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Defining Feminist Ethnography
Kamala Visweswaran
In a recent paper, Renato Rosaldo describes the following interchange with a physicist who has just asked him to describe some of anthropology’s laws. As Rosaldo replies in dismay, “You mean something like E= mc2?,” it suddenly occurs to him, “There’s one thing we know for sure. We all know a good description when we see one. We haven’t discovered any laws of culture, but we do think there are really classic ethnographies, really telling descriptions of other cultures, like Trobriand Islanders, the Tikopika, and the Nuer.”
Malinowski, Firth, Evans-Pritchard. This paper is in part a questioning of the discipline’s canonization of ‘classic ethnographies.’ To ask why it is that the classics most often cited are those ethnographies written by men, and why it is that what women anthropologists write is so easily dismissed as ‘subjective,’ is to invite a mumbled answer of ‘sexism.’ Yet, within the latest school of ethnography, which advertises itself as ‘experimental,’ ethnographies written by women are again consigned to the margins of what is valorized.
My aim in this paper is to describe and suggest possibilities for a ‘feminist ethnography.’ Part of this exercise is restitutive, which involves re-reading and assigning new value to texts ignored or discarded. In other disciplinary terms–those of literary criticism–this exercise would be called ‘questioning the canon.’ Some of what I will be looking at are the ways in which female ethnographers confront their biases as Western women and the processes of identification (or lack of them) which inform description. The other part of this exercise is explanatory. I will suggest more recent autobiographical and novelistic attempts for this consideration of a feminist ethnography. I will suggest more recent autobiographical and novelistic attempts for this consideration of a feminist ethnography: Paula Gunn Allen’s The Women Who Owned the Swadows, and Cherrie Moraga’s Loving in the War Years. Most of this paper is focused on locating feminist ethnography in the recent challenge mounted by Anthropology stands to learn much from the challenge to ethnographic authority, but this challenge needs to be pushed to its limits. I argue that feminist ethnography can benefit from a experimental ethnography’s concern for the constitution of subjectivities, but perhaps more importantly, that experimental ethnography can benefit form a feminist evaluation of some of its assumptions. I will begin by briefly describing competing modes of analysis within feminist anthropology then consider women’s accounts which could be read as feminist or experimental ethnography. In doing so, I will level my critiques of some of the assumptions of feminist anthropology and experimental ethnography.
I. Competing Approaches in Feminist Anthropology
Akin to what James Clifford has noted as a late 19th century division of labor between ethnographers and theorists in anthropology, a clear empirical divide exists in contemporary feminist anthropology (117-46). The ‘ethnographers,’ drawing upon the ‘compensatory scholarship’ phase in anthropology (‘bringing women back in’), have matured into the chroniclers on women’s life history, Jane Atkinson has noted (236-58). The theorists, on the other hand, continue to take a more comparative tack, using field data explicitly to deconstruct Western categories of analysis (MacCormack and Strathern) or re-analyzing data about women pulled from traditional ethnographies. [1] In contrast to the ethnographer’s centering of women in the text, theoretical approaches are becoming increasingly decentered (e.g., if you want to understand anything about women, don’t start with women, but with their relations to men; or look at relationships between men and men). In 1981, in an article titled ‘The Use and Abuse of Anthropology,’ Michelle Rosaldo, a major proponent of the decentered approach, argued that what we need is not more data (read: fieldwork), but more questions. As I see it such an approach loses sight of the fundamental reconstitutive value of feminism, and the potential of a feminist ethnography which has yet to be expressed: one that locates the self in the experience of oppression in order to liberate it. As Susan Griffin says:
A theory of liberation must be created to articulate the feeling of oppression, to describe this oppression as real, as unjust, and to point to a cause. In this way the idea is liberating. It restores to the oppressed a belief in the self and in the authority of the self to determine what is real. (emphasis mine) (280)
I will return to this theme.
It is my contention that a very obvious element has been left out of the feminist anthropological approaches just described. A woman-centered ethnographic approach need not sacrifice rationality. But rather than foreground men’s relationships to each other, or women’s relationships with men, perhaps a feminist ethnography would focus on women’s relationships to other women. Research on communities of women is a step in this direction. But in terms of a feminist contribution to the study of colonialism, it is the relationship between women of the colonizer and women of the colonized that demands attention.
