Feminist anthropology
Encyclopedia
Feminist anthropology is an approach to studying cultural anthropology
that aims to correct for a perceived androcentric
bias
within anthropology. It came to prominence in the early 1970s, although elements of it can be seen in the works of earlier anthropologists including Alice Fletcher, Marija Gimbutas
, Margaret Ehrenberg, Emily Martin
, and Margaret Mead
.
, a prominent theorist of feminist anthropology, argued that women had been included in some sense in anthropological theory and research since the discipline's birth. Early anthropologists from James Frazer
to E.E. Evans-Pritchard were interested in kinship and marriage, so women always appeared in their ethnographies, and a number of women wrote early anthropological works. The problem, Moore argued, was not of presence in anthropology but of interpretation, representation, and understanding. She cites a 1976 study by Ruby Rohrlich-Leavitt et al. comparing analysis by male and female ethnographers of the social position of Aboriginal Australian
women. Male ethnographers, Rohrlich-Leavitt wrote, said Aboriginal women were seen by their societies as profane and excluded from rituals, and were unimportant within the economy. The female ethnographers on the other hand said that the women were economically indispensable for subsistence, important in rituals, and were treated with respect by men. Moore presented this as proof that it is how women are included in anthropology that matters. The challenge, then, was to critically analyse existing anthropological literature and create new research, placing women at the centre.
had, also in 1975, coined the term "sex/gender system" to illustrate the difference between biological imperative and social behaviour, arguing that human expressions of gender and sexuality were not biological constants but politically constructed norms. Toward an Anthropology of Women was originally published with the author's name cited as Rayna Rapp Reiter, but subsequent and recent (as of 2011) scholarship by this author has appeared under the name of Rayna Rapp.
published Feminism and Anthropology, an argument for a feminist anthropology conscious of the way gender difference relates to other markers of social difference, including class, ethnicity, and race. 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.
Moore argued too, though, that there was nothing self-evident or determinant about gender, and that anthropology - with its capacity to understand how differently cultures around the world conceive of gender and sex - could not treat the idea of womanhood as straightforward and unproblematic.
is not universal. 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 anthropology, Marilyn Strathern writes, disagrees internally about whether sexual asymmetry is universal. 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 anthroplogy 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.
and deconstruction
ism 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 the 'female point of view', feminist anthropology constantly defines itself as 'not male' and therefore as inevitably distinct from and marginal to the mainstream. 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.
Cultural anthropology
Cultural anthropology is a branch of anthropology focused on the study of cultural variation among humans, collecting data about the impact of global economic and political processes on local cultural realities. Anthropologists use a variety of methods, including participant observation,...
that aims to correct for a perceived androcentric
Androcentrism
Androcentrism is the practice, conscious or otherwise, of placing male human beings or the masculine point of view at the center of one's view of the world and its culture and history...
bias
Bias
Bias is an inclination to present or hold a partial perspective at the expense of alternatives. Bias can come in many forms.-In judgement and decision making:...
within anthropology. It came to prominence in the early 1970s, although elements of it can be seen in the works of earlier anthropologists including Alice Fletcher, Marija Gimbutas
Marija Gimbutas
Marija Gimbutas , was a Lithuanian-American archeologist known for her research into the Neolithic and Bronze Age cultures of "Old Europe", a term she introduced. Her works published between 1946 and 1971 introduced new views by combining traditional spadework with linguistics and mythological...
, Margaret Ehrenberg, Emily Martin
Emily Martin
Emily Martin is a sinologist, anthropologist, and feminist. Currently, she is a professor of socio-cultural anthropology at New York University. She received her PhD degree from Cornell University in 1971. Before 1984, she published works under the name of Emily Martin Ahern.- Sinology :Martin’s...
, and Margaret Mead
Margaret Mead
Margaret Mead was an American cultural anthropologist, who was frequently a featured writer and speaker in the mass media throughout the 1960s and 1970s....
.
Origins
Henrietta MooreHenrietta Moore
Henrietta L. Moore is a British social anthropologist. She is the William Wyse Professor of Social Anthropology at the University of Cambridge. Previously Moore was a Governor of the LSE; LSE Deputy Director for research and external relations 2002-2005, and served as the Director of the Gender...
