Mapping Feminist Anthropology in the Twenty-First Century

Ellen Lewin, Leni M. Silverstein

• Publisher: Rutgers University Press
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9780813574301
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Cultural & Social Anthropology
• Index: Social Sciences

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.   

Part I

Foundations

Problematizing Feminist Anthropology

Feminist Anthropology Engages Social Movements

Theory, Ethnography, and Activism

Louise Lamphere

Social movements have been a critical component of the emergence, growth, and current research agenda of US feminist anthropology. Feminist anthropology officially emerged in 1974–1975 with the publication of Woman, Culture, and Society edited by Michelle Zimbalist Rosaldo and Louise Lamphere (1974) and Toward an Anthropology of Women edited by Rayna Reiter (now Rapp) (1975). As women anthropologists, many of us, already active in the civil rights and anti-war movements, became involved in the 1970s women’s movement in the United States. Through participating in demonstrations for women’s liberation, legislative hearings on abortion rights, and especially consciousness-raising (CR) groups, women anthropologists learned that “the personal is political” and began to bring a feminist sensibility to their research and teaching as well as to their own personal lives. At this stage, activism in the public sphere brought changes to anthropology, but feminist advocacy on issues of importance to women (abortion rights, child care, job discrimination, etc.) tended to be segregated from anthropological endeavors.

In the late 1970s and the early 1980s, our theoretical framework expanded to emphasize the category “gender” rather than solely women. Many younger graduate students and new PhDs who defined themselves as feminists also participated in other movements including the emerging gay and lesbian movement. African American, Chicana/Latina, and lesbian anthropologists brought new voices and concerns as well to feminist anthropology. Anthropological research itself began to expand to include not only women but also how rural and tribal societies around the world, as well as urban populations, were grappling with the impact of a globalizing economy, issues of health care and reproduction, environmental degradation, and migration, among others. In studying such matters, feminist anthropologists pioneered gender research in these growing subfields within anthropology and brought methodologies emphasizing collaboration, positionality, and personal narratives to their new research (see Silverstein and Lewin, this volume).1

Since 2000, a third generation of young feminist anthropologists, along with some senior scholars, has continued the engagement with social movements in the United States and in other parts of the globe but in a very different way. Feminist anthropologists have examined women’s roles in these movements, how they intersect with local issues and populations, and what strategies are necessary to bring about change. In this approach, many feminists are attempting to balance their roles as researchers, critics, and activists, a stance enabled by both theoretical and methodological changes in the way anthropology is practiced.

This chapter focuses specifically on the development of feminist anthropology in the United States beginning in the early 1970s and extending through the transformations of feminist theory, ethnography, and activism that occurred in the next four decades.

First, feminist theory has evolved from a focus on women’s status and a search for universal explanatory systems to studies that pay greater attention to history, local context, and the particular political economies in which our research subjects live. Sophisticated analyses of power, influenced particularly by the work of Michel Foucault (1977), and agency, as defined by Judith Butler (1993), emerged between 1980 and 1995 and have continued to the present. These evolving theoretical concepts (power and agency) allowed feminists to see women as having an active hand in forging their own fate.

Second, feminists have transformed ethnographic fieldwork and writing, paying more attention to the power dynamics between anthropologists and their subjects, resulting in increased collaboration. In ethnographic writing, feminists have assumed a more dialogical approach to highlight the voices of women more clearly in our research and publications.

These changes in theory and ethnographic practice set the stage for more attention to my third topic: activism. Since 2000 there have been increasing calls for an engaged or activist feminist anthropology, one where carefully conducted ethnographic research can be more directly relevant to social movements, to educating the public, and to efforts to bring about changes in public policy. With the exception of Karen Brodkin Sacks’s and Ann Bookman’s labor research (Bookman and Morgen 1988; Sacks 1988a), Sandra Morgen’s study of the women’s health movement (Morgen 2002), and Ida Susser’s study of a New York working-class community (1982), participation in social movements was something that feminists engaged in outside of their anthropological research and writing, or at least “off stage.”

Now, as in the 1970s, some feminist anthropologists might define their activism in terms of creating courses on women, building stronger women’s studies programs, or teaching their students to take a gendered perspective. Here, I focus on activism off campus, particularly in bringing those we study into full collaborative partnerships at all stages of research. Activism, as Ida Susser insists, always involves an intervention and usually includes a social justice stance on the part of the feminist researcher (Susser 2009, 15). This is a definition I find helpful in analyzing current forms of feminist activist anthropology.

