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Can There Be A Feminist Ethnography?

Lila Abu‐Lughod
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 7

Can There Be A Feminist

Ethnography?
By Lila Abu-Lughod

I begin this lecture with some trepidation because it is not the kind
of lecture I usually give. Anthropologists are accustomed to winning
over our audiences with stories from the field. In my own case, I have
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always had the benefit of being able to use what the Bedouin families
I lived with in Egypt gave me in the way of poignant poetry, funny songs,
outrageous folktales, moving stories of the trials of love and marriage,
and the tragedies of death and loss. Just as you'd be about to doze off,
losing the thread of my argument, I'd pull you back with one of these.
But it is more than that. I usually theorize through my material and
preserve that interaction and the priority of the ethnography in my
talks.
But in taking up the question of whether there can be a feminist
ethnography, I can't offer you these stories to keep you awake. I want
to consider some theoretical issues of which the book I'm writing is the
practice. This is the half, therefore, without the stories and the ethno-
graphy. The book will be full of narratives like those of an old matriarch
in the community I lived in who, sixty years after the events, vividly
recounts three episodes of resistance to marriage in her youth, episodes
in which she cried and refused to eat for twelve days, spent long hours
in front of a ravine praying that spirits would possess her so she could
become crazy, covered herself with black dye, ran away to her maternal
uncle's, and hurled bowls of food out of the tent. The book will include
stories about contraception and fertility, stories like those of a woman

1. This is the slightly modified text of a lecture presented to the Anthropology

Section of the New York Academy of Sciences on February 29, 1988. Lectures
are the peculiar sort of performance academics most often engage in; I thought
I'd leave it as one, flaws and all. Since delivering this lecture I have rethought
many of the issues. For a more developed discussion of what feminists and
"halfies" share, and what they reveal about anthropology, see my "Writing
Against Culture" in Interventions: Anthropology of the Present, edited by
Richard Fox (forthcoming). I am grateful to NEH for fellowship support that
enabled me to spend the 1987-88 year at the Institute for Advanced Study in
Princeton where I had time to work on this lecture, among other projects, and
was helped, by discussions in the Gender Seminar, to move beyond it. I also
want to thank Cathy Lutz for helpful comments, and Connie Sutton and Susan
Slyomovics for encouraging me to put this out in the world in a less fleeting
form.
 &/Abu-Lughod

whose eldest daughter proudly explains that her mother stopped having
children (after giving birth to 9!) because she, the daughter, crushed
under foot the seven white snailshells that had been filled with blood
from the umbilical chord of her mother's lastborn. This she did instead
of putting them in a jar and burying them so that her mother could get
pregnant again by bathing with the water in which she had soaked them.
It will include the songs sung amidst wild clapping and celebratory
gunshots to praise the virginity cloth displayed triumphantly at wed-
dings, the songs praising the girl's honor and that of her father, the
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groom and his family, and the assembled guests. In the book will be
Bedouin women's detailed post-mortems on every aspect of the wed-
dings—from who came, to how the food presentation was organized,
and how many dresses and how much gold the bride brought with her.
Stories which bring to life the complex transformations of people's lives
in the age of television, radio, school and the Islamic movement will
include Bedouin adolescent girls' discussions of the latest Egyptian
radio soap operas like "A Bride by Computer." This serial ends happily,
with our hero finally marrying the woman he loved, after having been
forced to try three inappropriate brides arranged through a computer
matchmaking service. As I sit with a few Bedouin girls who are listening
to the radio as they bake bread, the smoke in our eyes, the wind coming
off the desert, and the chickens noisily chasing each other around, they
fill me in on the episodes I've missed. When they've finished, they
sheepishly ask me, "What is a computer?"
This lecture can't include such stories. In taking up the question of
whether there can be feminist ethnography and what it might be, I will
have to talk instead about things like epistemology and representation,
anthropology, feminism, self and other. I will have to drop a lot of
names, not all of which will be familiar to all of you since they come
from different disciplines. The burden of staying awake will be on you.
I want to argue that we are at a critical juncture in the trajectories of
both feminism and anthropology that makes the development of a
feminist ethnography both more possible and more desirable. To make
that argument, I will first talk about the anthropological and feminist
critiques of objectivity—that attitude which might be invoked to de-
clare the impossibility of putting "feminist" and "ethnography" to-
gether. Then I'll discuss a crisis in anthropology and a crisis in feminism
that make this an opportune moment for the project of feminist eth-
nography. But first, a definition of terms. To ask whether there can be
a specifically feminist ethnography, we must know what we mean by
ethnography. And already things are complicated because ethnography
is an ambiguous term which refers both to the activity of doing anthro-
 Feminist Ethnography 19

