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Australian Feminist Studies

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Dislodging a world
view: Challenge and
counter‐challenge in the
relationship between
feminism and anthropology
a
Marilyn Strathern
a
Professor of Social Anthropology , Manchester
University, Fellow of Girton College , Cambridge
Published online: 29 Nov 2010.

To cite this article: Marilyn Strathern (1985) Dislodging a world view: Challenge
and counter‐challenge in the relationship between feminism and anthropology,
Australian Feminist Studies, 1:1, 1-25, DOI: 10.1080/08164649.1985.10382902

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 ARTICLES
DISLODGING A WORLD VIEW: CHALLENGE AND COUNTER-
CHALLENGE IN THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN FEMINISM
AND ANTHROPOLOGY*
Marilyn Strathern
I here is often hopefulness in the way we link terms, as I have
done with 'feminism and anthropology', or as the title to this
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series invites us, in connecting 'feminist theory' and 'the world

of scholarship': two terms of patently different value, yet holding
out the possbility that combined they could yield a product. Thus we
might hope that feminism and anthropology brought together would look
like neither of them considered separately, a vision which lies behind much
of the current effort being put into transdisciplinary work: feminist
scholarship leads to new mixes.
I begin—rather injudiciously perhaps—with the remarks of three senior
male anthropologists. They indicate something of the gamut of positions
which anthropologists have taken towards feminist interests. In about
July 1983 the Commonwealth Association of Social Anthropologists held
their third decennial meeting, on the topic of anthropology in the 1980s.
Most of the papers were taken up with applied anthropology—its
relevance and application to other fields. There was little attention to
theoretical issues. But tucked away on the last afternoon was a session
on gender studies. An eminent elder statesman, who to my knowledge
has never particularly concerned himself with women's matters, was heard
to remark that at least at the gender studies session one could look forward
to some intellectual discussion. In the context of concern with how
anthropology 'relates' to the world, this area stood out as also offering
hope for the general theoretical advancement of the discipline. Yet earlier,
when plans for the gender section were under review, two very different
comments had been made by his colleagues of his own sex. One told me
flatly that no self-respecting feminist would engage in that kind of
academic discourse. Their first audience was feminists themselves; no 'real'
feminists would go to the meetings: their commitment was of another
order. Much more tolerant was another's remark: 'Let a thousand flowers
bloom!'. That is, there is room for everything—including a feminist
anthropology.

1
 MARILYN STRATHERN

Oddly enough, this tolerant reassurance I found quite heart-sinking.

I lacked the wit at the time to make the ohvious repartee: feminism is
not a flower, it is a field. It is not simply another ism. Other isms may
tolerate it as such. But tolerance of course also counters challenge—in
the sense of confining and encompassing it. The former comments speak
to a genuine tension in the end probably more livable with: that on the
one hand feminists have raised genuine intellectual issues for anthropology
as a discipline; and, on the other, that the practice of feminism is
incompatible with that of academia.
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But to simply juxtapose 'feminism' and 'anthropology' is to ignore the

crucial middle term: 'feminist scholarship'. Feminist scholarship acts as
a kind of broker between feminism as political practice and the academic
world per se.1 It embodies a relation between the two, drawing on
commitment to both feminist politics and scholarly practice, and at the
same time criticising premises on each side. Feminist scholarship has the
strength to be as critical of some of the assumptions written into feminist
theory as it is of dominant paradigms in academic work. It is this mix
of commitment and criticism which gives feminist scholarship one of its
most lively characteristics: self-scrutinising internal debate. That debate
is extremely important, and in this paper I hope to convey something
of the way it impinges on anthropology.
Anthropologists tend to take one of two courses. They may negotiate
for themselves a middle term between feminism and anthropology, and
offer their work as an example of feminist scholarship,2 or they may create
a middle term between feminist scholarship itself and anthropology, in
which case the results are treated as feminist or feminist-inspired
anthropology.3 But either way a curious fate seems to await them, which
also needs discussion, because I doubt whether it is peculiar to this one
discipline.

Achievements
First, though, let me put it on record that in many ways feminist theory
has found a ready response among anthropologists in their description
of other societies. No one any more can talk unselfconsciously about 'the
position of women'. No longer can one start with the presumption that
women are to be measured in terms of a position they hold relative to
something else, or relegated, as in former monographs, to a chapter dealing
with marriage and the family. Moreover the study of 'gender'—a term

2
 FEMINISM AND ANTHROPOLOGY

used to refer to male-female relations, whether as a matter of social

relationship or symbolic construction—has become a field in its own right.
The question of how one registers the difference it makes to be male or
female, has led to reformulations, for instance, of economic and political
analysis.4
In fact most of the major areas of social anthropology were colonised
very rapidly during the enormous growth of interest in feminism in the
1970s. And the main achievements of feminist anthropology remain some
of its earliest concerns; concerns with the place of ideology in collective
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representations, with systems of inequality, with scrutiny of analytic

categories such as the distinction between 'domestic' and 'political'
domains, and with concepts of personhood.
No doubt this rapid absorption of feminist thinking was due in part
to anthropology's own history of interest in gender. Monographs on male-
female relations date from the time of Malinowski and Margaret Mead.
Anthropology has prided itself, then, on being in the vanguard. And
anthropologists have contributed massively to one part of the feminist
enterprise, namely the scrutiny of western constructs as artefacts. They
have contributed to the demystification of western biological idioms. They
have stressed that what happens to women cannot be comprehended
unless we look at what happens to men and women, and that what
happens here cannot be comprehended without attention to the overall
social system. They also continue to provide illustrations of other cultures,
glimpses into other worlds, different forms of oppression and different
forms of freedom. In effect, anthropology supplies a range of data, to
borrow a phrase, 'good to think with'.
The subject appears, then, to offer an unparalleled position from which
to scrutinise our own assumptions, while simultaneously enlarging the
scope of feminist enterprise, by reminding us of the conditions under
which women live elsewhere. Yet the feminist interest dating from the
early 1970s entered anthropology in the form of quite savage attacks on
its evident male bias. This was a clear signal that anthropologists could
not afford to be complacent. They could not imagine that simply because
they always had a 'place' somewhere for women in their accounts, they
were not just replicating the male evaluation of women made in the
societies they studied. In fact this feminist critique of bias quickly found
its mark—after all feminists were asking the kinds of questions which
anthropologists with any theory of social action or theory of value could