, a prominent theorist of feminist anthropology, argued that women had been included in some sense in anthropological theory and research since the discipline's birth. Early anthropologists from James Frazer
James Frazer
Sir James George Frazer , was a Scottish social anthropologist influential in the early stages of the modern studies of mythology and comparative religion...
to E.E. Evans-Pritchard were interested in kinship and marriage, so women always appeared in their ethnographies, and a number of women wrote early anthropological works. The problem, Moore argued, was not of presence in anthropology but of interpretation, representation, and understanding. She cites a 1976 study by Ruby Rohrlich-Leavitt et al. comparing analysis by male and female ethnographers of the social position of Aboriginal Australian
Indigenous Australians
Indigenous Australians are the original inhabitants of the Australian continent and nearby islands. The Aboriginal Indigenous Australians migrated from the Indian continent around 75,000 to 100,000 years ago....
women. Male ethnographers, Rohrlich-Leavitt wrote, said Aboriginal women were seen by their societies as profane and excluded from rituals, and were unimportant within the economy. The female ethnographers on the other hand said that the women were economically indispensable for subsistence, important in rituals, and were treated with respect by men. Moore presented this as proof that it is how women are included in anthropology that matters. The challenge, then, was to critically analyse existing anthropological literature and create new research, placing women at the centre.
1970s
Self-consciously feminist anthropology emerged during the 1970s as a series of challenges to anthropology's male bias. Rayna [Reiter] Rapp's 1975 Toward an Anthropology of Women represented an early contribution to the emerging school, arguing that women and men experience gender differently from one another, with reference to different sets of social markers, and that the experience of women was in itself a legitimate subject for anthropological enquiry. [Reiter] Rapp pointed out male bias in the theories and assumptions of contemporary anthropology, introducing a new strand in anthropological self-criticism. [Reiter] Rapp's contemporary Gayle RubinGayle Rubin
Gayle S. Rubin is a cultural anthropologist best known as an activist and influential theorist of sex and gender politics. She has written on a range of subjects including feminism, sadomasochism, prostitution, pedophilia, pornography and lesbian literature, as well as anthropological studies and...
had, also in 1975, coined the term "sex/gender system" to illustrate the difference between biological imperative and social behaviour, arguing that human expressions of gender and sexuality were not biological constants but politically constructed norms. Toward an Anthropology of Women was originally published with the author's name cited as Rayna Rapp Reiter, but subsequent and recent (as of 2011) scholarship by this author has appeared under the name of Rayna Rapp.
1980s
In 1988 Henrietta MooreHenrietta Moore
Henrietta L. Moore is a British social anthropologist. She is the William Wyse Professor of Social Anthropology at the University of Cambridge. Previously Moore was a Governor of the LSE; LSE Deputy Director for research and external relations 2002-2005, and served as the Director of the Gender...
published Feminism and Anthropology, an argument for a feminist anthropology conscious of the way gender difference relates to other markers of social difference, including class, ethnicity, and race. 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.
Moore argued too, though, that there was nothing self-evident or determinant about gender, and that anthropology - with its capacity to understand how differently cultures around the world conceive of gender and sex - could not treat the idea of womanhood as straightforward and unproblematic.
Feminist anthropology and 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 womenSexism
Sexism, also known as gender discrimination or sex discrimination, is the application of the belief or attitude that there are characteristics implicit to one's gender that indirectly affect one's abilities in unrelated areas...
is not universal. 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 anthropology, Marilyn Strathern writes, disagrees internally about whether sexual asymmetry is universal. 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
Western world
The Western world, also known as the West and the Occident , is a term referring to the countries of Western Europe , the countries of the Americas, as well all countries of Northern and Central Europe, Australia and New Zealand...
. Feminist anthropologists have claimed that their research helps to correct this systematic bias in mainstream feminist theory
Feminist theory
Feminist theory is the extension of feminism into theoretical, or philosophical discourse, it aims to understand the nature of gender inequality...
. 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
Traditional knowledge
Traditional knowledge , indigenous knowledge , traditional environmental knowledge and local knowledge generally refer to the long-standing traditions and practices of certain regional, indigenous, or local communities. Traditional knowledge also encompasses the wisdom, knowledge, and teachings...