pological research, and more commonly, to the written results of this

research, the texts or ethnographies which are now recognized as
constituting a distinctive semi-literary genre. I'll leave the definition of
feminism aside, both because we all have a rough idea of what it is and
because it is too contested a term to define without immediately
running into trouble.
To ask whether there could be a feminist ethnography is to ask what
difference feminism could make to the doing of anthropological re-
search and/or to the writing of accounts of the lives of other cultural
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groups. To consider those questions is to provoke a reconsideration of

the problem of "objectivity" since if objectivity is the ideal of anthro-
pological research and writing, then to argue for feminist ethnography
would be to argue for a biased, interested, partial, and thus flawed
project. The question of objectivity is a venerable one within the social
sciences and anthropology has its own take on it. I'll talk about that
first, and then go on to outline the breakthroughs feminist theorists
have made in thinking about "objectivity." For them, epistemology has
been the explicit focus of a tremendous amount of theorizing, and they
have tackled "objectivity" in its stronghold—science itself.

Reflexive and Textual Anthropology

Somehow, the prospect of feminist ethnography does not seem as

shocking as the idea of feminist political science or feminist economics.
Not that many people would raise an outcry. In part, this is because
implicit in anthropology, with its long tradition of cultural relativism
and its notion of many truths, is a critique of the philosphical basis of
the doctrine of objectivity. But in the last two decades, there has been
a more explicit questioning of the possibility of objectivity. This has
come not so much from the sociology of knowledge, which in other
fields has been a more potent subverter of the claims of objectivity of
knowledge, as from interpretive anthropology. Clifford Geertz,
through his metaphor of cultures as texts with its celebrated corollary
that anthropology is "not an experimental science in search of law but
an interpretive one in search of meaning"2 laid the groundwork for the
two most important developments associated with the now fashionable
critiques of objectivity in anthropology: the reflexive attention to the
process of fieldwork and the literary attention to the production of
written representations.

2. Clifford Geertz, "Thick Description: Toward an Interpretive Theory of

Culture," The Interpretation of Cultures, New York: Basic Books, 1973, p. 5.
 10 / Abu-Lughod

Under the rubric of reflexive anthropology are those works con-

cerned with the way the so-called "facts" we get in the field are
constructed through our personal interactions with particular individ-
uals in specific social and cultural contexts. Key names associated with
this work are Vincent Crapanzano, Jean Paul Dumont, Kevin Dwyer,
Paul Rabinow, and Paul Riesman, all of whom, although in different
ways, have paid particular attention to the fieldwork encounter as the
locus of the intersubjective production of "facts."3 If, as anthropolo-
gists, we know what we know through emotionally complicated and
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communicatively ambiguous social encounters in the field, then cer-

tainly objectivity is out of the question and anthropology is not to be
likened to science.
The second wave of critiques of objectivity come from a slightly
different angle. Again, with Geertz, there has been a growing realiza-
tion that one of the main things anthropologists actually do is write.
Looking at the literary conventions of ethnographic writing, some
anthropologists began to point out how realism and the transparent
language of objectivity were used to assert the authority of the narra-
tor/anthropologist in the classic ethnographies. Here the ways anthro-
pological descriptions are constructed are shown to be crucial and
linked to the relationship of distance and inequality between ethnogra-
phers and subjects.4
In the introduction to Writing Culture, Clifford spells out the ways in
which ethnographic writing and description might be shaped by factors
outside the awareness and control of the writer. He writes, "Ethno-
graphic writing is determined in at least six ways: (1) contextually (it
draws from and creates meaningful social milieux); (2) rhetorically (it
uses and is used by expressive conventions); (3) institutionally (one
writes within, and against, specific traditions, disciplines, audiences);