3
 MARILYN STRATHERN

have come up with themselves.5 In short, it was excellent anthropological

advice.*
Indeed it is true in general that feminist critique has enriched
anthropology—opened up new understandings of ideology, the
construction of symbolic systems, resource management, property
concepts, and so on. The subject has in turn enlarged its scope, and
become sensitive to areas of interest in the past treated only incidentally—
sex-role stereotyping, the politics of domestic life, informal as well as
formal power, and so on. Yet I am left with a slight sense of
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disappointment. Has all this activity really established a relation between

feminism and anthropology? Why should I feel disappointment that we
have a vastly improved anthropology? A better anthropology? What more
could one have hoped for? One source of my feeling is that when
anthropologists take feminism seriously, they become (by and large)
feminist anthropologists. That is, 'feminist' becomes an adjective, a
modifier. And this is the curious fate to which I referred.
In this sense social anthropology is in some ways an open discipline—
if not actually a 'loose' one. Faced with an array of different social and
cultural systems, its practitioners tend to grab for its tool kit' any set of
theories or constructs which can be turned to analytical utility.
Specialisations proliferate—regional ethnography, political systems, legal
theory. And so do frameworks—marxism, structuralism, hermeneutics.
This tolerance made room for the study of gender and made room for
feminist theory. But that won't quite do, will it?
That so tolerant, disquieting remark was 'Let a thousand flowers bloom'.
The milieu of pluralism which tolerates growths of all kind, which has
enabled feminist scholarship to take off, has also reduced it to another
approach, another way into the data to be put alongside all the other
ways. Many specialisms are linked to master texts, master authors. In
the case of feminism there is no single text or author. Certainly in
anthropology there are few names which of themselves demarcate only
a feminist position. Instead, feminist anthropology is tied to a general
category—women; to 'women' as its practitioners, as well as its subject
matter.8 Clearly it is the intention of many feminist scholars to restore
women to view. But it is unfortunate perhaps that their concerns can
be concretised in this way. Many feminist anthropologists see themselves
as taking on the whole of the subject; they are met with a tendency to
hive off women's studies from the rest of anthropology. By concentrating

4
 FEMINISM AND ANTHROPOLOGY

on 'women', rather than on gender as a social fact,' social science

characterises this subject matter as something less than the overall study
of''society' and 'culture'.
When feminist-inspired anthropologists began raising questions about
male bias, they were challenging the foundation of the subject. They were
challenging the way in which anthropologists conceived their subject
matter. They were challenging the theoretical emphasis on group
structures, on systems of authority, and on rules and norms. They were
also challenging assumptions about ideologies, and about the description
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of total systems. The odd thing is, however, that where these concepts
have most powerfully come under scrutiny—and 'groups', 'rules' and
'norms' have hardly survived the last decade—it has been from within:
systematic internal deconstruction that has not had anything to do with
feminist theory perse. Meanwhile social anthropology still continues to
know itself as the study of 'social behaviour' or 'society' in terms of
'systems' and 'relationships' and 'collective representations'. If this amounts
to a paradigm, then it is largely intact.
Feminist anthropology has instead become deflected. Its own declared
interest in putting women back on the map has led to its theoretical
containment. If it is seen to do with the study of women, or at the most,
of gender, then both these things can be taken as something less than
'society'. 'Feminist anthropology' is thus tolerated as a specialism, a 'part'
which can be absorbed without challenge to the 'whole'. Feminist theory
becomes another instrument of anthropological enquiry.
Yet is this really the process of challenge and counter-challenge which
it looks like? Is it the case that feminist theory presents a profound threat
to core paradigms and that the threat is deflected by the bulk of the
anthropological population assuming it is just 'about women', and is
therefore taken care of by those who study women? Is my sense of
disappointment in the result being simply a better anthropology due to
the fact that the fundamental conceptual tools still serve to define the
subjects of enquiry as anthropological ones. Thus we arrive at a more
comprehensive but still recognisable analysis of 'the economic system'
or 'cultural models' or whatever, with the core paradigms intact. These
are difficulties which feminist scholars often report.
I want to pursue a different argument. We can take the theme for this
issue of Australian Feminist Studies—'changing paradigms'—in two ways.
We can regard it as something we ought to be doing. Or we can regard

5
 MARILYN STRATHERN

it as part of the way we talk about what we want to do. That is, as part
of the way enquiring scholars or feminist theorists or lively anthropologists
describe their own activity. Self-consciousness about paradigms stems from
Kuhn's work on scientific revolutions.10 The question to be asked is
whether anthropologists really have paradigms in quite the way Kuhn
suggested for natural science. Anthropologists have concepts, and
assumptions, and unacknowledged ideologies, not I think quite that 'world
view' against which everything can be tested. Of course, like everyone
else, they are caught in webs of prejudice and ignorance. But I am not
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sure that the source of their resistance to feminist theory is in clinging

to cherished paradigms which a revolutionary set of insights could
dislodge. To my mind that image belongs too closely to the rhetoric of
radicalism—and requires explanation as part of that rhetoric." People
claim they are assaulting paradigms. Yet one significant feature of the
Kuhnian paradigm is that one does not become aware of it till after the
event. The whole point of his scientists' activities is that they do not aim
to shift paradigms—they aim to account for things by what they know.
I wonder if there are not other kinds of explanation for the resistance.
One which comes to mind relates to the social context in which people
who are anthropologists and people who are feminists act (and of course
they may be the same individuals). It is certainly worthwhile searching
for reasons in the real hope that one might come closer to understanding
what is awkward in the relationship between feminism and anthropology.
At several points in fact we shall see that anthropology has interests close
to those of feminist scholarship, and that each proximation makes the
question of resistance more poignant. It will be particularly worthwhile
jn this regard looking not so much at the practice of orthodox
anthropology, but at a brand of radical anthropology which on the surface
would seem to share affinities with feminism. In so far as both imagine
they might be overthrowing existing paradigms, they together provide
something of a testing ground: we might reasonably expect the radical
anthropology to draw on its feminist counterpart.

Resistance
If there are other reasons for the resistance, then perhaps we need not
pin too much on the idea of paradigm change. For the idea of paradigm
not only offers false hope but also gives us false despair. Perhaps, however,
I am making out a special case. Yet it is because feminist anthropology

6
 FEMINISM AND ANTHROPOLOGY

shares the problem of resistance with other disciplines, that I am concerned

with specifying its nature in the anthropological instance. I do not mean
to imply that the same reasons will necessarily hold elsewhere. Elsewhere
this resistance is explicitly associated with the problem of overthrowing
entrenched paradigms.
In 1980-81 at the University of Vanderbilt, nine American scholars
lectured in a series rather similar to this one: they asked what difference
a feminist perspective had made to their particular disciplines. Let me
run through the editor's summary of their findings:12
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General statement: Feminist analyses have begun to alter scholarship, but have
yet to have a substantial influence on the traditional curriculum because such
analyses challenge fundamental assumptions in each discipline.
Literary criticism: A feminist perspective has made some difference, yet while
scholars must modify their papers in response to feminist insights, feminist
scholarship appears as footnotes to articles in prestigious journals, rarely
appearing as an article in its own right.
Religious studies: Women are entering seminaries in increasing numbers, but
seminaries still confine feminist studies to the peripheries of theological training.
Drama: Women's significance as scholars analysing the discipline of drama
remains surprisingly minimal.
History. Historians have paid increasing attention to women, but male scholars
who acknowledge that the broadening of perspectives enhances the
understanding of historical study remain rare.