Barriers to this kind of study exist within that discipline, however. At birth, feminist anthropology, like her sister disciplines, needed to imagine a universal self or ‘we.’ The other established was that of ‘man.’ Unfortunately, feminist anthropologists have uncritically continued to promulgate this assumption.
Marilyn Strathern’s paper which evaluates feminist anthropology in light of experimental ethnography, is a telling example of this assumption. She proposes that feminism and anthropology, instead of being mutually reconcilable, actually work at counter-purposes. She compares the feminist emphasis on experience ‘as knowledge which cannot be appropriated by others’ with experimental ethnography’s emphasis on experience, and concludes that while the goal of experimental ethnography is to create a (positive) relation with the other, the goal of feminist anthropology is to attack it. Thus,
Feminist theory suggests that one can acknowledge 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. (Strathern 288)
Slowly and painfully Third World women broached the problems of racism and class that prohibited a universal ‘we.’ It is not a little ironic that cross-cultural and class ‘others’ have finally been acknowledged within the women’s movement, while feminists in anthropology, the bastion of cultural relativity, insist on maintaining an us/them split that does not call into question their own positions as members of dominant Western societies. Insisting on the opposition between a unified female self and a male other removes the power categories that exist between all anthropologists and their subjects: the ways in which women anthropologists may pass as honorary males in some societies, or as persons of higher status by virtue of their membership in Western culture.
In experimental ethnography, ‘pursuit of the other’ becomes problematic, not taken for granted. The text is marked by disaffections, ruptures and incomprehensions. Skepticism, and perhaps a respect for the integrity of difference, replaces the ethnographic goal of total understanding and representation. Feminist anthropology, I would argue, stands to benefit from re-evaluating its assumptions about ‘the other’ in terms of experimental ethnography. In the next section however, I would like to demonstrate how experimental ethnography stands to benefit from a feminist questioning of its assumptions.
II. Re-reading ‘Confessional Field Literature’ for a Feminist Ethnography
Works by early women anthropologists (continuing through the mid-1970s) portrayed women’s lives through the use of third person objective accounts. [2] Many of the writings I will be considering, however, have been dismissed as ‘popularized accounts’ or a confessional field literature. Often judged as ‘inadequate science,’ these first person narratives have been consigned to the margins of anthropological discourse because of their subjective nature. In traditional ethnographic practice, if the first person narrative is allowed to creep into the ethnographic text, it is confined to the introduction (see for example Evans-Pritchard’s The Nuer ) or postscript. If a book is devoted to the first hand experiences of the novice ethnographer, it is after a monograph written in the proper objective manner has been produced. [3]
Proponents of a more experimental mode of writing ethnography have also dismissed such accounts, calling them ‘fables of rapport,’ in the end, functioning to shore up traditional boundaries of ethnographic authority by showing the process of the ethnographer’s ‘mastery’ of culture (Clifford). For example, Marcus and Cushman distinguish confessional field literature from experimental ethnography by saying, “Such accounts …. are at best seldom more than tenuously related to their author’s ethnographic enterprises (Marcus 25-69). The writers of experimental ethnographies, in contrast, often represent fieldwork experiences as a vital technique for structuring their narratives of description and analysis.” Rabinow and Dumont are heralded as two examples, while the rest of the genre is treated as so many more throwaway paperback novels. What Clifford and others have missed is the fact that for women writers of this genre, subjective accounts are often first accounts. Moreover they are as likely to generate tales of distance or alienation as empathic fables of rapport.
The writers I will be discussing do see the fieldwork experience not only as central to their analysis, but as definitive of its shaping into the first person narratives. While due respect is paid to them for ‘paving the way’ for experimental ethnography, there has been little consideration that these books, radical before their time, had to carve out a space for themselves within positivism. Instead, I would argue that the ‘fieldwork anthologies’ such as Saberwal and Henry’s Stress and Response in Fieldwork are more geared to shoring up anthropology as a positive science than the first person narratives I will be treating.
