Mapping Feminist Anthropology in the Twenty-First Century

By Ellen Lewin, A. Lynn Bolles, Tom Boellstorff and 11 more

Feminist anthropology emerged in the 1970s as a much-needed corrective to the discipline’s androcentric biases. Far from being a marginalized subfield, it has been at the forefront of developments that have revolutionized not only anthropology, but also a host of other disciplines. This landmark collection of essays provides a contemporary overview of feminist anthropology’s historical and theoretical origins, the transformations it has undergone, and the vital contributions it continues to make to cutting-edge scholarship. 
 
Mapping Feminist Anthropology in the Twenty-First Century brings together a variety of contributors, giving a voice to both younger researchers and pioneering scholars who offer insider perspectives on the field’s foundational moments. Some chapters reveal how the rise of feminist anthropology shaped—and was shaped by—the emergence of fields like women’s studies, black and Latina studies, and LGBTQ studies. Others consider how feminist anthropologists are helping to frame the direction of developing disciplines like masculinity studies, affect theory, and science and technology studies. 
 
Spanning the globe—from India to Canada, from Vietnam to Peru—Mapping Feminist Anthropology in the Twenty-First Century reveals the important role that feminist anthropologists have played in worldwide campaigns against human rights abuses, domestic violence, and environmental degradation. It also celebrates the work they have done closer to home, helping to explode the developed world’s preconceptions about sex, gender, and sexuality. 
 

• Language: English
• Publisher: Rutgers University Press
• Release date: Jul 7, 2016
• ISBN: 9780813574301

Book preview

Mapping Feminist Anthropology in the Twenty-First Century

Mapping Feminist Anthropology in the Twenty-First Century

Edited by Ellen Lewin and Leni M. Silverstein

Rutgers University Press

New Brunswick, New Jersey and London

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Lewin, Ellen, editor. | Silverstein, Leni M., 1947– editor.

Title: Mapping feminist anthropology in the twenty-first century / edited by Ellen Lewin and Leni M. Silverstein.

Description: New Brunswick, New Jersey : Rutgers University Press, [2016] | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2015037350| ISBN 9780813574295 (hardcover : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780813574288 (pbk. : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780813574301 (epub) | ISBN 9780813574318 (web pdf)

Subjects: LCSH: Feminist anthropology.

Classification: LCC GN33.8 .M36 2016 | DDC 305.42—dc23

LC record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2015037350

A British Cataloging-in-Publication record for this book is available from the British Library.

This collection copyright © 2016 by Rutgers, The State University

Individual chapters copyright © 2016 in the names of their authors

All rights reserved

No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without written permission from the publisher. Please contact Rutgers University Press, 106 Somerset Street, New Brunswick, NJ 08901. The only exception to this prohibition is fair use as defined by U.S. copyright law.

Visit our website: http://rutgerspress.rutgers.edu

Leni dedicates this book to Manuela and Leonora Silverstein Zoninsein, the next generation, with pride and hope.

Ellen dedicates this book to Liz Goodman, my companion through the twenty-first century.

Contents

Acknowledgments

Prologue

Rayna Rapp

Introduction: Anthropologies and Feminisms: Mapping Our Intellectual Journey

Leni M. Silverstein and Ellen Lewin

Part I. Foundations: Problematizing Feminist Anthropology

Feminist Anthropology Engages Social Movements: Theory, Ethnography, and Activism

Louise Lamphere

Feminist Linguistics and Linguistic Feminisms

Elise Kramer

The Curious Relationship of Feminist Anthropology and Women’s Studies

A. Lynn Bolles

Part II. Expansions: Confronting Universals

When Nature/Culture Implodes: Feminist Anthropology and Biotechnology

Elizabeth F. S. Roberts

Conceptions of Contraceptions: Feminist Anthropological Perspectives on Men, Women, and Reproductive Health in Two K’iche’ Maya Communities

Matthew R. Dudgeon

The Body and Embodiment in the History of Feminist Anthropology: An Idiosyncratic Excursion through Binaries

Frances E. Mascia-Lees

Discipline and Desire: Feminist Politics, Queer Studies, and New Queer Anthropology

Margot Weiss

Part III. Reverberations: Transnational Encounters

A Greater Measure of Justice: Gender, Violence, and Reparations

Kimberly Theidon

Cooking with Firewood: Deep Meaning and Environmental Materialities in a Globalized World