However the next three are brighter:

Sociology: A feminist perspective has made researchers more sensitive to the

way they frame questions and carry out enquiry.
Psychology: Significant changes in our understanding of concepts of masculine
and feminine in the discipline.
Anthropology:" Anthropologists have apparently long been sensitive to
differences in male and female behaviour.

But, say the editors, sensitivity in general to these issues is just beginning,
and clinch with a summary of the chapters from the fields of economics
and political science, 'where there is little evidence that a feminist
perspective has made itself felt'. I quote:
While these nine scholars agree that a feminist perspective has begun to affect
the shape of what is known—and knowable—in their respective disciplines,

7
 MARILYN STRATHERN

perhaps the more urgent note in each essay is the failure of women's studies
to alter college and university curricula. Paper after paper concludes that, while
the potential power to transform the discipline is great, women's studies has
not yet significantly unleashed that power.14

An overview of women's studies in the United States refers to the 'massive

resistance against which feminist scholars struggle'.15 From a more
informal survey of women's studies in British Adult Education comes
the observation that: 'It is our experience that some Adult Education
students, male and female, are now prepared to accept, even if in a jocular
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manner, the existence of Feminist Studies courses as long as they do not

impinge upon the main programmes and can be controlled'.16
The editors of the Vanderbilt lectures ask about the cause of the failure
they document. Their answer is in terms of a paradigm model:
Women's studies has had so little impact on traditional bodies of knowledge
because it challenges deeply held, often sacred beliefs... it uproots perspectives
which are familiar... [for] women's studies is not an additional knowledge
merely to be tacked on to the curriculum. It is, instead, a body of knowledge
that is perspective transforming [original italics] and should therefore transform
the existing curriculum from within and revise received notions of what
constitutes an 'objective' or 'normative' perspective."

I want instead to develop the suggestion that the idea of perspective-

transforming is part of the revoluntionary ideology of radicalism, and
perhaps that by assimilating shared beliefs and premises, including
premises which underwrite academic disciplines to the concept of scientific
paradigm, and specifically to Kuhnian paradigms, we mystify ourselves
that we can bring about a change of perspective through sheer will power.
A paradigm enters our conceptual vocabulary to refer to an artefact,
a constructed model, so that one may envisage new paradigms 'invented'18
or an alternate paradigm 'emerging'.19 It holds this position for those who
talk about paradigms. Users of paradigms simply take them as the way
to think. Of course feminist scholarship undermines assumptions and
premises, and of course anthropology short-changes itself in offering
resistance. Yet when we are dealing with disciplines in the social sciences
which constantly turn over their own theories, and moreover entertain
explicit auto-histories of internal revolution, I do not think the key is
feminism's challenge to 'paradigms'. Rather, the key lies in the social
constitution of the disciplines and of feminist scholars—in how the
practitioners relate to their subject matter, and consequently the structure

g
 FEMINISM AND ANTHROPOLOGY

of their discourse. But first I must say a little more about the extent to
which the idea of overturning paradigms prevails in our accounts of the
challenge of and counter-challenge to feminist scholarship. It is the
received radical view that people will defend their present paradigms
because it is too uncomfortable or threatening to give up what one has.
Obviously this constantly reconstructs feminism as offering challenge.
Paradigms
Paradigms in Kuhn's account are shared world views or 'tacit knowledge'
which comes from doing science rather than from acquiring rules for doing
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it.20 Boxer's survey on women's studies observes:

Just as many feminists found that the goals of the women's movement could
not be fulfilled by the 'add-women-and-stir method', so women's studies scholars
discovered that academic fields could not be cured of sexism simply by
accretion.21
The report notes that initial 'compensatory' scholarship led to the
realisation that only radical reconstruction would suffice. Among the
works it overviews are those of scholars who have found powers of
explanation in Kuhn's theory of scientific revolutions. Kuhn's schema,
it is argued, are as applicable to the humanities and social sciences as
they are to the hard sciences for which he developed it.
Now 'paradigm' has-been seized on as tantamount to what the
anthropologist would call 'culture' or 'world view' in the sense of habitual
ways of doing things. In fact the insights which Kuhn's approach gives
as to how theories change has been used directly by the occasional
anthropologist to explore social change in general.22 As an 'implicit body
of intertwined theoretical and methodological belief that permits selection,
evaluation and criticism',23 traditional models first evaluate changes then
register them as anomalies—so that change occurs under the pressure
of anomalies which force a new model of what is normative. The shifts
in people's world views can thus be recorded as shifts in their paradigm
states.
Janeway's article, 'On the loss of sexual paradigms'24 takes step by.step
Kuhn's reformulations to show that the connotations of 'paradigm'
provide powerful analogies for the investigation of sex stereotypes. Male
representations of female sexuality function as patterns which fit
comprehensibly into the accepted structure of behaviour; as beliefs which
provide a source of permissible metaphors, and thus allow people to think

9
 MARILYN STRATHERN

through attributes, attitudes, conducts; as involving the assignment of

weight and priority to shared values, setting up standards for behaviour;
and they comprise exemplars learnt from the anonymous pressure of
ascriptive social mythology. Beliefs about female sexuality also act like
Kuhnian paradigms in their response to anomalies. Over time anomalies
pile up, and these force paradigms into a different position—from being
taken for granted they become ideals preached about. Indeed, she is
concerned to press the point that for some they never fitted. Women could
never share fully in them, since 'women' cannot fit themselves into
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expectations of male normalcy.

Paradigms in this view set up conditions of normalcy. It would seem
self-evident that social life must be based on such paradigms of behaviour,
including the behaviour of academics and their disciplines. Boxer refers
to an essay by Sandra Coyner which
advises women's studies practitioners to abandon the energy-draining and still
overwhelmingly unsuccessful effort to transform the established disciplines.
Instead they should continue developing the new community of feminist
scholars who will eventually discover new paradigms and found a new
normative science."
But this interesting statement breaks with the assumption that paradigms
are like some set of cultural norms to a more precise location of paradigms
in relation to a community of practitioners. This is an important issue.
For what do we do with the contradictions which Janeway's 'paradigms'
also seem to entail? Does this not make them rather closer to 'ideologies'?26
Ideology generally has the character of promoting views in conflict
with itself. The very construction of normalcy along exclusive 'male' lines
invites questions about the place of women in relation to its definition
of what is normal. Janeway writes: 'the shared beliefs and values expressed
by our "paradigms" of female sexuality are not, in fact, shared fully by
the women who have had to take them as models'." I would suggest that
the fact they are not shared comes less from a failure of a 'paradigm'
to accommodate reality, than from the structure of an 'ideology' which
speaks to certain social interests, reproducing the parallel existence of
others and thus promoting contradictory propositions.
Kuhn himself claims that his investigations in natural science stemmed
from a realisation of the extent to which, by contrast, social science was
characterised by overt disagreement. He thus professes to be puzzled at
the way his notion of paradigm had been adopted, and queries its easy