3. Vincent Crapanzano, "On the Writing of Ethnography," Dialectical Anthro-

pology, Vol. 2, 1977, pp. 69-73; Vincent Crapanzano, Tuhami: Portrait of a
Moroccan, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980; Jean Paul Dumont,
The Headman and I, Austin: University of Texas Press, 1978; Jean Paul
Dumont, "Prologue to Ethnography or Prolegomena to Anthropography,"
Ethos, Vol. 14, No. 4, 1986, pp. 344-367; Kevin Dwyer, Moroccan Dialogues,
Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1982; Paul Rabinow, Reflections
on Fieldwork in Morocco, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1977;
Riesman, Paul, Freedom in Fulani Social Life, Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1977.
4. James Clifford, "Introduction: Partial Truths," in Writing Culture, edited by
James Clifford and George Marcus, Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of
California Press, 1986, pp. 1-26; James Clifford, The Predicament of Culture,
 Feminist Ethnography /11

(4) generically (an ethnography is usually distinguishable from a novel

or a travel account); (5) politically (the authority to represent cultural
realities is unequally shared and at times contested); (6) historically (all
the above conventions and constraints are changing)." This is obviously
an argument that all ethnographies are situated and none are simply
objective representations of reality.5
Of these determinations which, as Clifford puts it, "govern the
inscription of coherent ethnographic fictions," very few have yet been
systematically explored .6 Most of the self-consciousness has been about
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literary conventions (2 and 4 above) and has led to some interesting

experimentation with form. One popular solution proposed is the
introduction of dialogical or polyvocal ethnography. This kind of eth-
nography, a decolonization on the level of the text, would make clear
that the voice of the narrator/anthropologist was only one among many,
and would allow the voices of the subjects to be heard. It seems to me
that in this critique of ethnographies as texts, epistemological issues—
issues about how we know—have become too quickly elided with issues
of how we represent, allowing a sort of sidestepping of the basic political
issue at the heart of most anthropology—the issue of Western knowers
and representers, and non-Western knowns and representeds. This is
an issue of self and other, subject and object, that I'll return to because
it is related to the issues of gender and feminist ethnography.

Feminist Theory and the "Objectivity" Question

For feminist theorists, on the other hand, the relationship among

gender, method, theory, and description has been the subject of work
ranging across disciplinary boundaries. In the first wave of feminist
scholarship, which continues today, the charge against much existing

Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1988; George Marcus and James
Clifford, "The Making of Ethnographic Texts: A Preliminary Report," Current
Anthropology, Vol. 26, No. 2, 1985, pp. 267-71; George Marcus and Dick
Cushman, "Ethnographies as Texts," Annual Review of Anthropology, Vol. 11,
1982, pp.25-69; Michael Taussig, Shamanism, Colonialism, and the Wild Man:
A Study in Terror and Healing, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987;
Dennis Tedlock, The Spoken Wordandthe Work of Interpretation, Philadelphia:
University of Pennsylvania Press, 1983; Stephen Tyler, "Post-Modern Ethnog-
raphy: From Document of the Occult to Occult Document," in Writing Culture,
edited by James Clifford and George Marcus, Berkeley and Los Angeles:
University of California Press, 1986, pp. 122-40.
5. Clifford, 1986, p.6.
6. Ibid.
 12/ Abu-Lughod

theory and knowledge was that it was not truly objective or objective
enough. Scholars pointed out the ways in which women had been
ignored in studies of society and cultural production, and how certain
questions had not been asked or had been asked, in such a way as to
overlook gender or women. The validity of scientific studies which
supported popular assumptions about sex-differences and the inferior-
ity of women began to be questioned. The accusation was that this was
"bad science." The documentation of the distortions produced by
androcentrism in most fields of study was quite significant, as was the
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corrective research undertaken.7 The criticism of existing scholarship