Meena Khandelwal

Feminist Anthropology: Approaching Domestic Violence in Northern Việt Nam

Lynn Kwiatkowski

Studying Gender and Neoliberalism Transnationally: Implications for Theory and Action

Catherine Kingfisher

Epilogue

Tom Boellstorff

Notes on Contributors

Index

Acknowledgments

Assembling this volume has been an ambitious but extremely satisfying project. But, as is the case with all such ventures, its completion depended on the support and counsel of people from many parts of our lives. The editors first became friends in the early 1960s, when we were undergraduates at the University of Chicago, the place where we both fell in love with anthropology. And we mean fell in love. Anthropology offered a way to understand the lives of others in a manner that seemed to us (then) to be uniquely respectful, an approach to the world in which every person held a place of honor—as an actor in cultural dramas and as the bearer of viewpoints that were inherently valuable. As women who often felt like outsiders, it also afforded us a way to situate ourselves within a global setting. Although in those prefeminist days, women had yet to be discovered and difference in general was deemphasized, anthropology already contained the tools that would enable it (and us) to illuminate these issues—they had only to be unveiled.

After our Chicago years, we both became immersed in the early feminist movement and, as graduate students in anthropology, were both committed to the business of helping the discipline to stretch in order to incorporate questions about gender and sexuality being raised by the movement. Each of us has had a different sort of career in anthropology. For both of us, the question of how to make our anthropological training relevant and responsive to the pressing issues of the modern world was answered clearly by the demands of the feminist movement: to understand the inequities associated with gender and sexuality as they present themselves in many different socioeconomic and historical contexts and to perhaps offer some avenues for their redress.

Our shared history means that our first acknowledgment must be to each other: for the friendship, respect, and support we have shared throughout these years and during the creation of this project, even when we disputed the right way to approach the task of editing this volume. We have (mostly) been patient with one another, and working together has taught us both more than we could have imagined when we launched this undertaking. We discovered that, fortunately, our writing styles were quite similar and that our editorial preferences complemented each other’s, producing a more cohesive and thorough book. Co-editing is not an easy job and the fact that our friendship survived is a testament to both the strength of our relationship and the importance we attributed to birthing this volume.

We want to thank everyone who participated in the two sessions at the 2013 American Anthropological Association Chicago meetings that inspired us to edit this volume. Each presenter challenged us to rethink what we thought we knew about the contours of feminist anthropology.

Marlie Wasserman of Rutgers University Press has been every author’s dream editor. She has been enthusiastic about the project since we first accosted her at the AAA book exhibit in 2013 and has shepherded us through the various stages of the process with patience and precision. Marlie gets feminist anthropology in a way that makes her advice uniquely appropriate. We couldn’t have completed the volume without her wisdom—and her insistence on staying on schedule.

All the contributors to the volume have worked diligently to produce the best chapters possible. They accepted our comments, whether they were substantive or seemingly trivial matters of grammar or format, with grace; even those who were asked to produce multiple drafts did so without complaint and adhered to the deadlines we asked them to meet. We are grateful that we were able to assemble such a stellar group of scholars in this volume.

We owe special thanks to anonymous reviewers who evaluated the book proposal and to Claire Wendland, who carried out the review of the completed manuscript. Her comments were substantive and thoughtful, and led us to careful reassessments of parts of the volume. Her attention to the details of arguments was particularly meticulous, and was enormously helpful as we crafted the final version of the introduction. Rayna Rapp and Tom Boellstorff also contributed their critical insight and editorial acumen in vastly sharpening our introductory argument.

Finally, we wish to acknowledge the endless support of our friends and family who accepted numerous pauses, interruptions, and detours in their schedules as we strove to complete this manuscript.