10
 FEMINISM AND ANTHROPOLOGY

extension to other fields.28 Kuhn reminds his readers of the specific nature
of the community in natural science: that there are relatively few
competing schools—so that revolutions affect the perceptions of everyone;
that a community's members are the only judge of one another; and where
puzzle solving is a self defining goal. A tremendous emphasis is put on
the shared nature of paradigms, the shared meanings which both define
a scientific community and are defined by it. Of course scientific
communities exist at different levels, but on the whole there is a measure
of agreement among them about the status of their disagreements. At
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the most fundamental level there is agreement about the subject matter,
the nature of the matter to be investigated—and agreement about their
relationship to that subject matter: the world presents them with problems
to be solved.
These are the characteristics of what in social terms must function as
a closed system. The effect of a revolution is to close the system again.
After the crisis, to the extent that a new paradigm is accepted then the
previous one- is obliterated. Successive paradigms actually replace one
another. Possibly one could describe certain processes of social evolution
in this way. But I do not think it fits the present case of feminist
scholarship, because feminism has something of an interest in sustaining
antagonism between 'paradigms'. Indeed, it is arguably in feminism's overt
interests—and certainly reflects its practice—to take a conflict view of
its social context, one might agree here, then, with Kuhn himself. For
if so, we cannot properly speak of paradigms.

Diverse feminisms, diverse anthropologies

Neither feminist scholarship nor social anthropology are closed in the
Kuhnian sense. Thus there is no 'one' anthropology—its practitioners
range themselves all along the spectrum from determinists to relativists,
from those interested in power relations to those who give primacy to
cultural models, from the political economists to the para-hermeneuticists.
From those who seek to explain to those who seek to understand and
to those who want to do something about what they have explained and/or
understood. Moreover most of the positions anthropologists occupy can
be thought of as corresponding to philosophical ones, or find their
counterparts in debates in history or literary criticism. When
anthropologists call themselves post-structuralists they cannot escape
contemporary literary traditions any more than they ever had a monopoly

11
 MARILYN STRATHERN

on the concept of structuralism. In other words many of the differences

between anthropologists mirror a whole range of western intellectual
positions to be found in other disciplines. These also shade off into political
persuasions. Here is the contrast with natural science: not simply that
within any one discipline one finds diverse 'schools' (also true in science)
but that their premises are constructed competitively in relation to one
another.
Anyone overviewing feminist theory has to accommodate its explicitly
self-differentiated positions.29 Labels have a political flavour—
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liberal/radieal/marxist/socialist: the differences between the political

vantage points provide a model for the differences between the feminist
vantage points, which also replicate major intellectual divisions within
western society at large.
It should cause no surprise, then, that small as the field of feminist
'anthropology' is, it too reproduces these divisions. It does not itself have
to occupy all the niches. Thus since feminist anthropology as a whole
regards itself as offering a radical critique of the cultural construction
of bias, for instance, taking an anti-determinist position will locate
determinism on the part of others. Many feminist anthropologists
concerned with evolutionary theory are concerned with the introduction
of cultural bias in the form of male bias into the process of explanation.30
Social anthropological studies of women persistently divide into two
radically divergent camps over whether or not sexual asymmetry is
universal.31 The question is whether social inequality is inherent in
relations between men and women. One side argues that our own
constructs blind us from seeing egalitarianism for what it is in unfamiliar
contexts, and that we only encounter hierarchical relations where we also
encounter the historical penetration of privatised ownership. The other
side see as their project accounting for sexual inequality in all its forms,
for sexual difference everywhere feeds into socially constituted differences.
Atkinson" here opposes Leacock" and Sacks34 to Ortner and Whitehead,35
Collier and Rosaldo.36 Bell" has called these 'evolutionist' and 'universalist'
positions and they echo well-worn strategies in the anthropological
handling of cross-cultural data.
Now the ease of this interpenetration of certain feminist perspectives
and certain anthropological ones suggests a kind of natural relation
between the two. One can argue, for instance, that as a whole
social/cultural anthropology has a radical bent, as feminism does, in so

12
 FEMINISM AND ANTHROPOLOGY

far as it offers a critique of its own society. We see it in the concern to

decode our own assumptions and formulations as ideologies, and in the
early feminist recognition that to study 'women' was to study relations
between men and women. If it did not borrow from anthropological
preoccupations it is patently congenial to them. Moreover the kind of
cross-cultural enquiry which characterises anthropology has been a direct
inspiration to the feminist scrutiny of sexual stereotypes, and is repeated
in certain feminist positions which seek a constant revision of their own
frameworks. The pluralism which characterises both endeavours would
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seem to have them touch mutual ground at several points. So we come

back to why there should be any resistance at all to feminist anthropology.
Is it after all because, in spite of the many points of congruence, feminist
anthropology also threatens at some deeper level?
One obvious question pressing the humanities and social sciences is
much less applicable to the natural sciences, namely, the relationship of
the scholar-practitioners to their subject matter. Kuhn's characterisation
of that relationship was one of problem-solving. We conceive of the
natural world as made up of different things—and different orders of
things—but ultimately reconcilable through sets of 'laws' which by our
'natural logic' cannot be in conflict.38 Paradigms provide the rules for
registering the nature of the problem and what its solution would look
like. In the social sciences and humanities, however, the differences
between the theoretical positions I have been talking about respond to
the perceptions of different social interests. We conceive of our social
world as made up of basically similar persons but divided between
themselves by different interests, which may indeed be in conflict; 'social
logic' allows contradiction.39
It is arguable that disciplines concerned with the constitution of the
social world lend themselves vitality in replicating as theoretical positions
a range of social interests. It would be pointless to seek for a
homogenisation or reconciliation of all the points of view— there is, in
this sense, no world view. What constitutes the social world, rather, is
the nature of the relationships between different views from different
social positions.
Thus, to the extent that anthropology has an investment in the study
of other societies and other cultures, it .has an interest in preserving the
distinctiveness of its subject matter. For ethical reasons, apart from
anything else, the anthropologist does not wish to assimilate the character