Feminist Anthropology and the Women’s Movement

The 1970s saw the blossoming of feminist anthropology. The women who contributed to the earliest collections—Woman, Culture, and Society (1974) and Toward an Anthropology of Women (1975)—were all marginal to the anthropology departments where we were affiliated as graduate students, new faculty, or faculty wives. We were profoundly influenced by the women’s liberation movement that emerged from both the civil rights and anti-war movements (Evans 1979). A number of centers of non-academic feminist activism appeared during the period between 1967 and 1969. Some (e.g., Chicago, Washington, DC) were more oriented to working within the anti-war movement while combating male domination, and others (e.g., New York) promoted an autonomous women’s movement, emphasizing the oppression of women (rather than race, class, or capitalist forms of domination) as the central issue to combat (Echols 1989; Evans 1979). This split between the “politicos” and the “radical feminists” was less salient to those who became involved later in the 1970s. As young feminists, we read widely and became connected to feminism through myriad different local groups and activities.

Redstockings, a radical feminist organization, was a center of the movement in New York City. Their “Notes from the Second Year” (1969) was one of the first publications we all passed around and devoured because it called for personal relationships between men and women to be revolutionized. Rejecting male-dominated notions of leadership and forming solidary relationships with “our sisters” found broad appeal. One of the most important aspects of the women’s movement was the consciousness-raising group started by Redstockings and the New York Radical Feminists,2 a group that continued the women’s liberation movement in New York as Redstockings began to fall apart (Echols 1989; Rosen 2000). The foundational principle of these small CR groups of five to ten women was “the personal is political,” based on the idea that by talking about our personal lives, we would begin to understand the more systemic characteristics of our oppression. Usually the groups met weekly and often posed a general question that each woman addressed, mining her own experience. Marriage, money, housework, educational goals, standards of beauty, self-confidence, and sexual relationships were all grist for the mill.

In Boston, Bread and Roses, a socialist-feminist “politico” organization, advocated for a broad range of changes in women’s lives from equality in the workplace, to control over their bodies, to free child care.3 Michelle Rosaldo, for example, joined a Bread and Roses CR group composed of Radcliffe graduates in October 1969. She later participated in another group at Stanford, of which Ellen Lewin was also a member. I joined a small group at Brown University that emerged from our chapter of the New University Conference (NUC), a university- and college-based anti-war organization, and from activities that grew out of the Brown campus-wide May 1970 strike. We shared an interest in addressing our personal concerns in relation to men and to the larger power structure; these CR groups offered us a safe environment for exploring such issues.

Female anthropologists elsewhere also joined similar CR groups. In Michigan, Rayna Rapp and Gayle Rubin joined a consciousness-raising group that had spun off from Resistance, the draft resistance and anti-war movement group active on the University of Michigan campus. In New York, the Ruth Benedict Collective (RBC) brought together senior anthropologists (June Nash, Eleanor [Happy] Leacock, and Ruby Rohrlich-Leavitt), recent PhDs, and graduate students, including Leni Silverstein. In its early years (1969–1971), some of the twenty-five or more anthropologists in the RBC also met in small consciousness-raising groups that provided personal, intellectual, and professional support (Chernela 2013). Subsequently, members of the group began writing papers about women to explore the extent of discrimination among female anthropologists in universities, and to engage with the larger questions the women’s movement was raising about women’s roles and status cross-culturally (Leni Silverstein, personal communication 2014). An offshoot of this larger group initiated the New York Women’s Anthropology Caucus (NYWAC) whose senior founders included Happy Leacock, Ruby Rohrlich-Leavitt, and Constance (Connie) Sutton (Friedlander 2013).

We discovered that—despite being mostly white and middle class—our feelings of subordination and inadequacy were widely shared by others. We also were united in the belief that we could change family and social structures that created women’s second-class status through our academic work. We were involved not only in protest marches and organizing efforts, but also brought our new sense of the multiple meanings of women’s position into our teaching and academic writing.

Given the interest in cross-cultural information among women in the movement, feminist anthropologists started putting together comparative ethnographic material on women’s lives and teaching courses focusing on what little we could find in the existing literature. Between 1970 and 1973 courses on women were taught in anthropology departments at Stanford, Brown, the University of Michigan, New York University, the New School, and other campuses. Michigan students, in particular, were fortunate that, unlike most departments at the time, two women, Norma Diamond and Niara Sudarkasa, were faculty members in the Anthropology Department. Norma Diamond taught an initial course on women called “Second Sex/Third World” that Rayna Rapp took over during its second year in 1971 (Lamphere, Rapp, and Rubin 2007).

