Women writing culture / edited by Ruth Behar and Deborah A. Gordon. [electronic resource]

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Behar/Gordon, Author.

Contributor:

Behar, Ruth, 1956-

Gordon, Deborah A., 1956-

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Women anthropologists--Attitudes.

Women anthropologists.

Ethnology--Authorship.

Ethnology.

Ethnology--Philosophy.

Feminist anthropology.

Feminist literary criticism.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (xiii, 457 p. ) ill. ;

Place of Publication:

Berkeley : University of California Press, c1995.

Summary:

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.

Contents:

Introduction: out of exile / Ruth Behar

Participant observation / Kirin Narayan

Bad girls: theater, women of color, and the politics of representation / Dorinne Kondo

Writing in my father's name: a diary of Translated Woman's first year / Ruth Behar

Feminist anthropology: the legacy of Elsie Clews Parsons / Louise Lamphere

"Not in the absolute singular": rereading Ruth Benedict / Barbara A. Babcock

Ella Cara Deloria and Mourning Dove: writing for cultures, writing against the grain / Janet L. Finn

Multiple subjectivities and strategic positionality: Zora Neale Hurston's experimental ethnographies / Graciela Hernández

(cont.) Ruth Landes and the early ethnography of race and gender / Sally Cole

Margaret Mead and the "Rustling-of-the-wind-in-the-palm-trees school" of ethnographic writing / Nancy C. Lutkehaus

The ethnographic films of Barbara G. Myerhoff: anthropology, feminism, and the politics of Jewish identity / Gelya Frank

Writing against the grain: cultural politics of difference in the work of Alice Walker / Faye V. Harrison

The gender of theory / Catherine Lutz

Works and wives: on the sexual division of textual labor / Barbara Tedlock

(cont.) Ms. representations: reflections on studying academic men / Judith Newton and Judith Stacey

"Man's darkest hours": maleness, travel, and anthropology / Laurent Dubois

Writing lesbian ethnography / Ellen Lewin

A tale of two pregnancies / Lila Abu-Lughod

Women out of China: traveling tales and traveling theories in postcolonial feminism / Aihwa Ong

Border work: feminist ethnography and the dissemination of literacy / Deborah A. Gordon

In dialogue? : reading across minority discourses / Paulla Ebron, Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing

Border poets : translating by dialogues / Smadar Lavie.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN:

0-520-91681-6

0-585-31791-7