was that it was biased, and the goal of feminist scholarship was to
complete the record and to make the theories more objective, more
complete, and more universal through the inclusion of women's lives,
experiences, literature, art, and so forth. In this formulation, the ideal
of objectivity was still unquestioned, and its opposite was presumed to
be bias or partiality.8
The second wave of feminist critiques of objectivity began from a
different point. They involved a multi-faceted assault on "objectivity"
and the dichotomy between objective and subjective through which the
term gains its meaning. With this, feminists began to shift the debate
away from the traditional worries about "constraints on objectivity"
(which carry conventional scientific assumptions about objectivity as
an ideal) to a more radical questioning of the very status of the concept
of objectivity and its value.
The most rigorous and exciting of this thinking has come not from
the social sciences, where the notion of objectivity as an ideal or a
practicable possibility has always been controversial, but from the
philosophy or history of the natural sciences. This is the strong case
because the sciences are where the ideals of objectivity seem most

7. One can think of this critique as the epistemological counterpart to the

feminist movement's critique of social, political, and economic institutions.
8. This critique of androcentrism shaded off into something that began to bring
"objectivity" into question. It is best expressed by one of the most eloquent
radical feminists, Adrienne Rich, who declared, "Feminism means finally that
we renounce our obedience to the fathers and recognize that the world they
have described is not the whole world. Masculine ideologies are the creation
of masculine subjectivity; they are neither objective, nor value-free, nor inclu-
sively 'human.' Feminism implies that we recognize fully the inadequacy for us,
the distortion, of male-centered ideologies, and that we proceed to think, and
act out of that recognition." Adrienne Rich, "Conditions for Work: The
Common World of Women," On Lies, Secrets and Silence: Selected Prose
1966-1978, New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1979, p. 209.
 Feminist Ethnography 113

impregnable and the separation between the knowing subject and the
object of study most clearly defined. The feminist theorists have argued
that objectivity within science is both part of a dualism that is gendered
and is a mode of power. Some argue it should be abolished, some argue
it should be reformed.
Let me give you a sense of the issues. One of the intriguing observa-
tions Evelyn Fox Keller makes is that objectivity takes its meaning from
being paired with subjectivity and that this dualism corresponds, in our
culture, to the polarized dualism of gender.9 Objectivity is associated
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with masculinity, and a host of characteristics which are also considered

masculine in this culture—reason as opposed to emotion, mind versus
body, detachment and impersonality as opposed to personal interest
and involvement—an association that allows for the mutual reinforce-
ment of the prestige of science and the dominance of masculinity.10
Keller also suggests ways in which what she calls the ideology of
"objectivism" in science reproduces itself through a kind of self-selec-
tion. Science, she argues, attracts those who share its stereotyped
values or whose self-image would be compatible with these—mostly
men. Furthermore, making a more speculative psychodynamic argu-
ment, she proposes that it also attracts those whose early infantile
experiences make them take comfort in the promised detachment and
boundary clarity of the scientific enterprise—again, mostly men.
Her argument has many strands. For our purposes, however, all I
want to point out is how persuasive this cultural interpretation is. Just
think of two axes central to thinking about the relationship between
subject and object in science: the status of the knower and the known,
and their relationship. You get oppositions like subjective/objective;
biased/unbiased; personal/ impersonal; identified with/detached from;
partial/universal; particular/general; interested/value free; emo-
tional/rational. These are all associated with feminine/masculine. Then
you have the association of scientist/nature or even man/nature as the
subject/object relation with nature always associated with the feminine.
Keller would like to preserve a distinction between "objectivism,"
which she considers the ideology of science rather than a description of
scientific practice, and true "objectivity." More radical feminist critics

