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Translated Woman by Ruth Behar  (5)  $24.00

Anthropology as Cultural Critique: An Experimental Moment in the Human Sciences by George E. Marcus  (1)  $10.88

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A Thrice-Told Tale: Feminism, Postmodernism, and Ethnographic Responsibility by Margery Wolf  (3)  $19.95

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Conceived partly in homage to the diversity of This Bridge Called Our Backs and partly in umbrage at the mostly male musings on anthropology in Writing Culture, this rewarding collection redefines anthropology through feminist and multicultural eyes. At its heart is the "poetics and politics" of ethnography, an uneasy marriage of art and science that attempts to distill the essence of another person's culture.

Editor Ruth Behar, who wrote in depth about her comadre Esmeralda (and more fleetingly of her own father's rage) in Translated Woman, contributes a wrenching piece on the betrayal implicit in marking down another person's life. "Foolish, foolish is the anthropologist who mixes up the field with her life," she mourns. Other essays consider such issues as how gender and racism play out in anthropology, how women in the field undermine themselves, and what women bring to the odd dance between narrator and observer. In a light essay that contrasts cultures, Lila Abu-Lighod, who researched the lives of Bedouin women, speaks of their pity for her childless state. While they assume she is "searching for children" unsuccessfully, she assumes their infertility remedies are wondrous fodder for field notes. --Francesca Coltrera

Product Description
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.

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First Sentence:
feminist anthropologists felt the inadequacy of the dichotomies between Subject and Object, Self and Other, the West and the Rest. Read the first page Key Phrases - Statistically Improbable Phrases (SIPs): (learn more)
lesbian ethnography, male cultural critics, women writing culture, anthropological canon, women anthropologists, women ethnographers, feminist ethnography, absolute singular, translated woman, textual experimentation, ethnographic form, letters from the field, modernist anthropology, experimental ethnography, female ethnographers, feminist anthropology, feminist anthropologists, feminist ethnographers, ethnographic authority, classroom ethnography, woman anthropologist, anthropological imagination, vodou priestess, marital abuse, male anthropologists Key Phrases - Capitalized Phrases (CAPs): (learn more)
New York, Mourning Dove, African American, United States, Margaret Mead, Ruth Benedict, Zora Neale Hurston, Elsie Clews Parsons, University of California Press, Chinese American, Asian American, Franz Boas, Number Our Days, Ruth Landes, Ella Deloria, Third World, James Clifford, Native American, Ruth Behar, Deborah Gordon, Barbara Myerhoff, Los Angeles, Alice Walker, American Anthropological Association, San Francisco New!
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