These accounts comprise a tradition of women ethnographers, not always professionally trained, often writing in a novelistic or fictive voice about culture. Some of these women were the wives of male anthropologists, men who upon completion of their fieldwork continued in the mein of publishing for a professional audience. Kevin Dwyer has noted that the male seemed to adopt the ‘objective’ explanatory mode, and the female a ‘subjective, anecdotal’ mode (143-51). (There are plenty of exceptions, one of which is Robert and Yolanda Murphy’s collaboration on Women of the Forest.) He suggests contrasting the books of Laura Bohannon, Elizabeth Fernea, Margery Wolf, (and I would add Marion Benedict), to those of their anthropologist husbands to get some idea of this division. I would also consider others consigned to the genre of confessional or popular literature: Jean Briggs, Hortense Powdermaker, and Elizabeth Marshall Thomas. We might ask why it is that this genre consists largely of women, and why it is that women more frequently adopt first person narrative as a means to convey their cross-cultural experiences.
One cannot convincingly argue that this was a choice circumscribed by lack of training, since Bohannon, Briggs, and Powdermaker were professional anthropologists. What is it then about the power of the fieldwork experience that cannot be contained in the additional introductory margins of anthropological discourse? I shall argue that first person narratives are being selected by women as part of a strategy both of communication and self-discovery. This strategy is evinced in Jean Briggs’ Never in Anger.
During her fieldwork among the Inuit, Briggs finds herself adopted by an Eskimo family as a ‘Kapluna’ (white) daughter but constantly bridling at the male authority to which she is subjected. Issues of autonomy are important to her and influence her relationship with the Eskimo women. She tells us:
On one occasion I nonplussed Allaq by asking why it was that men ‘bossed’ women and made all the daily decisions. Allaq, very resourceful when confronted with idiotic Kapluna questions, was silent for only a minute, then said: “Because the Bible says that’s the way it should be.’ Wanting to know whether the situation was rationalized in terms of women’s inferiority, I prodded her, telling her that some Kapluna men also boss their women because they believe that women have less ihuna (judgment of mind) than men. She assured me this was not the case among Eskimos …
Briggs’ questioning and need for personal self-expression continues, as does her rebellion against what she comes to see as repressive igloo life. The Eskimos with whom she lives see her as angry and irritable. Finally, one day she loses her temper and is ostracized by the community. Briggs is never able to fully comprehend her ostracism, and the dispute evolves into a permanent misunderstanding which she can never repair. The last pages of her book call into question the very nature of ethnographic understanding. Briggs’ difficulties sprang in part from the problem of her positionality in Eskimo culture. Questions of positionality more often than not confront female rather than male fieldworkers, and the female ethnographer is more likely to be faced with a decision over which world she enters. Let me give two examples among many.
The title of Hortense Powdermaker’s book, Stranger and Friend, suggests two faces of the anthropologist. Observing Lesu women practicing ritual dances, Powdermaker seeks a way to stay awake during the long evening sessions. She soon begins to practice with the women as a means of relieving the tedium of observation. When she is asked to participate in the upcoming festivities, however, Powdermaker is taken by surprise. Fearing a refusal would be seen by the women as a rejection she self-consciously agrees, and recounts;
…there I was in my proper place in the circle; the drums began; I danced. Something happened, I forgot myself and was one with the dancers. Under the full moon and for the brief time of the dance, I ceased to be an anthropologist from a modern society. I danced. When it was over I realized that for this short period, I had been emotionally a part of the rite. Then out came my notebook. (107)
Later, being invited to watch ceremonial circumcision of village boys, Powdermaker decides,
Since I had been identified with the women even to the extent of dancing with them, it seemed unwise in the hostile atmosphere between the sexes to swerve suddenly from the women’s group to the men’s. Or perhaps I was unable to switch my identifications so quickly… From then on the quality of my relationships with the women was different. I had their confidence as I had not had it before They came of their own accord to visit me and talked intimately about their lives. (113)
Yet it is upon the illness of Powdermaker’s friend and ‘best informant,’ when she feels her uselessness and the tribe withdrawing into itself, that she realizes, ‘…no matter how intimate and friendly I was with the natives, I was never truly a part of their lives’ (116).