, 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
Latin America
Latin America is a region of the Americas where Romance languages – particularly Spanish and Portuguese, and variably French – are primarily spoken. Latin America has an area of approximately 21,069,500 km² , almost 3.9% of the Earth's surface or 14.1% of its land surface area...
), 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 anthroplogy 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
Ethnocentrism
Ethnocentrism is the tendency to believe that one's ethnic or cultural group is centrally important, and that all other groups are measured in relation to one's own. The ethnocentric individual will judge other groups relative to his or her own particular ethnic group or culture, especially with...
of feminism.
The 'double difference'
Feminist anthropology, [Reiter] Rapp argued, 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 postmodernismPostmodernism
Postmodernism is a philosophical movement evolved in reaction to modernism, the tendency in contemporary culture to accept only objective truth and to be inherently suspicious towards a global cultural narrative or meta-narrative. Postmodernist thought is an intentional departure from the...
and deconstruction
Deconstruction
Deconstruction is a term introduced by French philosopher Jacques Derrida in his 1967 book Of Grammatology. Although he carefully avoided defining the term directly, he sought to apply Martin Heidegger's concept of Destruktion or Abbau, to textual reading...
ism 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 the 'female point of view', feminist anthropology constantly defines itself as 'not male' and therefore as inevitably distinct from and marginal to the mainstream. 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.
Further reading
- Duley, Margot I. and Mary I. Edwards. (1986) The Cross-Cultural Study of Women: A Comprehensive Guide. New York, NY: Feminist Press.
- Moore, Henrietta L. (1996) The Future of Anthropological Knowledge, London; New York: Routledge,
- Nicholson, L. (1982) ‘Article Review on Rosaldo’s “The Use and Abuse of Anthropology,”’ in Signs, Vol 7, No. 42, pp732–735
- Reiter, Rayna R. (1975) ed. Toward an Anthropology of Women, Monthly Review Press: New York.
- 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 0691086958 (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.
See also
- Feminist sociologyFeminist sociologyFeminist sociology is a conflict theory and theoretical perspective which observes gender in its relation to power, both at the level of face-to-face interaction and reflexivity within a social structure at large...
- Margaret Ehrenberg
- Louise LamphereLouise LamphereLouise Lamphere is an American anthropologist who has been distinguished professor of anthropology at the University of New Mexico since 2001. She was a faculty member at UNM from 1976-1979 and again from 1986-2009, when she became a Professor Emeritus.Lamphere received her Ph.D. from Harvard in...
- Catherine LutzCatherine LutzCatherine Lutz is an anthropologist who is currently Chair of the Anthropology Department at Brown University. She is also a director of the Watson Institute's Costs of War study, an attempt to calculate the financial costs of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars....
- Phyllis KaberryPhyllis KaberryPhyllis Mary Kaberry was a social anthropologist who dedicated her work to the study of women in various societies. Particularly with her work in both Australia and Africa, she paved the way for a feminist approach in anthropological studies...
- Emily MartinEmily MartinEmily Martin is a sinologist, anthropologist, and feminist. Currently, she is a professor of socio-cultural anthropology at New York University. She received her PhD degree from Cornell University in 1971. Before 1984, she published works under the name of Emily Martin Ahern.- Sinology :Martin’s...
- Sherry OrtnerSherry OrtnerSherry Beth Ortner is an American cultural anthropologist and has been Distinguished Professor of Anthropology at UCLA since 2004.-Biography:...
- Michelle RosaldoMichelle RosaldoMichelle Zimbalist Rosaldo , known to her friends and colleagues as Shelly, was a social, linguistic, and psychological anthropologist famous for her studies of the Ilongot tribe in the Philippines and for her pioneering role in women's studies and the anthropology of gender.-Life:Born in New York...
- Adrienne L. Zihlman
- Gayle RubinGayle RubinGayle S. Rubin is a cultural anthropologist best known as an activist and influential theorist of sex and gender politics. She has written on a range of subjects including feminism, sadomasochism, prostitution, pedophilia, pornography and lesbian literature, as well as anthropological studies and...
- Edwin ArdenerEdwin ArdenerEdwin Ardener was a British social anthropologist and academic. He was also noted for his contributions to the study of history. Within anthropology, some of his most important contributions were to the study of gender, as in his 1975 work in which he described women as "muted" in social...