Prologue

Rayna Rapp

Social movements always recast contested pasts as they stake their claims on a more just future. Recently, much anthropological discussion has been devoted to futurity.¹ Whether traveling under labels like anticipation (Adams et al. 2009), potentiality (Taussig et al. 2013), digital futures (Pels et al. 2010), Afrofuturism (Nelson 2002), or the politics of hope (Miyazaki 2004), these intersecting theoretical discussions broadly concern what Arjun Appadurai calls The Future as Cultural Fact (2013). By this title, Appadurai intends to highlight the tensions between risk-saturated probabilities that face escalating numbers of human communities living under conditions of extreme precarity, and more hopeful if fragile possibilities for collective action that might help to shape newly inclusive prospects. Future-oriented writings are highly diverse, focusing on intersecting topics currently of great interest to anthropologists. These range from the globalization of chronic disease and epidemics, and the highly stratified benefits of biomedical and pharmaceutical interventions to the escalation of precarious labor and labor migration. Such writings also focus on growing threats of and responses to climate change and food insecurity as well as the present-day impact of chronic warfare, violations of human rights, and the upending of vulnerable refugee populations, and much more. All involve escalating inequalities and all highlight the impact of social injustice on future generations, as well as our own. These discussions combine a widespread commitment to rethinking anthropological objects/subjects so that retellings of the past in the present will help to construct a future that might thus be otherwise, to use Elizabeth Povinelli’s construction (2012). Yet such disparate literatures cannot simply or easily be lumped together. I bring them briefly into this conversation for a reason: anthropologists and the people among whom we work all hold stakes in imagining futures beyond present-day exclusionary practices that separate out certain groups of people from the conditions of survival, mute their aspirations, and mark their legibility or invisibility. Gender, of course, is interwoven with varying degrees of explicitness into all of these analyses. Likewise, the presence of a gender dimension to any and all forms of rising inequality and future aspirations indexes the kinds of mapping projects undertaken in the chapters in this volume.

Long before the present interest in future imaginaries, feminists in our field developed potent fusions of anthropological theory and practice to scrutinize, critique, and ally with social movements. These projects bore their own utopian/dystopian risks and limitations, as Robyn Wiegman (2000) reminded us. Many of the chapters in Mapping Feminist Anthropology provide genealogies of gender-sensitive pasts in order to influence potential futures through present research, writing, and teaching. Some authors document the emergence of gender and sexual critiques and practices designed to heighten theoretical and practical interventions into the heart of the anthropological enterprise (Bolles, Weiss). The book’s introductory textual map and eleven chapters offer many rich, lively, open-ended, contentious, and—above all—hopeful readings of hitherto neglected or untheorized lineages. A substantial subset of authors describe current projects to institutionalize or transcend where or how gender in its many intersectionalities reproduces the marks of inferiority, and in turn marks rifts in social life. Collectively, these chapters illustrate how feminisms in all their diversity can articulate continuous critique of present inequality in the service of imaging how more just futures might emerge.

Mapping Feminist Anthropology morphed and developed from conference panels intended to celebrate and assess the twenty-fifth anniversary of the founding of the Association for Feminist Anthropology within the American Anthropological Association. At the time of AFA’s founding, most of us whose lives were touched by various versions of what was then called the women’s liberation movement understood that we were charged with the seemingly impossible task of transforming the subjects, objects, methods, and theories of our entire field. Naively utopian as this vision seemed then and now, its futurity was focused on addressing gender inequalities and their many forms of intersecting injustice both in our home societies and the ones whose stratifications we often studied.

Improbably enough, feminist interventions succeeded beyond what many of us anticipated; some iterations of gender relations were rapidly embraced as objects of anthropological investigation. Yet I might argue that the very success of institutionalizing the study of gender in intersectional perspectives not only mirrored the unruly heterogeneity and dividing practices of anthropology itself; it also created present-day tensions and barriers to the project of retelling our diverse histories in the service of imagining sufficiently transformational futures. Most who participated in new visions of anthropology dreamed of an otherwise future for our field.

Now that some of us dwell in various academic, governmental, non-governmental, and corporate worlds, how might these modicums of our own inclusion limit our ability to imagine a continuous and always unreachable horizon of social justice?

All the chapters in Mapping Feminist Anthropology explore those tensions between institutionalization—securing a home for gender-sensitive intersectional understandings of power, oppression, subjectivity, and mobilization (Kramer)—and continued theoretical, empirical, and practical commitments to building future imaginaries that supersede current understandings of what continual social transformations might look like. Whether discussing widespread violence against Peruvian indígenas viewed as an artifact of civil war rather than more accurately and capaciously the subject of multiple, ongoing forms of racialized oppression (Theidon), or the role of women’s labor in global climate change and the brutal market opportunities it enforces (Khandelwal), these chapters aim to mobilize ethnographic insight in pursuit of a more just future. To do so, they collectively address many intersecting themes. Here I suggest just three.