Laura Bohannon describes her book Return to Laughter as an ‘anthropological novel.’ Bohannon was perhaps even more acutely aware than her contemporaries of disciplinary boundaries of truth and fiction, hence the ‘fictional name,’ Elenore Smith Bowen. Profound crises in identity mark Bohannon’s account, initiated by a confusion over which Bohannon, as a woman, is supposed to be identified with.
We reached Udama’s hut. There the bride was handed to her mother-in-law. The women scrambled in the hut after them. I tried to follow. Udama herself stopped me. “You must make up your mind,” she announced loudly so all could hear, “whether you wish to be an important guest or one of the senior women of the homestead. If you are an important guest we will again lead out the bride so you can see her. If you are one of us, you may come inside, but you must dance with us.” (Bowen 123)
Bohannon says that without stopping to consider the ramifications, she went inside. But it is her refusal to remain in the women’s world, and her determination to enter the men’s world that indirectly earns her the title ‘witch.’ Caught in a battle between two powerful village elders, Bohannon, almost against her will, is forced to play out her role as witch.
Bohannon is confronted throughout her fieldwork experience with a number of moral dilemmas, some of which involve decisions to dispense medication or aid those affected with smallpox who have been banished from the Tiv homestead. But perhaps the moral problem which upsets Bohannon the most involves what she regards as callous jokes villagers play upon the helpless. One in particular haunts Bohannon and recurs as a motif signifying the limitations of cultural understanding: The villagers tell an old blind man a snake is in front of him on the path, then laugh watching him try to run. In the end, Bohannon feels she can come to terms with their sense of humor, because she comprehends the tragedies of their everyday life. Finally, there is a ‘return to laughter.’
Many of my moral dilemmas had sprung from the very nature of my work, which had made me a trickster: one who seems to be what he is not and who professes faith in what he does not believe. But this realization is of little help. It is not enough to be true to one’s self. The self may be bad and need to be changed, or it may change unawares into something strange and new. I had changed… I had held that knowledge is worth the acquisition. I had willingly accepted the supposition that one cannot learn save by suppressing one’s prejudices, or, at the very least, holding them morally in obeyance. The trouble lay in my careless assumption that it would be only my prejudices that were to be involved, and never my ‘principles’–it had not occurred to me that the distinction between ‘prejudice’ and principle is itself a matter of prejudice. It is an error to assume that to know is to understand and that to understand is to like. The greater the extent to which one has lived and participated in a genuinely foreign culture and understood it, the greater the extent to which one realizes that one could not, without violence to one’s personal integrity be of it. (291-292)
I hope I have demonstrated that these works are not the ‘fables of rapport’ they were taken to be. Briggs and Bohannon, in particular, question anthropology as a positivist endeavor. More precisely, they can be read as the fables of ‘imperfect rapport’ Rabinow’s and Dumont’s books exhibit. The women ethnographers I have discussed couched the fieldwork experience in terms of its disjunctions and misunderstandings, long before it was fashionable. Giving these women the credit due them is one way experimental ethnography can incorporate a feminist critique of its assumptions. A second criticism of experimental ethnography’s assumption follows.
III. Women and Natives: Recalcitrant Subjects?
Focus on women’s lives has been made an epistemological problem by male ethnographers such as Edwin Ardener and more recently, Roger Keesing. Ardener attempted to explain men’s willingness to give cultural models to the anthropologist and women’s comparative silence, with the idea of ‘muted discourse.’ While Ardener has been attacked for biologism and essentialism (Mathieu), the very gutsy implication of his paper, that men and women in different cultures might have separate realities, has been ignored.
