Rachel Morgain - Feminism and Anthropology

Feminism and Anthropology
RACHEL MORGAIN
Australian National University, Australia
Beginning in the 1920s, many feminists in the United States gained prominence
within cultural anthropology—notably Elsie Crews Parsons, Margaret Mead, Ruth
Benedict, and Zora Neale Hurston. Many were excluded from faculty positions but
left a significant public and scholarly legacy as role models and through engaging
with feminist themes. Margaret Mead, in particular, popularized the view that gender
and sexual roles are culturally variable, influencing later movements for sexual
freedom and women’s liberation. Within British social anthropology, Phyllis Kaberry
pioneered a feminist approach from the 1930s, arguing that her predecessors had
widely underestimated women’s social influence.
From the 1970s, second-wave feminists began widely questioning the marginaliza-
tion of women’s lives and concerns from traditional ethnographies. Influential volumes
reevaluated older studies and analyzed the social situation of women cross-culturally
(Reiter 1975; Rosaldo and Lamphere 1974). Socialist, structuralist, and interpretive
feminists debated how best to theorize women’s status cross-culturally. Eleanor Burke
Leacock and Karen Sacks (later Brodkin) took inspiration from Friedrich Engels’s The
Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State to argue that societies not divided
by class were generally egalitarian with respect to gender, the subordination of women
being tied to the emergence of class stratification and private property. Others, includ-
ing several of the influential essays in Woman, Culture and Society, argued that women
are universally understood as symbolically inferior to men and sought to explain this
with reference to cross-cultural commonalities such as how women’s childbearing is
socially interpreted as rendering them closer to nature (Rosaldo and Lamphere 1974).
These debates hinged on whether status is measured in economic, reproductive,
political, interpersonal, legal, or symbolic terms. They dominated feminist anthropol-
ogy over subsequent years but ultimately came to be widely understood as irresolvable,
not only because of the complexity of measuring status, but because they rested on
concepts such as woman, man, power, exploitation, dominance, and oppression, which
were increasingly seen as impossible to define in any cross-culturally meaningful way.
By the late 1980s, Marilyn Strathern was suggesting that feminism and anthropology
were in an “awkward relationship,” in that (Western) feminism had emerged as an
oppositional striving of women for self-creation rooted in specifically Western modes
of personhood, whereas anthropology rested upon the possibility of humanist identi-
fication with others that is devoid of power imbalances (a position that feminists view
with skepticism). Focusing on Melanesia, Strathern (1988) argued that concepts used
by feminists, such as exploitation and dominance, rest on ethnocentric Western notions
of the person and cannot be meaningfully applied to Melanesian social relations.
The International Encyclopedia of Anthropology. Edited by Hilary Callan.
© 2018 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Published 2018 by John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
DOI: 10.1002/9781118924396.wbiea2126
2 F E MI NI SM A ND A NT HR OP OL OGY
Feminist approaches reliant upon a universalizing category of “woman” came under

increasing scrutiny, as did the widespread assumption that female ethnographers would
automatically be better positioned to relate with (and to speak for) women in their field
sites. Along with concerns about ethnocentrism, a growing postmodernist critique
of representation and the dominance of white, middle-class perspectives in Western
feminism led to a broader questioning of feminism in anthropology, particularly with
respect to ethnic and racial diversity, anticolonialism, decolonization, identity, and dif-
ference. The volume Women Writing Culture (Behar and Gordon 1995) was especially
significant, reframing anthropology through drawing on critical feminist engagements
with representation, power, and difference while seeking to foster a diversity of
voices. A growing critique also emerged of mainstream Western representation of
non-Western gender relations, including of Muslim women and female genital cutting.
Subsequent scholarship has seen a shift in focus from women’s roles and status to the
analysis of gender relations, including attention to systems of gender, masculinities, sex-
ual diversity, and, more recently, transgender and nonbinary gender expressions. Many
ethnographic studies have used frameworks of gender relations to engage with issues
of enduring feminist concern, such as gender violence, reproduction, warfare, health,
and rights. However, while many scholars in these areas view their work as feminist,
the relationships between feminism and anthropology are still debated, while other
related approaches such as queer theory and transgender theory are seen variously as
overlapping with, distinct from, or in conflict with feminist understandings.
SEE ALSO: Abortion; Anthropological Knowledge and Styles of Publication; Domestic

Mode of Production; Economy, Feminist Approaches to; Exploitation; Feminism,
First-, Second-, and Third-Wave; France, Anthropology in; Gay, Lesbian, and Queer
Sexuality; Gender; Gender and Christianity; Gender, Colonialism, and the Colonial
Gaze; Gender and Economics; Gender and Fieldwork; Gender and Human Rights; Gen-
der and Kinship; Gender and Language; Gender and Law; Gender, Marxist Theories of;
Gender, Nationalism, and Ethnicity; Gender, Structuralist Theories of; Heterosexuality,
Heteronormative; Home; International Development, Anthropology in; International
Union of Anthropological and Ethnological Sciences (IUAES); Language and Iden-
tity; Masculinities; Masculinities and Militarization; Materiality; Matriarchy; Mead,
Margaret (1901–78); New Age, Wicca, and Paganism; Poland, Anthropology in; Post-
colonial Theory and Feminism; Queer Theory; Religion and Emotion; Representation,
Politics of; Sacred Time; Sex/Gender Distinction; Sex Work; Sexual Conflict Theory;
Sexuality; Violence, Structural and Interpersonal; Weiner, Annette (1933–97)
REFERENCES AND FURTHER READING
Behar, Ruth, and Deborah A. Gordon, eds. 1995. Women Writing Culture. Berkeley: University
of California Press.
Leacock, Eleanor Burke. 1981. Myths of Male Dominance: Collected Articles on Women
Cross-Culturally. New York: Monthly Review Press.
Moore, Henrietta. 1988. Feminism and Anthropology. Cambridge: Polity.
Reiter, Rayna R., ed. 1975. Toward an Anthropology of Women. New York: Monthly Review Press.
F E MI NI SM A ND A NT HR OP OL OGY 3
Rosaldo, Michelle Zimbalist, and Louise Lamphere, eds. 1974. Woman, Culture and Society. Stan-
ford: Stanford University Press.
Strathern, Marilyn. 1988. The Gender of the Gift: Problems with Women and Problems with Society
in Melanesia. Berkeley: University of California Press.

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Feminism and Anthropology

Feminist approaches reliant upon a universalizing category of “woman” came under

SEE ALSO: Abortion; Anthropological Knowledge and Styles of Publication; Domestic

REFERENCES AND FURTHER READING

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