First, many chapters unearth hidden and not-so-hidden institutional histories of discrimination and activism. Some focus on tangential connections in and out of our academic homes while others index the heterogeneous relations between feminist anthropologists and burgeoning social movements at home and internationally (Lamphere). As Lynn Bolles tells us, the profound political value of ethnographically derived partial truths should not be underestimated. She thus highlights the productive complexities and built-in uncertainties that we as scholars, as well as advocates, located in our own diverse perspectives and genealogies of experience and activism, bring to institutionalizing gender projects. Second, some authors highlight the importance of reflexivity, situating our own intellectual and political stakes in the questions, methods, and findings of our work (Mascia-Lees). They ask how we perhaps inadvertently other Others, reproducing the boundaries of our own knowledge, and often in that process disabling the usefulness of our findings for intervention (Weiss). The goal of such reflection is, of course, to transform the future of anthropology as a discipline, a lens, a habitus for contributing to a potentially alternative world. Third, these chapters critique what Elizabeth Roberts identifies as legacies of essentialism. By this, she means attribution of the root cause of suffering and resistance to a naturalized embodiment. Other authors offer similar critiques of identities putatively based on religion, sexuality, and kinship as if any or all predetermine present and therefore future forms of social life. The process of engendering cannot be reduced to reproduction or racialized ethnicity or labor or national/migrational status or religion or sexuality. Indeed, attempts to essentialize gender, making women or men the naturalized victims or agents of their own oppression, misapprehends historical contingency and deep legacies of an overdetermined and hence virtually immutable identity. Identifying iterations of essentialism holds the potential to contribute to future imaginaries, but at the same time it may also entrap us in reflexive halls of mirrors.

Where next? Many of these chapters are frank in their ambition to lay a road map for ongoing transformations, whether in the work of human rights NGOs or the analysis of local, national, and international forces as they redefine domestic violence (Kwiatkowski); the parsing of neoliberal strategies for removal of highly gendered state services to woman-headed families in need (Kingfisher); the importance of recognizing multiple forms of masculinity in indigenous communities, where legacies of military slaughter remain an active presence shaping the lives of men and women traumatized by this violence (Dudgeon). The tensions, constraints, contradictions, small victories, and immense challenges that feminist anthropologists identify and sometimes help to address place us under a collective obligation to continually engage the object and subject of our risk-laden desires and aspirations. The heterogeneous non-synchrony of the social movements, geopolitical forces, and sheer political–economic power relations addressed in these chapters unearth one certainty: whatever the surprises, feminists are obligated, indeed, overdetermined to write beyond the ending, as feminist poet and literary theorist Rachel DuPlessis (1985) long ago dubbed our messy dilemma in making narratives of new futures possible. And as Alondra Nelson entitled her interview with the Afrofuturist novelist Nalo Hopkinson (2002), making the impossible possible is the challenge that we continually glimpse in much of our collective work. By venturing this far and beyond into Mapping Feminist Anthropology in the Twenty-First Century, you, too, Dear Reader, are invited and implicated in using the fantastically rich feminist pasts provided to us in the present by this valuable book, so that collectively we might participate in making an otherwise future.

Note

1. My understanding of futurity as an aspect of theory/method has been developed in longstanding conversations and writings with Faye Ginsburg. As ever, I thank her for our vibrant anthropological friendship.

References

Adams, Vincanne, Michelle Murphy, and Adele E. Clarke. 2009. Anticipation: Technoscience, Life, Affect, Temporality. Subjectivity 28: 246–265.

Appadurai, Arjun. 2013. The Future as Cultural Fact: Essays on the Global Condition. London: Verso.

Du Plessis, Rachel. 1985. Writing Beyond the Ending: Narrative Strategies of Twentieth-Century Women Writers. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

Hopkinson, Nalo. 2002. ‘Making the Impossible Possible’: An Interview with Nalo Hopkinson by Alondra Nelson. Social Text 71 (2): 98–113.

Miyazaki, Hirokazu. 2004. The Method of Hope: Anthropology, Philosophy, and Fijian Knowledge. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.

Nelson, Alondra. 2002. Future Texts. Social Text 71 (2): 1–15.

Pels, Peter, et al. 2010. The Future Is Elsewhere: Towards a Comparative History of Digital Futurities. http://futurities.info/about/, accessed March 3, 2015.

Povinelli, Elizabeth. 2012. The Will to Be Otherwise/The Effort of Endurance. South Atlantic Quarterly 111 (3): 453–475.

Taussig, Karen-Sue, Klaus Hoyer, and Stefan Helmreich. 2013. The Anthropology of Potentiality in Biomedicine: An Introduction to Supplement 7. Current Anthropology 54 (S7): S3–S14.