In Roger Keesing’s reassessment of Ardener’s theory, he attempts to analyze historical and structural reasons for his own previous failures to elicit detailed information about women from women. While Keesing’s sex was a large barrier so was the fact that he was commissioned by Kwaio men to record the kastom of their society. Women, not initially seeing their activities as a part of this endeavor, saw no point in talking to Keesing. Keesing concludes, ‘What women can and will say about themselves and their society can never…be taken as direct evidence of what they know and don’t know, or of women’s status'(127). Of course we might wonder whether ‘what men can and will say about themselves and their society is direct evidence of what they know.’ However, I choose to see Keesing’s report as a welcome rejoinder to feminist anthropologists who returned from fieldwork claiming they could not study gender because it was not ‘at issue’ in that society. Indeed the fact that it was not at issue, may have been the issue. Women may choose not to discuss gender relations with an outsider. I would argue that a feminist anthropology cannot assume the willingness of women to talk, and that one avenue open to it is to investigate when and why women do talk, to assess what structures are placed on their speech, what avenues of creativity they have appropriated, and what degrees of freedom they possess. Thus far, epistemological problems about women as subjects have been framed in terms of our anthropological models, (as with Ardener and Keesing) when much feminist theory outside the discipline takes the problematic of voicing as its starting point. Yet feminist theories of language have not informed ethnography. In fact I would argue that feminist anthropologists stand to learn not only from women’s speech, but from women’s silences as well. Like Adrienne Rich, we might learn how to plot these silences, very possibly strategies of resistance, in the text. She says:
Silence can be a plan
rigorously executed
the blueprint to a life
It is a presence
It has a history of form
Do not confuse it with any kind of absence. [4]
According to James Clifford, it is the inter-cultural dialogic production of texts that constitutes one of the key moments in experimental ethnography. He says, “With expanded communication and inter-cultural influence, people interpret others, and themselves, in a bewildering diversity of idioms–a global condition of what Bakhtin called ‘heteroglossia'” (139). Yet heteroglossia is not a ready-made solution. It assumes voices, most likely male ones; and does not confront problems of coming to voice. This is my second feminist critique of experimental ethnography’s assumptions.
Clifford’s solution to the dilemmas posed by a colonialist anthropology is to advocate production of co-authored, joint texts. As Rabinow points out, proponents of experimental ethnography only go so far in their critique of anthropological representation; they stop just short of calling themselves into question. Marcus and Cushman note that experiments with dispersed authority risk ‘giving up the (authority) game’ (44). On the contrary, I would argue it represents anthropology’s last authoritative hold on the other. I have to say I’m not surprised that no inclusion of work done in ethnic studies or so-call ‘indigenous anthropology’ is made in Marcus and Cushman’s canon-forming analysis, but I am dismayed. This is so despite the fact that these writings explicitly challenge the authority of representations … of themselves. Self-writing about like selves has thus far not been on the agenda of experimental ethnography. To accept native authority is to give up the game.
If we have learned anything about anthropology’s encounter with colonialism, the question is not really whether anthropologists can represent people better, but whether we can be accountable to people’s own struggles for self-representation and self-determination. When the ‘other’ drops out of anthropology, becomes subject, participant, and sole author, not ‘object,’ then, as Kevin Dwyer proposes, we will have established a hermeneutics of vulnerability and an anthropology which calls itself into question.’ Another way in which feminist theory can make a contribution to the study of colonialism is through a critique of the very concept of representation.
This is my point, alluded to at the outset of the paper, about experimental ethnography not pushing the challenge to ethnographic authority far enough. What would our new alternative canon of ethnography look like if it included books like John Langston Gwaltney’s Drylongso, portraits of Black America by a Black anthropologist, or Maxine Hong Kingston’s Woman Warrior, a literary interpretation of Chinese folklore and folklife. This is not a uniquely feminist criticism, but it can be expressed in feminist ways.
What would experimental ethnography’s concern with the constitution of subjectivities, the politics of identity, look like if it moved into a politics of identification? For a movement which claims interest in experimenting with how selves are constituted or represented, experimental ethnography has been strangely reluctant to embrace other forms of writing, like the novel, short story, diary or autobiography. At a time when literary critics read such texts as expressive culture, why can’t anthropologists? Novels by Zora Neale Hurston or Paula Gunn Allen, or short stories by Cherrie Moraga would never be considered anthropology in the old canon. But perhaps they can in the next one. For the conclusion of my critique of experimental ethnography, I would like to consider these authors in light of Susan Griffin’s words, “locating the self in the experience of oppression in order to liberate it.”