13
 MARILYN STRATHERN

of other systems to his or her own. The essence of the comparative

perspective is to make sense of differences, not collapse them. Feminist
theory also has an interest in difference—in constantly bringing to mind
the 'difference it makes' to consider things from a perspective which
includes women's interests qua women. It follows that in so far as men's
and women's interests are opposed—when male bias is discerned for
instance—every effort must be made to bring this to attention: again,
homogenisation makes no sense. This mutual interest in sustaining
difference, because such differences reflect differences between social
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positions as they are lived, would seem to be grounds again for a mutual
convergence between feminism and anthropology. So why the resistance?
I have said enough to indicate that the answer cannot lie only in
'paradigms'. First, for the reasons I have sketched, that the different
theoretical positions occupied in the humanities and social sciences are
not really analogous to the paradigms of Kuhnian science. They are based
on conflict between contradictory premises which it is in no one's interests
to reduce to single positions. Second, because theoretical positions in
anthropology, at least, are in fact overturned and displaced very easily—
radicalisms abound. It may be objected that if so then such positions are
not really of paradigmatic status and we should look for deeper premises.
Now my problem is that were I to do so, I would in fact do so from within
anthropology: for instance, scrutinising the subject/object dichotomy
which underlies the western concept of study, or commodity notions
which inform our concepts of personhood and identity, stems from
analysing social and cultural systems different from our own. From the
anthropological point of view, much feminist thinking participates in such
constructs, embodying a specifically western commentary upon the world.
This brings me to the third reason. Although one would not wish to
discount the heavy hand of diehards, the awkward and uneasy relationship
between feminism and anthropology is lived most dramatically in the
experiences of those who practise feminist anthropology. They are caught
between structures, neither of which will wholly substitute for the other.
It is not just a matter of clinging to the familiar; rather, one is faced with
two different ways of relating to one's subject matter. One needs to keep
that tension going, for there can be no relief in substituting the one for
the other—any more, say, than one might want to get rid of a tension
between work and home. It is a tension akin to that many in the
contemporary arena of applied anthropology also experience; and one

14
 FEMINISM AND ANTHROPOLOGY

might recall that Clifford's biography of a missionary-anthropologist

reveals 'a field of tensions':" Tension can of course be highly creative-
it is also in the end humbling, and it would be a diminished humanity
which would wish this particular one away.41

Diverse radicalisms
But before we get complacent about our tensions, let me expand what
I mean by talking of different relations to a subject matter. If I were to
put the antithesis between feminism and anthropology in a nutshell it
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would be not that they are based on competing paradigms, but in terms
of something much less rhetorical, in a way sillier. I think there is a
sense in which each has the capacity to mock the other. Ultimately this
is to do with ethics, because each one nearly achieves what the other
aims for as an ideal relation with the world.
Here, for the sake of comparison, I introduce a brand of radical
anthropology which uses the same ideology of overthrowing paradigms
as does feminist scholarship. There is in fact a long tradition in
anthropological enquiry of breaking with the past, so that theoretical
generations tend to be short lived. A recent heir to this constant
radicalisation of the subject is scrutiny of ethnographic writing itself,
another 'new ethnography', and the case is interesting in the present
context for the weight placed on the interpretation of experience. For
'experience' is also an explicit topic of feminist enquiry (including in strictly
academic contexts).42 There is a well argued view for example that 'feminist
theory' is 'experiential'."" Its first step is consciousness raising. In
transmuted form, feminist anthropologists implement the emphasis on
experience. Of course it will take the form of description, but nonetheless
one of the moves which Rapp reported in her 1979 review of the
'anthropology of women' was the 'search for analysis of more finely
delineated female experience';44 she later notes interest in 'the lived
body'—women's self-concepts as mediated through perceptions of their
bodies.43 Apart from bodies, we also have selves. The papers which
Scheper-Hughes addresses represent a feminist anthropology which
explores 'the nature of the selP in the fieldwork situation : ethnography
as 'intellectual autobiography'.46
While highlighting women's (rather than men's) experiences and
perceptions is an advance one may attribute to feminist anthropology,
focusing on these issues is paralleled in anthropology today without any

15
 MARILYN STRATHERN

regard for the feminist contribution; a quite 'independent' development:

The aim is to grasp 'lived experience', for instance, through 'body
praxis'." 48 'A new anthropology of ritual experience'49 is heralded in a
collection of essays on initiation rites. Feminist interest in these matters,
thus, would not be challenging 'paradigms' which are not already under
challenge from within the subject. Let me briefly compare, then, how
the idea of 'experience' is used in non-anthropological feminist discourse,
and in non-feminist anthropological discourse. For both develop the
concept of experience as a weapon against orthodoxy.
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Feminist theory sees itself as challenging stereotypes which misrepresent

women's experiences. 'Experience' may be set against the whole endeavour
of collective representation, including academic theory building, which
appropriates speech and image in the interests of patriarchy. Experience,
closely tied to the personal, cannot but resonate with conditions as they
are, even if its meaning has to be brought up to individual consciousness.
Experience thus becomes the instrument of a knowledge which cannot
be appropriated by others. It can only be shared with like persons (and
the test of likeness is of course the very capacity to share). Thought is
given to decoding the speech and imagery which colonises experience by
assigning it patriarchal values.50 These are the images of sexuality of which
Janeway talked—women being made to feel in certain ways about
themselves, as though that thinking could be done for them.
Essential to the feminist task is the need to expose and thereby destroy
the authority of other persons to determine feminine experience. The
constant re-discovery that women are the Other in men's accounts reminds
women that they must see men as the Other in relation to themselves.
Creating a space for women thus becomes elided with creating a space
for the self. Experience is an instrument for knowing the self. Feminist
theory thus simultaneously marks out women as special selves, and claims
that knowledge of the self as such can come only from acknowledging
this special nature. Necessary to the construction of the feminist self, then,
is a non-feminist other.51 Because the goal is to restore to subjectivity a
self obliterated or dominated by the Other, there can be no shared
experience between them.
Those who write about the anthropology of experience seek to avoid
pernicious analysis which reduces social like to verbal praxis. For others,
the focus of experience contains an attempt to register the impact of
society on individual lives. In either case, the problem remains of course

16
 FEMINISM AND ANTHROPOLOGY

that the ethnographer writing his or her account employs the double filter,
first of translating another's experience through his or her own, and then
rendering experience in the form of the written word. Contemporary
experimentation with biography, narrative and novel is a response to this.52
Experimentation with ways of presenting ethnography itself also includes
recent self-conscious attempts to let the anthropologist's subjects speak
in their own voice.
Clifford" was thus able to describe a new genre of anthropological
works designed to reproduce multiple authorship. Rabinow54 typifies the
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genre itself as post-structuralist, an 'intercalation of mixed genres of texts

and voices'. The resultant new ethnography does a number of things,
(a) It allows the so-called informant to speak in his or her own voice,
(b) It replicates the interlocutory process of fieldwork, which always rests
on collaboration between anthropologist and informant. Anthropologists
and their reactions are thus constituted as part of the data, rather than
being mysterious hidden hands, (c) The anthropologist's experiences do
not frame off objective data, but are personalised so that through the
lens of their experience others of their own society may approximate a
like understanding. The anthropologist's experience can consequently
become a vehicle for cross-cultural commentary, as when Rabinow's55
personal reactions reveal a 'cultural self.