Wiegman, Robyn. 2000. Feminism’s Apocalyptic Futures. New Literary History 31 (4): 805–825.

Introduction

Anthropologies and Feminisms: Mapping Our Intellectual Journey

Leni M. Silverstein and Ellen Lewin

Try to imagine what it was like to study anthropology during the 1960s. First, the profession was predominantly male and androcentric. Second, objectivity or taking a neutral stance in our research was valorized and the notion that politics could influence our investigations was strictly eschewed. And, third, not coincidentally, anthropological research in all four fields was concentrated (albeit unconsciously) on reifying patterns of culture that mirrored conventional elements of contemporary life in the West. Women were viewed as the lesser partners of men. For example, most reconstructions of the life of ancient hominids started with the chase, the public imagination stoked with stories of hunting, aggression, and sex: me Tarzan, you Jane evokes the image.

A brief excerpt taken from Frances Dahlberg’s edited volume Woman the Gatherer offers an account of ancient hunters that illustrates the problems this kind of story provided for scholars or members of the public who had begun to wonder about women’s roles in evolution.

Imagine a group of people walking beside a lake in East Africa two million years ago: five thin, wiry men who carry spears for throwing at game or enemies walk rapidly away from the group. These hunters will search for bushbuck and may be gone for several days while the women and children stay behind. The women move slowly; they are pregnant, carrying toddlers, and besides, they are not going anywhere that day.

They will stay close to the edge of the lake, cooking the remnants of the meat the men brought several days before, maybe looking for snails or gathering some squalid roots from the rather sparse vegetation. They will wait patiently until their men return with meat. Each woman was chosen by her husband, so the legend continues, on the basis of her loveliness, especially her prominent breasts and buttocks. Her father or brother gave her to her husband on the basis of his hunting skills and fierceness. Other men will not seduce her because they fear her husband’s anger. (Dahlberg 1981, 1)

In this story, Dahlberg was reflecting on the shape of anthropology before serious thought about women and gender transformed the discipline. Her parodic characterization of the man the hunter formulation emphasized the pervasive view that human evolution, social organization, culture, and language were all rooted in the centrality of men’s activities. The essays included in her edited volume all took aim at the inadequacies of this formulation, setting the stage for the dramatic changes that feminist anthropology would bring to the discipline, as the long-accepted story of the preeminence of hunters collapsed under the persuasive weight of new inquiry.

In this introductory chapter, we propose to map the most salient lines of analysis that led to the disruptive and transformative new field that came to be known as feminist anthropology. These new perspectives constituted a dramatic paradigm shift that today seems mundane. But at the time it began, it represented a bold challenge and rethinking of the entire discipline of anthropology. In bringing this book to fruition, we intend to demonstrate that feminist scholarship continues to breathe new life into anthropology broadly conceived and to generate theoretical innovations. We also will delineate how anthropological studies of women evolved from a unified focus on females (Quinn 1977) to broad lines of inquiry impossible to imagine when the field first made its appearance. This analysis will also lead us to note how the feminist challenge to anthropology both influenced and expanded the changing interests and persuasions of the field itself, helping to legitimize anthropological research not only in exotic locales but at home as well. This was part of a much larger postcolonial transformation of reflexivity, not a concept available to us at the time, but already described by anthropologists working in many locations such as South Africa, India, and parts of Latin America. Thus we will recognize, as well, how our political engagements kept pace while also becoming transformed with the greater inclusion of people of color and gays and lesbians in the discipline; analyses of colonialism and postcolonialism; and the evolving challenges of globalization.

This volume underscores the productive tension between advocacy and theory that has been characteristic of feminist anthropology since its beginnings. The chapters move between a focus on non-Western ethnographic research and engagements with the United States and the West, highlighting shifts in method and writing, as well as topics of research, that have been the trademark of feminist critiques of anthropology. Much of the work in this volume, then, reflects the persistent struggles between academic rigor and public engagement (Lamphere), a movement that continues to challenge and drive our future investigations.