Zora Neale Hurston was trained by Franz Boas as an anthropologist, yet she is more often noted for her contributions to the Harlem Renaissance than for her contributions to anthropology. Hurston chose to record Black culture not only in traditional anthropological writings, but to imbed it in a storytelling tradition as well. Hurston’s quest to portray Black women as speaking subjects is the underlying thread of her book, Their Eyes Were Watching God, in which Janie, the central character, sets out to fight the bonds of silence her husband has placed over her:
Janie did what she had never done before, that is thrust herself into the conversation.
Sometimes God gits familiar wid us womenfolks too and talks His inside business. He told me how surprised he was ’bout y’all turning out so smart after him makin’ yuh different; and how surprised y’all is going to be if yuh ever find out yuh don’t know half as much as you think you do. It’s so easy to make yo’self out God Almighty when yuh ain’t got nothin’ tuh strain against but women and chickens. (116- 117)
In a remarkable first novel, The Woman Who Owned the Shadows, by Native American writer Paula Gunn Allen, myths of goddesses are intertwined with personal narrative; in the end the reader recognizes that these myths have served as metaphors for Allen’s self-awakening. Perhaps most compelling is the author’s struggle to articulate the separate reality of her culture through an alien dominant language:
She knew that everything moved and everything balanced, always, in her language, her alien crippled tongue, the English that was ever unbalanced, ever in pieces, she groped with her words and her thought to make whole what she could not say. She was obsessed by language, by words. She used the words she had lavishly, oblivious to their given meanings. She did not give them what was theirs, but took from them what was hers. Ever she moved her tongue, searching for a new way to mean in words what she meant in thought. For her thought was the Grandmother’s, was the people’s, even though her language was a stranger’s tongue. (70)
In Cherríe Moraga’s short story, ‘Pesadilla,’ the character’s sexuality and color is the filter through which reality is constructed.
There came the day when Cecilia began to think about color. Not the color of trees or painted billboards or the magnificent spreads of color laid down upon the hundreds of Victorians that lined the streets of her hometown city. She began to think about skin color. And the thought took hold of her and would not give; would not let loose. So that every person–man, woman, and child–had its particular grade of shade. And that fact meant all the difference in the world. Soon her body began to change with this way of seeing. She felt her skin, like a casing, a beige bag into which the guts of her like were poured, and inside it she swam through her day. Upstream. Always the shell of this skin, leading her around. So that nothing seemed fair to her anymore: the war, the rent, the prices, the weather. And it spoiled her time. Then one day color moved in with her. Or, at least, that was how she thought of it when the going was roughest between her and her love. (36)
Let me conclude here.
Notes
This is a working paper and follows some of the arguments developed in a Master’s thesis for Stanford University, ‘Reclaiming the Subjective in Feminist Anthropology’ (1984) which is being revised for publication elsewhere. This version of the paper only considers the development of experimental ethnography before the publication of the book Writing Culture (1986).
1. Jane Collier and Michelle Rosaldo, ‘Politics of Gender in Simple Societies,’ Sexual Meanings,S ed. Sherry Ortner and Harriet Whitehead (Cambridge University Press, 1981); Sherry Ortner, ‘Gender and Sexuality in Hierarchical Societies,’ in the same volume. Back to main text
2. Margaret Mead, Coming of Age in Samoa New York: Morrow, 1928); Ruth Landes, The Ojibwa Woman (New York: Norton, 1938); Phyllis Kaberry, Aboriginal Woman (New York: Humanities Press,1939); Audrey Richards, Chisungu (London: Tavistock, 1959; Marilyn Strathern, Women in Between; Female Roles in a Male World: Mount Hagen, New Guinea (London: Seminar Press, 1972). Back to main text
3. David Mayberry-Lewis, The Savage and the Innocent (Cleveland: World Publishing, 1965); Paul Rabinow, Reflections of Fieldwork in Morocco (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1977); Jean-Paul Dumont, The Headman and I (Austin: University of Texas Press,1978). Back to main text
4. Quoted by Joanne Feit Diehl, ‘Cartographies of Silence: Rich’s Common Language and the Woman Poet,’ Feminist Studies 6.3 (1980): 539. Back to main text
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