9. Evelyn Fox Keller, "Feminism and Science," Signs: Journal of Women in

Culture and Society, Vol. 7, No. 3, 1982, pp. 589-602; Evelyn Fox Keller,
Reflections on Gender and Science, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985.
10. For an elaboration of the dualisms in which the concept of emotion partakes
in Euro-American culture, see Catherine Lutz, Unnatural Emotions, Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1988.
 141Abu-Lughod

of "objectivity" from Catharine MacKinnon to Dorothy Smith would

not accept this distinction. MacKinnon is the most radical and contro-
versial of the feminist theorists who have considered how objectivity
functions within a society like our own, structured fundamentally in
terms of sexual inequality. She argues that objectivity is a strategy of
male power, not just a notion given cultural meaning through an
association with masculinity. She argues, "Feminism does not see its
view as subjective, partial, or undetermined but as a critique of the
purported generality, disinterestedness, and universality of prior ac-
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counts... Feminism not only challenges masculine partiality but ques-

tions the universality imperative itself. Aperspectivity is revealed as a
strategy of male hegemony."11 She believes that men, always dominant,
create the world from their point of view, particularly in objectifying
women, and then adopt an epistemological stance—objectivity—
which corresponds to the world they have created.
MacKinnon can often be faulted for the same type of totalizing of
which she accuses male theorists, and her universalist and ahistorical
argument about the roots of women's oppression in their sexual domi-
nation by men must be viewed with caution. Yet her intuition that
objectivity and dominance are linked finds more careful and detailed
support in the work of the sociologist Dorothy Smith, who argues
persuasively for the affinity and relatedness among objectivity, socio-
logical discourse, men, and the apparatuses of ruling. In limiting her
analysis to the domain of one discipline and one society, she is able to
ground her argument in specifics. She argues that the agenda and
domains of sociology are "grounded in the working worlds and relations
of men, whose experience and interests arise in the course of and in
relation to participation in the ruling apparatus of this society. The
accepted fields of sociology—organizational theory, political sociology,
the sociology of work, the sociology of mental illness, deviance, and
the like—have been defined from the perspective of the professional,
managerial, and administrative structures and in terms of their con-
cerns."12 She then notes that the ideal perspective of sociology—scien-
tific, objective, Archimedean—is related to sociologists' participation
in the apparatus of ruling. She writes, "The specific character of the
sociological mode of reflecting upon society, upon social relations,

11. Catharine MacKinnon, "Feminism, Marxism, Method, and the State: An

Agenda for Theory," Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, Vol. 7,
No. 3, 1982, pp. 515-44.
12. Dorothy Smith, The Everyday World as Problematic, Boston: Northeastern
University Press,1987, p. 62.
 Feminist Ethnography 115

upon people, in suspending the actual and particular position of the

knower, must be understood as itself located... It is a partial view, a
view which originates in a special kind of position in the society."13 This
is the view from above and the position of dominance, a position
occupied, at least in modern Western societies, primarily by men.
What MacKinnon adds is that this perspective is not just a reflection
of men's experiences as dominant, ruling, or managing, but an effective
tool of their dominance. She notes, "If the sexes are unequal, and
perspective participates in a situation, there is no ungendered reality
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or ungendered perspective. And they are connected. In this context,

objectivity—the nonsituated, universal standpoint, whether claimed or
aspired to—is a denial of the existence or potency of sex inequality that
tacitly participates in constructing reality from the dominant point of
view."14
Feminist scholars have had two types of responses to the critiques of
objectivity. Some have denounced objectivity and begun to explore the
possibility of feminist alternatives. Many of these have embraced the
values of the previously devalued side of the dualism, advocating
methods built on a different relationship between subject and object,
one of relationship rather than distance, of equality rather than domi-
nation, of attachment rather than detachment or disinterest. Others,
perhaps too aware that this might be just a turning on its head of the
hierarchy which still preserved the gender dualisms, in other words a
way of valorizing the conventionally feminine which does not do much
to challenge the dualism that allowed for the hierarchy in the first place,
argue instead for the importance of another implication of the critique.
They build on the aspect of the critiques which has to do with partiality
and argue that all knowledge is partial and from an embodied perspec-
tive. They want to reclaim and redefine objectivity to mean precisely
the situated view. There is no such thing as a study which is not situated,
they would argue. Women's point of view is in some sense privileged
because, like any subaltern view, it never could pretend that it wasn't a
view from somewhere.15