A Bit of History

Beginning in the late 1960s, critiques of British structural functionalism and American cultural anthropology began to open up new spaces for understanding cultures as more dynamic than envisioned by the static models that had long dominated the field. Responding to an earlier linear evolutionary focus (Harris 1969; Sahlins and Service 1960; Steward 1955), this shift returned anthropology to thinking about history and change over time, but in a different manner than in nineteenth-century Darwinian models. Questions of boundaries were raised in new ways (Barth 1969; Leach 1967) as were assumptions about the links between biology and kinship systems (Schneider 1968). At the same time, the work of the French structural anthropologists, preeminently that of Claude Lévi-Strauss (1969), showed us how to discover deeper meaning in myths, symbols, and ritual structures. Marxist theory also generated new questions about social change and its material foundations, mirroring the political turmoil of the 1960s (Engels 1902; Marx 1932). These new perspectives enabled us to imagine that women and men might not operate within the strictures of unitary cultural forms, and that their divergent positions in societies might, in fact, produce different ways of conceiving and pursuing their interests.

This intellectual ferment paralleled the upheaval in the United States—the civil rights movement, opposition to the Vietnam War, the emergence of second-wave feminism—which all resonated with and inspired our intellectual journey. In a particularly audacious paper, Woman the Gatherer, Sally Slocum (1975) exposed the pervasive male bias in anthropology and offered an alternative account of human development to that presumed by the ubiquitous Man the Hunter narrative. Other anthropologists soon followed Slocum’s lead in deploring the absence of data and theories specific to women. In another key contribution, Sherry Ortner’s article Is Female to Male as Nature Is to Culture? (1974) began the task of deconstructing women’s subordination to men in the realm of representation. Gayle Rubin’s theoretical tour de force, The Traffic in Women (1975), used Freud, Marx, Lacan, and preeminently Lévi-Strauss to locate what she saw as the universal secondary status of women in the arrangements of exchange that characterized kinship systems. Other feminists (Conkey and Gero 1991; Wylie 1992) noted that male archaeologists had paid virtually no attention to material remains that could inform our understandings of prehistoric gender patterns.

Thus, feminism found its way into anthropology through the same processes that brought it into other disciplines in the humanities and social sciences in the United States, through the second wave of feminism that emerged in the late 1960s and 1970s. Among this new generation of feminist activists were anthropology students and relatively marginalized female academic anthropologists (see Lamphere, this volume). How unprepared we were to provide answers to many pressing questions that the new focus on women’s oppression presented and that our (non-anthropologist) sisters in the women’s movement raised: was female subordination universal? Were there cultures, either contemporary or ancient, in which women had achieved higher status? What factors contributed to the relatively low status of women across cultures?

As we struggled to answer these questions, we were amazed to discover that few useful materials were available in the anthropological literature. Despite the looming presence of figures such as Ruth Benedict and Margaret Mead in the English-speaking canon, women had no more than an incidental place in the history of the discipline. They seemed to have only supporting (or cameo) roles in many ethnographies, mentioned when reproduction or childrearing was discussed and appearing in (typically) non-speaking parts when marriage exchanges were transacted. Women were assumed to passively cooperate with men’s desires and to have little independent social existence or agency of their own. We also discovered that the earlier work of female scholars tended to be ignored in the academic canon, largely through lack of citation. Men cited each other, but women’s contributions were effectively erased from the anthropological intellectual genealogy (Lutz 1990). The situation was even more egregious when examining the work of anthropologists of color (Bolles 2013).

The Impact on the Profession

For the emerging first generation of active feminist academic anthropologists, issues of discrimination addressed in the US Civil Rights Act (1965) and other legislation also applied to the institutions where they worked and studied. Since there were almost no senior faculty, not to mention junior colleagues, who were women, female graduate students faced discouraging prospects on the job market. Their efforts to introduce materials about women into the curricula of their departments were too frequently greeted with derision, understood by established (male) anthropologists to be a passing fad. They were often subject to sexual harassment and suffered the tenured male faculty’s tendency to discourage their efforts, based on the assumption that marriage and family would cause them to abandon their anthropological careers. These experiences, along with the activism of the times, motivated them to consider the disadvantages facing women in anthropology and to conclude that they had the right to demand redress. A group of activists in the American Anthropological Association (AAA) began investigating the status of women in the profession and produced important surveys that documented the prevalent inequities (Sanjek 1982). This work led to the formation of a permanent committee on the status of women, now called the Committee on Gender Equity in Anthropology, and in 1988 to the organization of the Association for Feminist Anthropology (AFA) to spotlight and legitimate the work of scholars who focused on gender.

