
Strathern argues that feminist anthropology,
as a tradition posing a challenge to the mainstream,
can never fully integrate with that mainstream:
it exists to critique, to deconstruct, and
to challenge.
== See also ==
== Notes ==
== Further reading ==
Duley, Margot I. and Mary I. Edwards.
(1986) The Cross-Cultural Study of Women:
A Comprehensive Guide.
New York, NY: Feminist Press.
ed. by Margot I. Duley ... (1986).
The cross-cultural study of women : a comprehensive
guide.
New York: Feminist Pr.
ISBN 0-935312-45-5.
OCLC 9784721.CS1 maint: Extra text: authors
list (link)
Moore, Henrietta L. (1996) The Future of Anthropological
Knowledge, London; New York: Routledge, edited
by Henrietta Moore.
(1996).
The future of anthropological knowledge.
London: Routledge.
ISBN 0-415-10786-5.
OCLC 32924172.CS1 maint: Extra text: authors
list (link)
Nicholson, L. (1982).
"Article Review on Rosaldo's 'The Use and
Abuse of Anthropology'".
Signs.
7 (42): 732–735.
ISSN 0097-9740.
Reiter, Rayna R. (1975) ed.
Toward an Anthropology of Women, Monthly Review
Press: New York.
edited by Rayna R. Reiter.
(1975).
Toward an anthropology of women.
New York: Monthly Review Press.
ISBN 0-85345-372-1.
OCLC 1501926.CS1 maint: Extra text: authors
list (link)
Bratton, A. (May 1998) Feminist Anthropology
Soga, K. “Feminist Anthropology” (15/12/03),
Summary of McGee, R et al. (2004) Anthropological
Theory: An Introductory History, New York:
McGraw Hill.
Abu-Lughod, Lila (1986).
Veiled sentiments: honor and poetry in a Bedouin
society, University of California Press.
Abu-Lughod, Lila (1993).
Writing Women's Worlds: Bedouin Stories.
University of California Press.
Davis-Floyd, Robbie (1992/2003).
Birth as an American rite of passage.
Berkeley: University of California Press.
Ruth Behar and Deborah A. Gordon (eds.), Women
Writing Culture.
University of California Press, 1995.
Boddy, Janice (1990).
Wombs and Alien Spirits: Women, Men, and the
Zar Cult in Northern Sudan.
University of Wisconsin Press.
Delaney, Carol.
1991.
The Seed and the Soil: Gender and Cosmology
in Turkish Village Society.
University of California Press.
Gelya Frank, Venus on Wheels: Two Decades
of Dialogue on Disability, Biography, and
Being Female.
University of California Press, 2000.
Carla Freeman, High Tech and High Heels: Women,
Work, and Pink-Collar Identities in the Caribbean.
Duke University Press, 2000.
Donna M. Goldstein, Laughter Out of Place:
Race, Class, Violence, and Sexuality in a
Rio Shantytown.
University of California Press, 2003.
Hochschild, Arlie Russell (1983/2003).
The managed heart: commercialization of human
feeling.
Berkeley, University of California Press.
Inhorn, Marcia Claire.
1994.
Quest for conception: gender, infertility,
and Egyptian medical traditions.
University of Pennsylvania Press.
Kondo, Dorinne K. (1990).
Crafting selves: power, gender, and discourses
of identity in a Japanese workplace.
Chicago:University of Chicago Press.
Layne, Linda L. (2003) Motherhood lost: a
feminist account of pregnancy loss in America.
New York: Routledge.
Lock, Margaret.
(1993) Encounters with Aging: mythologies
of menopause in Japan and North America.
University of California Press.
Lutz, Catherine (1988).
Unnatural emotions: everyday sentiments on
a Micronesian atoll & their challenge to western
theory.
Chicago, University of Chicago Press.
Mahmood, Saba (2005).
Politics of piety: the Islamic revival and
the feminist subject.
Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
ISBN 0-691-08695-8 (pb alk. paper).
Martin, Emily.
2001.
The Woman in the Body: A Cultural Analysis
of Reproduction.
Boston: Beacon Press.
Moore, Henrietta L. (1988).
Feminism and anthropology.Cambridge, UK, Polity
Press.
Ong, Aihwa (1987).
Spirits of resistance and capitalist discipline
: factory women in Malaysia.
Albany, State University of New York Press.
Radway, Janice A. (1991).
Reading the romance : women, patriarchy, and
popular literature.
Chapel Hill, University of North Carolina
Press.
Rapp, Rayna (2000).
Testing Women, Testing the Fetus : The Social
Impact of Amniocentesis in America.
New York: Routledge.
Salzinger, Leslie (2003).
Genders in production: making workers in Mexico's
global factories.
Berkeley: University of California Press.
Scheper-Hughes, Nancy (1992).
Death without weeping: the violence of everyday
life in Brazil.
Berkeley, University of California Press.
Teman, Elly (2010).
Birthing a Mother: the Surrogate Body and
the Pregnant Self.
Berkeley: University of California Press.
Tsing, Anna Lowenhaupt (1993).
In the realm of the diamond queen : marginality
in an out-of-the-way place.
Princeton, Princeton University Press.
Diane L. Wolf (ed.), Feminist Dilemmas in
Fieldwork.
Westview Press, 1996.
Margery Wolf, A Thrice-Told Tale Feminism,
Postmodernism, and Ethnographic Responsibility.
Stanford University Press, 1992.
== External links ==
Association for Feminist Anthropology
Overview of Feminist Anthropology
Anthropological Theories: Feminist Anthropology
Page on feminist anthropology from Indiana
University