13. Ibid. pp. 74-5.

14. Catharine MacKinnon, "Feminism, Marxism, Method, and the State:.
Toward Feminist Jurisprudence," Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and
Society, Vol. 8, No. 4, 1983, p. 636.
15. See Donna Haraway, "Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in
Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective," Feminist Studies, Vol. 4, No.
3,1988, pp. 575-99.
 16 / Abu-Lughod

Where Have Feminist Anthropologists Been?

Given what I have just outlined about trends vis-a-vis objectivity in

anthropology and feminist theory, one would expect a convergence and
the production of a rich body of feminist ethnography. But this has not
happened. Where have the feminist anthropologists been? Caught, as
Marilyn Strathern has suggested, in a tension created by the two
different ways feminists and anthropologists are supposed to relate to
their subjects?16 They are certainly not found in Writing Culture, an
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absence Clifford confesses "cries out for comment."

Clifford's excuse for the exclusion of feminist anthropologists is that
none were involved in textual innovation.17 If we grant the dubious
distinction between textual innovation and transformations of content
and theory, we might concede that feminist anthropologists have con-
tributed little to the new wave of experimentation in form. But a
moment's reflection will give us clues about why. Without even asking
the basic questions about individuals, institutions, patrons, and tenure,
we can turn to the feminist project itself. I'll confine myself to two
issues: the relationship between form and content, and the intersection
of academics and politics in the value of professionalism. It could be
said that feminist anthropologists, who have been doing exciting work
since the mid-seventies, have been more concerned with representation
in its political (rather than literary) sense; their projects have been
dedicated to making sure that women's lives are represented in descrip-
tions of societies, and women's experiences and gender itself are theo-
rized in our accounts of how societies work. Feminist anthropologists,
like their counterparts in other disciplines, have sought to make women
and gender'politics visible and legitimate, even central, as areas of
inquiry.18 This project might have encouraged a conservatism of form;
we needed to persuade our colleagues that anthropology that takes

16. Marilyn Strathern, "An Awkward Relationship: The Case of Feminism

and Anthropology," Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, Vol. 12,
No. 2, 1987, pp. 276-92.
17. Clifford, 1986, p. 19.
18. This is a political project, as the variously phrased claims of feminist
anthropologists of all persuasions that their work is rooted in the women's
movement assert. See especially the early collections like Rayna Reiter, ed.,
Toward an Anthropology of Women, New York: Monthly Review Press, 1975;
Michelle Z. Rosaldo and Louise Lamphere, eds., Woman, Culture, and Soci-
ety, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1974.
 Feminist Ethnography 111

gender into account is not only good anthropology but better anthro-
pology.
The promise in all of this is that we can better understand the way
the world works if we are not male-biased, gender-blind, or caught up
in our own western assumptions about the relationship between nature
and culture, and especially our biological essentialisms. The problem
is the instability of the epistemological ground—where do we stand to
get this better view? The premise the textualists share is the post-mod-
ernist one that the projects of the sciences, human and natural, of
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mirroring a reality out there, is a particular and peculiar way of con-