Anthropology here constitutes itself in relation to an Other, viz. the

alien culture/society under study. But the Other is not what is under
attack. On the contrary, the effort is to create a relation with the Other—
as in the search for a medium of expression which will offer mutual
interpretation, perhaps visualised as a common text, or as something more
like a discourse. Clifford develops the concept of 'discourse' in reaction
to the perceived objectification of 'texts', an interlocution which retains
the distinct multiple voices of its authors yet yields a product they all
to some extent share. What is under attack, by contrast, is part of
oneself—that is, oneself as embodied in the tradition one is heir to. It
is claimed that the pretensions of the old anthropology obliterated the
multiple authorship of fieldwork data, did not acknowledge the input
either of the informant or of the anthropologist's particular experience,
and thus misinterpreted the nature of the data itself. Clifford feels it
necessary to attack the very notion that ethnography has self-evident
authority.56

17
 MARILYN STRATHERN

Now it seems to me that I have described two very different radicalisms.

For all their parallel interests, they represent two different structures in
the way they organise knowledge and draw boundaries, in short, in terms
of social relations and thus the character of their discourse. Feminist
theory suggests that one can discover the self by becoming conscious of
oppression from the Other. This creates a natural kinship between those
who are similarly oppressed. Thus one may seek to regain a common
past which is also one's own. Anthropological enquiry suggests that the
self can be consciously used as a vehicle for representing an Other, quite
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different from itself. But this is only possible if the self breaks with its
own past.
Obviously I have been considering a tiny fraction merely of either
framework; there is enough however to see how each could mock the
ethics of the other. But I must add that what follows is in one regard
make-believe. That is, I have imagined a dialogue of sorts between
feminism and anthropology in order to show up the potential each has
for undermining the other. The potential exists, but I think we have good
reason to actually keep away from dialogue of this kind.

Mockery
How can feminism be said to mock this style of anthropology? The
anthropologist is trying to establish him or herself as an interpreting
vehicle which in being true to the fieldwork situation also yields a true
picture of the interaction which took place there. Yet obviously the
anthropologist would also admit that in the end he/she is in control of
the text. However much multiple authorship is acknowledged, publishing
the experiences as 'ethnography' and using them to make a statement
about the practice of anthropology in the end, as Clifford notes, turns
them to the uses of the discipline. But that does not mean that it is a
worthless exercise. On the contrary, and that is why the issue of ethics
is raised, the plea that multiple authorship is desirable speaks to an ideal
relationship with informants. The anthropologist is anxious to preserve
their distinctiveness, not to colonise them, not simply to render the
experience of others in his/her own terms, but to preserve their separate
dignity. To present a monograph as a collaborative production, then, is
a metaphor for an ideal ethical situation in which neither voice is
submerged by the other."

18
 FEMINISM AND ANTHR0P0U3GY

From a feminist perspective, of course, there can be no collaboration

with the Other. And as soon as one starts thinking in these terms, it is
clear that this anthropological ideal is subject to delusion. However much
the anthropologist talks of multiple authors, he/she forgets the crucial
dimension of different social interests. There can be no parity between
the authorship of the anthropologist and the informant; the dialogue must
always be asymmetrical. Whether the prime factors are the colonial and/or
economic relations between the societies from which they come, or the
question of literacy and language, or the use to which the text will be
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put, the social worlds of anthropologist and informant are different. They
have no interests in common to be served by this purportedly common
product.
Although I have used the case of the new ethnography, it itself is an
actualisation of values widespread within the subject as a whole. And
I think anthropological practice would cease if it could not implement
in some way or another a working ethic of humanism.58 The feminist
critique comes from different premises, but that does not prevent it poking
fun at anthropological pretensions at their most helpless. Indeed, mockery
always comes from a different vantage point, so the blow strikes
infuriatingly at a tangent. But feminists come very close to displaying
an alternative route to what anthropologists hope to achieve in
collaborative enterprises. Feminist scholars can actually claim they have
substantial interests in common with the women they study.
How, then, could anthropology possibly mock feminism? The line of
feminist theory I was pursuing placed great emphasis on the conscious
creation of the self by seeing its difference from the Other. Women have
to know the extent to which their lives are moulded by patriarchal values.
It is an achievement to perceive the gulf, and the perception in turn
constitutes an ethical position for this is what validates their commitment
to one another. Now if feminism mocks the anthropological pretension
of creating a product in some ways jointly authored, then anthropology
mocks the pretension that feminists can ever really achieve that separation
which they desire. From a vantage point outside their own culture,
anthropologists see rather that the very basis for the separation rests on
common cultural suppositions about the nature of personhood and
relationships. If women construct subjectivity for themselves, they do
so strictly within the socio-cultural constraints of their own society which

19
 MARILYN STRATHERN

defines what subjectivity looks like. The establishment of self endorses

a world view shared equally by the Other.
Again, these are issues which feminist thinkers have worried over
themselves. Silent speech; connivance and participation in oppression;
Els'htain's final question59 that asks how we set about creating a feminist
discourse that rejects domination, when language itself is conceived as
an instrument of domination. Feminism is also caught in a helpless ethical
state, for it requires a dogma of separatism as a political instrument in
order also to constitute a common cause. Anthropologists mock in almost
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effortlessly achieving that 'distance' from their own society which

feminists create with such anguish. Yet, again, the mockery also glances
off, because in fact feminism inhabits its own society and the discovery
that its values are culture-bound is irrelevant. Feminists can only
operationalise their perspectives if these are held to have some congruence
with reality. Thus they do not need to know that 'really' they cannot
distinguish themselves from the oppressive Other; on the contrary what
they need to know are all the ways in which 'really' they can and must.

Conclusion
I return finally to the tension between feminist practice and academic
practice. The achievement of feminism is that it has created a new social
reality, a community not to be defined by existing ones. It has made more
complex persons of us, and perhaps one should not wish it to substitute
for other areas of life, any more than one would want its own voice
silenced.
As a political device, feminism may have to use the rhetoric of
'paradigm change' in the sense of overturning existing premises based
on male privilege. Yet in another sense the last thing we want is a world
view. We would lose the flexibility of seeing the social world as necessarily
containing many views. Who, for instance, would wish for a 'normative
sociology' or a 'normative anthropology'? As an anthropologist, Rapp
cautions that we should stop assuming that our experiences subsume
everyone else's.60 So where does this leave feminist anthropology? In many
ways rather like applied anthropology, though in some regards much more
successful: it shifts not paradigms but discourse. That is, it alters the nature
of the audience, the range of readership, and the kinds of interactions
between author and reader, and alters the subject matter of conversation
in the way it allows others to speak—what is talked about and whom