How the Discovery of Women Changed Anthropology

Did women really need to be discovered? Apparently so. As subject matter for the discipline, their beginnings recall Mel Brooks’s startled announcement in the comedy skit The Two-Thousand-Year-Old Man that there are ladies here. An early acknowledgment of the invisibility of women in sociocultural anthropology appeared in Edwin Ardener’s famous article, Belief and the Problem of Women (1975), in which he argued that women (and other subordinated groups) are culturally muted. They are not literally mute, of course, but what they say doesn’t find its way into anthropological analyses because their contributions are irrelevant to understanding culture. In other words, women’s accounts of their culture fail to reproduce the normative systems that men are more likely to report; their views appear more localized and personal, and therefore, less valid and inclusive. When added to the restrictions in many cultures regarding extensive contact between male researchers and female informants, most anthropologists (females included) came home from the field with little data about women, particularly in their own words.

These lacunae in the ethnographic record inspired women anthropologists to return to sites of earlier research to launch studies that would take women’s voices and concerns into account. Jane Goodale’s Tiwi Wives (1971), for example, documented the ways in which Tiwi women understood their marriage system that an earlier account (Hart and Pilling 1960) had represented as completely male-dominated. However, rather than being mere pawns in a manipulative system that exchanged women even before they were born, Goodale learned that Tiwi women understood themselves as powerful arbiters, able also to pursue romantic bonds despite how they were situated in marriages. Other important restudies followed, including Marilyn Strathern’s Women In Between (1972), Annette Weiner’s Women of Value, Men of Renown (1976), and research undertaken jointly by Yolanda and Robert Murphy, Women of the Forest (1974), reexamining work done earlier (under Robert Murphy’s name) among the Munduruku of the Amazonian rain forest (Murphy 1960).

Beyond merely documenting that women were present and were important, the pioneering feminist anthropologists of the 1960s and 1970s had to define what it was that they should be studying. Debates ensued between those who argued that the subordination of women was a universal feature of all cultures and those who traced such status differentiation to particular socioeconomic configurations beginning with the classic Marxist focus on the advent of private property. These inquiries reflected our determination to generate a grand theory of gender inequality that would have explanatory power across all cultural boundaries. How we wished that a feminist theoretician could supplant Marx, Freud, or Lévi-Strauss in the anthropological canon (with acknowledgment to Gayle Rubin [1975]).

At the same time, feminist anthropologists also were called upon to engage with writers outside the discipline who devoted themselves to documenting the existence of purported ancient matriarchies. In The First Sex, for example, librarian Elizabeth Gould Davis (1971) mined anthropological and archaeological data to support her assertion that matriarchies had once been ubiquitous until overthrown by patriarchal forces. One academic archaeologist, Marija Gimbutas, argued that matriarchies and goddess worship were evidenced in the archaeological record (Gimbutas 1982, 1989, 1991), while other popular writings influential in feminist circles crafted wistful scenarios of a golden age in which goddess worship demonstrated the ancient power held by women (see Diner 1973; Eisler 1987; Eller 2001; Morgan 1972; Spretnak 1981; Starhawk 1979; Stone 1978; cf. Webster 1975).

Feminist anthropologists busily debunked these fanciful scenarios, while also weighing the intense internal debates between those who argued that the subordination of women was a universal feature of all cultures (Ortner 1974; Rosaldo 1974) and those who traced such differentiation to particular socioeconomic (capitalist) configurations (Etienne and Leacock 1980). These latter scholars called attention to the colonial impact on sexually stratified societies, arguing that such influences masked the pristine egalitarian conditions that must have been characteristic before contact (Leacock and Nash 1977). In their assessment, female subordination could not have existed in societies that otherwise appeared to be egalitarian (Leacock 1983). Drawing on these perspectives, some anthropologists considering relations between the sexes questioned how to refine concepts of hierarchy generated from our own society to understand gender relations in non-Western cultures (Sacks 1979). Still, the proponents of Marxist and other approaches that traced gender inequality to private property were criticized for failing to appreciate instances of marked asymmetry, even sexual violence, in small-scale foraging societies (Begler 1978). At the same time, those who argued for universal gender asymmetry had to contend with accusations that they were unduly influenced by experiences in their own culture (Rosaldo 1980) or obsessed with developing a meta-theory of gender.

As we continued to bring women to the foreground of ethnographic investigation, we also rediscovered the work of anthropologists who aptly could be called our foremothers. We celebrated such important (mainly US-based) figures as Elsie Clews Parsons, Margaret Mead, Ruth Benedict, Ruth Landes, and Phyllis Kaberry, who had been largely ignored in the anthropology of the postwar period. Zora Neale Hurston and Katherine Dunham, remembered for their accomplishments in literature and dance, were rediscovered as anthropologists, as were American Indians like Mourning Dove and Ella Cara Deloria (Finn 1995). The marginalization of these figures reflected both the colonial and racist temperament of the anthropology of their time; they were seen more as informants than as full-fledged anthropologists, receiving minimal opportunities to move ahead in their careers—or even to complete their PhDs.

