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University of California Press

About the Book

In this collection of new reflections on the sexual politics, racial history, and moral predicaments of anthropology, feminist scholars explore a wide range of visions of identity and difference. How are feminists redefining the poetics and politics of ethnography? What are the contradictions of women studying women? How have gender, race, class, and nationality been scripted into the canon?

Through autobiography, fiction, historical analysis, experimental essays, and criticism, the contributors offer exciting responses to these questions. Several pieces reinvestigate the work of key women anthropologists like Elsie Clews Parsons, Margaret Mead, and Ruth Benedict, while others reevaluate the writings of women of color like Zora Neale Hurston, Ella Deloria, and Alice Walker. Some selections explore how sexual politics help to determine what gets written and what is valued in the anthropological canon. Other pieces explore new forms of feminist ethnography that 'write culture' experimentally, thereby challenging prevailing, male-biased anthropological models.

About the Author

Ruth Behar is Professor of Anthropology at the University of Michigan and the author of Translated Woman: Crossing the Border with Esperanza's Story (1993). Deborah Gordon is Assistant Professor of Women's Studies at Wichita State University.

Table of Contents

Preface and Acknowledgments
INTRODUCTION: OUT OF EXILE
Ruth Behar
Part 1: Beyond Self and Other
I. PARTICIPANT OBSERVATION
Kirin Narayan
2. BAD GIRLS: THEATER, WOMEN OF COLOR,
AND THE POLITICS OF REPRESENTATION
Dorinne Kondo
3. WRITING IN MY FATHER'S NAME:
A DIARY OF TRANSLATED WOMAN'S FIRST YEAR
Ruth Behar
Part II: Another History, Another Canon
4· FEMINIST ANTHROPOLOGY:
THE LEGACY OF ELSIE CLEWS PARSONS
Louise Lamphere
5· "NOT IN THE ABSOLUTE SINGULAR":
REREADING RUTH BENEDICT
Barbara A. Babcock
6. ELLA CARA DELORIA AND MOURNING DOVE:
WRITING FOR CULTURES, WRITING AGAINST THE GRAIN 
Janet L. Finn
7· MULTIPLE SUBJECTIVITIES AND STRATEGIC POSITIONALITY:
ZORA NEALE HURSTON'S EXPERIMENTAL ETHNOGRAPHIES 
Graciela Hernandez
8. RUTH LANDES AND THE EARLY ETHNOGRAPHY
OF RACE AND GENDER
Sally Cole
9· MARGARET MEAD AND THE "RUSTLING-OF-THE-WIND-INI66
THE-PALM-TREES SCHOOL" OF ETHNOGRAPHIC WRITING 
Nancy C. Lutkehaus
IO. THE ETHNOGRAPHIC FILMS OF BARBARA G. MYERHOFF:
ANTHROPOLOGY, FEMINISM, AND THE POLITICS OF
JEWISH IDENTITY
Gelya Frank
I I. WRITING AGAINST THE GRAIN: CULTURAL POLITICS
OF DIFFERENCE IN THE WORK OF ALICE WALKER
Faye V. Harrison
Part Ill: Does Anthropology Have a Sex?
I 2. THE GENDER OF THEORY
Catherine Lutz
I3. WORKS AND WIVES:
ON THE SEXUAL DIVISION OF TEXTUAL LABOR
Barbara Tedlock
I4. MS.REPRESENTATIONS:
REFLECTIONS ON STUDYING ACADEMIC MEN
Judith Newton and Judith Stacey
I5. "MAN'S DARKEST HOURS":
MALENESS, TRAVEL, AND ANTHROPOLOGY
Laurent Dubois
I 6. WRITING LESBIAN ETHNOGRAPHY
Ellen Lewin
Part IV: Traveling Feminists
I7. A TALE OF TWO PREGNANCIES
Lila Abu-Lughod
CONTENTS


 

Reviews

"A rich collection that I will use in teaching graduates and undergraduates about the weave of ethnography, narrative, the women's movement, and feminism. Crafted by an impressive range of scholars, the essays are empirically rich and theoretically cogent. But most important, they engage the complexities of multicultural, feminist, and multinational ethnographies and the stories that matter to politics, scholarship, and lives. With an ear for the tones of race and gender, this book answers the political, generic, and theoretical challenge of Writing Culture with layered essays that rewrite an important range of cultural conversations."—Donna Haraway, author of Professor, History of Consciousness Board, UCSC

"Since the advent of the 'post-modern' in ethnography, we have been much in need of a marvelous volume such as this, placing 'woman' at the center of the debate. Women Writing Culture will prove as stimulating for our time as its great predecessor, Women, Culture and Society was for the 1970s."—Jose E. Limon, University of Texas

"A groundbreaking book—provocative, illuminating, imaginative—and it is a pleasure to read. A trenchant yet always generous feminist critique of the masculinist bias in the theoretical canon of anthropological texts, it expansively and imaginatively maps the future directions of a feminist anthropology. In moving and courageous acts of reconstruction, the writers in this volume boldly cross disciplinary and generic lines, reading fiction as anthropology, writing theater as ethnography, getting personal, radically reconceiving the relationship of self and other and, thereby, the field itself. Feminist scholars of all disciplines will find here enabling textual and conceptual strategies as well as memorable voices and powerful stories."—Marianne Hirsch, Dartmouth College, author of The Mother-Daughter Plot