About the same time, in the spring of 1971, Shelly Rosaldo and Jane Collier (both faculty wives at Stanford) and four graduate students (Ellen Lewin, Janet Fjellman, Julia Howell, and Kim Kramer) taught a class at Stanford entitled “Women in Cross-Cultural Perspective.” Looking back, it is hard to recall how audacious these efforts were; we never imagined at the time that we were launching a new subfield in anthropology. We just felt compelled to bring our new interest in analyzing women’s lives into the classroom in order to explore how our own situation compared to that of women in other cultures.

These two courses (Stanford and Michigan) served as the impetus for Woman, Culture, and Society and Towards an Anthropology of Women, the first edited volumes to take up the status of women as a focal concern. Both collections acknowledged their relationship to the women’s movement and to the questions that feminists looked to anthropology to answer. In our introduction, Shelly and I wrote, “Along with many women today, we are trying to understand our position and to change it. We have become increasingly aware of sexual inequities in economic, social, and political institutions and are seeking ways to fight them” (Rosaldo and Lamphere 1974, 2).

Rayna’s comments were in a similar vein: “This book has its roots in the women’s movement. To explain and describe equality and inequality between the sexes, contemporary feminism has turned to anthropology with many questions in its search for a theory and a body of information. These questions are more than academic: the answers will help feminists in the struggle against sexism in our own society” (Reiter 1975, 11).

The introductory essays by Rosaldo, Ortner, and Chodorow in Woman, Culture, and Society offered an integrated set of explanations, each at a different level of analysis, for the universal subordination of women: that is, respectively, through social structural arrangements, cultural ideas and values, and the psychological foundations of gender. The conclusion that women were universally subordinated not only made sense of the ethnographic examples we then knew, but fit well in a discipline that already emphasized universals like human language, marriage, incest taboos, and the family.

But the articles in both collections also attested to the variety of positions women held in cultures throughout the world. Authors offered examples where women held power or positions of great influence (McCormack, Brown) on the one hand, and demonstrated how women strategized to achieve their own goals even though men held power in patrilineal descent groups (Wolf, Collier, Silverman, Lamphere). Still other chapters sought to discover historical and cultural situations where relationships between men and women could be considered equal (Sacks, Gough, Draper). As Gayle Rubin put it, “So they [the books] were locally inflected [structural and cultural versus materialist and evolutionary], but the project was a common one, and it was one of those historical tectonic shifts where you don’t understand the forces that are impinging on all these different people in different places but they clearly were.” As Rapp said, “we and our whole generation were reconfiguring the field” (Lamphere, Rapp, Rubin 2007, 416–417).

Evolving Feminist Anthropological Theory: The Turn to Gender

In the late 1970s and early 1980s, as the women’s movement in the United States focused on passing the ERA and fighting the backlash against its early accomplishments, feminist anthropologists turned toward the academy as well, expanding the number of courses on women, solidifying women’s studies programs, recruiting and training new female graduate students, and building a feminist presence in academic professional associations including the American Anthropological Association (AAA). During this period, many took on new projects focused on women and encouraged our students to do the same. The ethnographic record that many of us found so untrustworthy and male-centered, often glossing over or marginalizing women (Reiter 1975, 2–14), became more nuanced over this period as new accounts appeared. Many studies were historical and examined women’s relationship to the state or to colonialism (Gailey 1987; Sacks 1979; Silverblatt 1987, 1991; Stoler 2002), while others sought to firmly document women’s participation in their society’s economic, familial, and cultural life, and place these into the ethnographic record (Abu-Lughod 1987; Shostak 1981; Wolf 1968).

In general, the emphasis on universals and broad generalizations about “all women” began to fade as the complexity of women’s actual strategies, actions, views, and values was analyzed in their appropriate historical and local contexts. The “turn to gender” was a large part of this trend and signaled a major theoretical shift. In addition, building on some of the insights of the Reiter 1975 volume, feminist anthropologists began to pay more attention to critiquing how our own conceptual frameworks were not only male-biased but based on thoroughly Western assumptions. Much of this new work was influenced by Marxist and political economy approaches, and by what became known as social constructionism, the idea that social hierarchies, gender roles, and i...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Prologue
• Introduction: Anthropologies and Feminisms: Mapping Our Intellectual Journey
• Part I. Foundations: Problematizing Feminist Anthropology
• Part II. Expansions: Confronting Universals
• Part III. Reverberations: Transnational Encounters
• Notes on Contributors
• Index