At the same time, feminist activists used emergent ideas about the importance of positionality and standpoint theory (see, for example, Harding 1986; Hartsock 1983) to demand that scholars account for themselves—where they came from and what connected them to particular research topics—to make such reflexivity a prominent part of their scholarship. These approaches achieved particular centrality in the work of black feminists like Patricia Hill Collins (1990), who argued that black women’s experience produced a distinctive set of feminist (or womanist) positions. Feminists also wanted to know how anthropologists intended to improve the lives of those with whom they worked, reinforcing the original, but now reconfigured, activist strain always present in our work. In this volume, Louise Lamphere examines the impact of political activism, in particular, on the development of feminist anthropology in the United States.

Methodological and Representational Innovations

In a related move, feminist anthropologists also pioneered new forms of representation and a range of experimental ethnographic forms, paying close attention to issues of affect, sexuality, and the body (see Mascia-Lees, this volume). Ruth Behar and Deborah Gordon’s influential collection, Women Writing Culture (1995), presented a wide range of textual innovations, including the use of fiction and drama to present ethnographic analyses, and contained essays that highlighted the work of many foremothers, including women of color who had been especially ignored. Their volume was assembled largely in response to the prominent collection Writing Culture (Clifford and Marcus 1986), in which James Clifford claimed, in his introduction, that the work of feminist anthropologists would not be included in the volume because their writings had introduced neither innovation nor experimentation to ethnographic representation, failing, in his terms, to produce either unconventional forms of writing or a developed reflection on ethnographic textuality (Clifford 1986, 21; see also Abu-Lughod 1991). Women Writing Culture was followed a few years later by Black Feminist Anthropology (McClaurin 2001) that expanded the mandate to take special note of the accomplishments of colleagues who had been doubly devalued by the intersection of racism and sexism in the academy.

These strategies had methodological implications that have had far-reaching effects on ethnographic research methods. Feminists pioneered the centrality of reflexivity, sought out and acknowledged collaboration with interlocutors, including participatory action research (Olesen 2011), and emphasized personal narratives and storytelling both to highlight women’s voices and to mount a vigorous challenge to top-down knowledge production. Feminist methods challenged and, consciously muted, the ubiquitous God voice that previously had characterized canonical ethnographic writing. That is, feminist ethnographers tended to locate themselves within the ethnographic project while also striving to represent the voices of the people they studied. These challenges have led to profound changes in the generation and shape of ethnographic writing in general: ethnographies now normatively include personal statements by researchers, along with more attention to evidence and historical and social context.

Among the salient issues that feminist scholars reconsidered was the strict distinction long made between insider/outsider or informant/anthropologist in ethnographic research. The relevance of personal commitments and the intensified attention given to issues of reflexivity meant that the boundaries between insiders and outsiders became more vexed and fluid, leaving researchers to confront ever more difficult ethical dilemmas that defined or threatened belonging. Anthropologist Lila Abu-Lughod coined the concept of the halfie to describe the researcher who both shared fundamental identity markers with her informants and also found herself distanced from their priorities (Abu-Lughod 1991; see also Narayan 1993). Questions of loyalty and the mandate to activism could make this position particularly uncomfortable (Lewin 1995). No matter how inside an ethnographer might be, she always had the privilege of movement or departure, and multiple choices for defining her identity.

Discussions across the humanities and social sciences offering critiques of the exotic and how Western political agendas shaped scholarly inquiries also were central to reframing studies of women in non-Western cultures, particularly in Islamic societies. Edward Said’s persuasive work, Orientalism (1979), put anthropologists on notice that their location in the Euro-American milieu made them likely to be under the sway of biases deeply entrenched in Western colonial sensibilities. This has nowhere been more prominent than in feminist anthropological research in the Middle East. Beginning with an early focus on the veil and female seclusion (Fernea 1965; Mernissi 1975), which reflected and struggled with the Orientalist perspective of much work in the area, some feminist anthropologists have critiqued scholars for an overemphasis on Islam as the key force shaping gender relations in this region (Abu-Lughod 2013).

At the same time, world events,