20
 FEMINISM AND ANTHROPOLOGY

one is talking to. Indeed, internal feminist discourse itself actually achieves
the multiple-authorship effect for which some anthropologists strive.
The kinds of internal revisions which anthropologists themselves are
always carrying out on their past suggest that they construe it as an
accretion of texts. In spite of the competitive base on which they may
be formed (see above), interpretations often appear to supplant one
another, being presented as the best current 'version' or whatever." As
I have emphasised, openness to the Other is differently directed, across
the cultural divide between anthropologists and informant. It is precisely
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because feminist theory does not constitute its past 'as a text' that it cannot
be added on or supplant anthropology in any simple way. For if feminists
always maintain a divide against the Other, among themselves by contrast
they create something indeed much closer to discourse than to text. And
the character of this discourse approaches the 'interlocutionary common
product' for which the new ethnography aims. Let me refer back to the
highly conscious way in which feminists locate their views in relation
to fellow-feminists. They construct a common arena different from the
character of the individual debates which constitute it, a discourse, in
Clifford's words created from a 'field of multiple discourses'." It does not
simply describe dialogue, but retains a true dialogical structure.
In their self-representations feminists are in constant debate. The fact
of debate maintains a connection between them. It looks as though we
have an impossible array of theoretical positions: 'here we are speaking
in many voices'." But it is a phenomenon of feminism that the positions
are held, often very explicitly, in relation to one another.M The vast
amount of internal criticism and counter-criticism—which can be read
as fragmentation if one looks only at the individual arguments—together
create a shared discourse. They depend on one another's presence. For
instance, as a variety of feminism, Marxist/socialist feminism places itself
in relation to both liberal and radical feminism, and is constantly
commenting on the fact.65 Others are for ever disavowing biological
essentialism. The arguments are never dispatched, never supplanted. In
other words, no one viewpoint is self-reproductive: it is created dialogically,
in the sense that all the positions in the debate comprise its theoretical
base. 'Feminism' means knowing that there is a debate on.
I am struck by Beer's recent account of Darwin's narrative art, her
exploration of the phase when a theory is first advanced and must appear
at its most fictive:

21
 MARILYN STRATHERN

The awkwardness of fit between the natural world as it is currently perceived

and as it is hypothetically imagined holds the theory itself for a time within
a provisional scope akin to that of fiction.66

Scientific revolutions occur when such hypotheses become what she calls
'determining fictions'. Anthropologists are notoriously adept at persuasive
narrative. They are always writing fictions—unauthorised accounts of
other societies—which become determining for their audience, who after
all have no other way to see what is being described. They display the
capacity of western imagination to contextualise itself by constant
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encounter with alien worlds. From this point of view feminist theory
speaks too evidently to what we know; as a set of practices, it has, after
all, to operate in the world as it is currently perceived. Perhaps, then,
it does not contextualise but operationalises the western imagination. It
must necessarily therefore be reluctant to yield its grasp of social reality.67
Its own concerns are too real to be comprehended as fictions. For we
measure feminist theory by the closeness of its insights into our
experiences, not its distance.

NOTES
* I have spoken on similar themes at the Department of Anthropology. University of California
at Berkeley, and at the History of Consciousness Unit, Santa Cruz, and thank colleagues
at both places for their comments. Inspiration has also come from other members of the
Research Group on Gender Relations in the Southwest Pacific at the Australian National
University
1 M.J. Boxer, 'For and about women: the theory and practice of women's studies in the United
States', in N.O. Keohane, M.Z. Rosaldo and B.C. Gelpi (eds.), Feminist Theory: A Critique
of Ideology (Harvester Press) Sussex, 1982
2 E.g.: P. Caplan and J.M. Bujra, Women United, Women Divided: Cross-Cultural Perspectives
on Female Solidarity (Tavistock) London, 1978; R.R. Reiter, Towards an Anthropology of
Women (Monthly Review Press) New York, 1975; K. Young, C. Wolkowitz and R. McCullagh
(eds.), Of Marriage and the Market, Women's Subordination in International Perspective (C.S.E.
Books) London, 1981
3 E.g.: J.M. Atkinson, 'Anthropology [Review Essay)', Signs: Journal of Women in Culture
and Society, 8, (1982), 236-58; M. Etienne and E. Leacock (eds.), 'Introduction' to Women
and colonization. Anthropological Perspectives (Praeger) New York, 1981; N. Scheper-Hughes,
'Introduction: the problem of bias in androcentric and feminist anthropology', Women's Studies,
10, (1983), 109-16; A.L. Tsing and S.J. Yanagisako, 'Feminism and kinship theory', Current
Anthropology, 24, (1983), 511-16
4 E.g.: J.F. Collier and M.Z. Rosaldo, 'Politics and gender in simple societies', in S.B. Ortner
and H. Whitehead (eds.), Sexual Meanings (Cambridge University Press) New York, 1981;
K. Sacks, Sisters and Wives: The Past and Future of Sexual Equality (Greenwood Press)
London, 1979
5 The interesting case of E. Ardener's paper on 'The problem of women' is apposite here: it
was written to elucidate certain features of model building, retrospectively becoming a
contribution to feminist literature, e.g. in S. Ardener (ed.), Perceiving Women (Wiley & Sons)
New York, 1975. S. Ardener's interests in the anthropology of women antedate the 1970s,
and she rarely describes her work as feminist. See E. Ardener, 'Belief and the problem of

22
 FEMINISM AND ANTHROPOLOGY

women', in J.S. La Fontaine (ed.), The interpretation of ritual (Tavistock) London, 1972,
reprinted in S. Ardener, op. cit.
6 Cf. Atkinson, op. cit.
7 J. Clifford, 'On ethnographic authority', Representations, 1, (1983), 118-46
8 Cf. J. Shapiro, 'Cross-cultural perspectives on sexual differentiation', in H. Katchadourian
(ed.), Human Sexuality. A comparative and developmental perspective (California University
Press) Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1979
9 J. Shapiro, 'Anthropology and the study of gender', in E. Langland and W. Gove (eds.), A
Feminist Perspective in the Academy (Chicago University Press) Chicago, 1983
10 T. Kuhn, The structure of scientific revolutions (Chicago University Press) Chicago, 1962,
2nd edition 1970
11 D.J. Haraway, 'In the beginning was the word: the genesis of biological theory', Signs: Journal
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of Women in Culture and Society, 6, (1981) 469-481; H. Longino and R. Doell, 'Body, bias
and behaviour: a comparative analysis of reasoning in two areas of biological science', Signs:
Journal of Women in Culture and Society, 9, (1983), 206-27
12 E. Langland and W. Gove (eds.), A Feminist Perspective in the Academy: the Difference
It Makes (University of Chicago Press), Chicago, 1981, 2nd edition, 1983
13 This is social/cultural anthropology. Longino and Doell put a positive, though not
unquestioningly so, case for physical anthropology in so far as 'feminist anthropologists have
developed alternative accounts of human evolution that replace androcentric with gynecentric
assumptions while remaining within the methodological constraints of their discipline'; see
Longino and Doell, op. cit., 226
14 Langland and Gove, op. cit., 2
15 Boxer, op. cit., 260
16 M. Hughes and M. Kennedy, 'Breaking out—women in adult education', Women's Studies
International Forum, 6, (1983), 261-69
17 Langland and Gove, op. cit., 3-4
18 E. Janeway, 'Who is Sylvia? On the loss of sexual paradigms', Signs: Journal of Women in
Culture and Society, 5, (1980), 588
19 E.S. Person, 'Sexuality as the mainstay of identity: psychoanalytic perspectives', Signs: Journal
of Women in Culture and Society, 5, (1980) 613
20 Kuhn, op. cit., 191
21 Boxer, op. cit., 258
22 E.g., S.M. Pflanz-Cook and E. A. Cook, 'Mai of the Manga: man of the middle', in W.L Rodman
and D.A. Counts (eds.), Middlemen and brokers in Oceania, ASAO Monograph 9 (University
Press of America), Lanham, 1983
23 Pflanz-Cook and Cook, op. cit., 241, quoting Kuhn
24 Janeway, op. cit.
25 Boxer, op. cit., 260
26 See Haraway, op. cit.
27 Janeway, op. cit., 575
28 Kuhn, op. cit., viii, 208
29 E.g. M. Barrett, Women's Oppression Today. Problems in Marxist Feminist Analysis (Verso)
London, 1980; H. Eisenstein, Contemporary Feminist Thought (Unwin Paperbacks) Sydney,
1984; J.B. Eishtain, Public man, private woman. Women in social and political thought
(Princeton University Press) Princeton, 1981; J. Sayers,BiologivalPolitics.Feminist and Anti-
Feminist Perspectives (Tavistock) London, 1982
30 Longino and Doell, op. cit.; e.g. N.M. Tanner, On becoming human. A model of the transition
from ape to human and the reconstruction of early human social life (Cambridge University
Press) Cambridge, 1981
31 R. Rapp, 'Anthropology [Review Essay)', Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society,
4, (1979), 497-513; Scheper-Hughes, op. cit.
32 Atkinson, op. cit., 238
33 E.B. Leacock, 'Women's status in egalitarian society: implications for social evolution', Current
Anthropology, 19 (1979), 247-75
34 Sacks, op. cit.

23
 MARILYN STRATHERN

35 Ortner and Whitehead, op. cit.

36 Collier and Rosaldo, op. cit.
37 D. Bell, Daughters of the Dreaming (McPhee Gribble/George Allen & Unwin) Melbourne,
1984, 245-6
38 T.M.S. Evens, 'Mind, logic and the efficacy of the Nuer incest prohibition', Man (n.s.), 18,
(1983), 111-33
39 Actually of course we have great problems with our notions of similarity and difference, and
a propensity to collapse the one system into the other—to describe our social world as a natural
world etc.
40 P. Rabinow, 'Facts are a word of God' (an essay review of J. Clifford's Person and myth:
Maurice Leenhardt in the Melanesian world) in G.W. Stocking (ed.), Observers Observed:
History of Anthropology Vol. 1 (University of Wisconsin Press) Wisconsin, 1983, 203
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41 And the tension between scholarship itself and feminism has been lived a thousand times,
indeed constituted the nature of recent scholarly feminist enquiry almost from the start; see
Boxer, op. cit.
42 E.g. C. Register, 'Literary criticism (Review Essay]', Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and
Society, 6, (1980), 269
43 Keohane, Rosaldo and Gelpi, op. cit., vii
44 Rapp. op. cit., 500
45 Ibid., 503
46 Scheper-Hughes, op. cit., 115
47 M. Jackson, 'Knowledge of the body', Man (n.s.), 18 (1983), 327-45
48 Not necessarily to recover intentionality and subjectivity, but to apprehend the social effect
of dispositions (habitual states) which embody structures; see P. Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory
of Practice (trans. R. Nice) (Cambridge University Press) Cambridge, 1977
49 G.H. Herdt, 'Preface' to Rituals of Manhood. Male initiation in Papua New Guinea (University
of California Press) Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1982
50 E.g.: J.B. Elshtain, 'Feminist discourse and its discontents: language, power, and meaning',
in Keohane, Rosaldo and Gelpi, op. cit.; C.A. Mackinnon, 'Feminism, marxism, method and
the state: an agenda for theory', in Keohane, Rosaldo and Gelpi, op. cit.
51 On analogy with constructions of western knowledge itself—see Haraway, op. cit., 480 and
G. Lloyd, 'History of philosophy and the critique of reason', Critical Philosophy, 1, (1984),
14. However, Keohane, Rosaldo and Gelpi delimit varieties of consciousness, of which
consciousness of oneself as object of the attention of another is only one; see Keohane, Rosaldo
and Gelpi, op. cit.
52 E.g.: M. Jackson, Allegories of the Wilderness. Ethics and ambiguity in Kuranko narratives
(Indiana University Press) Bloomington, 1982; M.W. Young, Magicians of Manumanua. Living
myth in Kaluana (University of California Press) Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1983
53 Clifford, 'On ethnographic authority', op. cit.
54 Rabinow, 'Facts are a word of God', op. cit., 196
55 P. Rabinow, Reflections on Fieldwork in Morocco (University of California Press) Berkeley,
1977
56 Clifford is a historian of anthropology, and he perhaps overdoes the presumption of authority.
Most ethnographies are, I am sure, written more provisionally than they look. However, radical
anthropology in general tends to include the destruction of its own past in its agenda. Here
we may note that experience as a source of authority ('fieldwork experience' turning the
anthropologist into an objective arbiter of the facts) is deliberately supplanted by the concept
of experience as a constructive negotiation involving interaction between conscious subjects.
Note, however, that Clifford differentiates them by calling the first a 'paradigm of experience'
and the second a 'paradigm of discourse'; the two compete with one another in his account
as the proper basis for ethnography. See Clifford, 'On ethnographic authority', op. cit., 133
57 Rabinow suggests that it is not authenticity which Leenhardt's co-authored texts claim but
'an ethically superior product of joint work' (my emphasis); see Rabinow, 'Facts are a word
of God', op. cit., 204. See also J. Clifford, 'Fieldwork, reciprocity and the making of ethnographic
texts: the example of Maurice Leenhardt', Man (n.s.), 15, (1980), 518-32, and M. Young,
op. cit., 34-5

24
 FEMINISM AND ANTHROPOLOGY

58 R. N. Bellah, 'Foreword' to P. Rabinow, Reflections on fieldwork in Morocco (University

of California Press) Berkeley, 1977, xii
59 Elshtain, "Feminist discourse and its discontents', op. cit., 145
60 Rapp, op. cit., 511
61 Though one would not want to ignore the tradition of multiple perspectives; see R.M. Keesing,
'Introduction' to G.H. Herdt (ed.) Rituals of Manhood. Male Initiation in Papua New Guinea
(University of California Press) Berkeley, 1982
62 Clifford, 'On ethnographic authority', op. cit., 136
63 Haraway, op. cit., 481
64 A similar point is made by Eisenstein; see Eisenstein, op. cit., xix
65 E.g.: Sacks, op. cit.; Barrett, op. cit.
66 G. Beer, Darwin's plots (Routledge & Kegan Paul) London, 1983
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67 Cf. C.F. Epstein, 'Women in sociological analysis: new scholarship versus old paradigms',
in Langland and Gove, op. cit.