ceiving and speaking about things. Some feminists, and most feminist
anthropologists shy away from this view, worried about how this might
undermine their political projects, within and outside of academia. The
fear that this means relativism brings with it the suspicion voiced by
feminist political theorist Nancy Hartsock: Why is it that just when
subject or marginalized peoples like blacks, the colonized and women
have begun to have and demand a voice, they are told by the white boys
that there can be no authoritative speaker or subject?19 This is an
important critique that needs to be considered, but we must also grant
that what might be being offered instead is an end to the myths of
objectivity and the always hierarchized dualisms that have fueled such
myths. The next step for feminist anthropologists is to think seriously
about these possibilities.
A second kind of politics at work on feminist anthropologists may
also have kept them from pursuing textual innovations. Rabinow's
skepticism of the metacritical enterprise and experimental ethnography
and his location of the constraints on ethnographic writing in academic
rather than colonial politics is refreshing.20 Experimenting, as he
bluntly points out, is greatly facilitated by tenure. What I would add is
that we need to consider the larger problem of women and profession-
alism to grasp why feminist anthropologists are not racing to experiment
with form. Contrary to Clifford's claim, women have produced "uncon-
ventional forms of writing" (Clifford, 1986, p. 21). He just ignored
them, neglecting a few professional anthropologists like Bowen (Laura
Bohannon), Briggs, and Cesara (Karla Poewe) who have experimented

19. Nancy Hartsock, "Rethinking Modernism: Minority vs. Majority Theo-

ries," Cultural Critique, Vol. 7, 1987, p. 196.
20. Paul Rabinow, "Representations are Social Facts: Modernity and Post-Mo-
dernity in Anthropology," in Writing Culture, edited by James Clifford and
George Marcus, Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press,
1986, pp. 234-61.
 18 / Abu-Lughod

with form and a whole alternative "woman's tradition" within ethno-

graphic writing.21- I am referring to the often excellent and popular
ethnographies written usually by the "untrained" wives of anthropolo-
gists, books like Fernea's Guests of the Sheik, Margery Wolf's The
House ofLim, and Marjorie Shostak's Nisa.22 They use different con-
ventions (often focusing on individuals—their statements, their every-
day activities and concerns, and their interpersonal relationships), are
more open about their positionality (locating themselves as partici-
pants using first person pronouns), less assertive of their authority or
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omniscience, and direct their works to slightly different and larger

audiences than the professional writers of standard ethnographies. In
the course of their accounts they touch on themes usually discussed in
anthropological accounts of the region, but as these emerge in the con-
text of people's lives. Often, their focus on the women's perspective
results in a radically different interpretation of the significance and
meaning of these social forms, for example sexual segregation and the
patrilineal family.
Why are these women ignored as textual innovators? A look at
Writing Culture itself may give a partial answer. The proponents of the
current experiments and critiques of ethnographic writing all break
with humdrum anthropology by borrowing from elite disciplines like
philosophy and literary studies. They do not break convention by
looking to more prosaic sources like ordinary experience or the terms
in which their anthropological subjects operate. They do not reject the
rhetoric of social science for ordinary language but for a rarified dis-
course so packed with jargon that one editorial reader was provoked to
compose a mocking jargon poem playing with their vocabulary of
tropes, thaumasmus, metonymy, pathopoeia, phenomenology,
ecphonesis, epistemology, deictics, and hypotyposis—a poem ironi-

21. Elenore S. Bowen, Return to Laughter, Garden City, New York: Anchor
Books, 1964 (1954); Jean Briggs, Never in Anger, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard
University Press, 1970; Manda Cesara, Reflections of a Woman Anthropologist:
No Hiding Place, London, New York: Academic Press, 1982. Two articles that
offer further insights into the question of feminist ethnography but came to my
attention after I had finished mine are Deborah Gordon, "Writing Culture,
Writing Feminism," and Kamala Visweswaran, "Defining Feminist Ethnogra-
phy," in Inscriptions, Nos. 3/4,1988, pp. 7-44.
22. Elizabeth W. Fernea, Guests of the Sheik: An Ethnography of an Iraqi
Village, Garden City, New York: Anchor Books, 1969 (1965); Marjorie
Shostak, Nisa: The Life and Words of a !Kung Woman, Cambridge, Massachu-
setts: Harvard University Press, 1981; and Margery Wolf, The House of Lint,
New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts, 1968.
 Feminist Ethnography 119

cally included as an invocation in the preface to the book.23 Here is a

hyper-professionalism that is more exclusive than that of ordinary
anthropology.
The problem with the alternative "woman's tradition" in ethno-
graphic writing is that, on the contrary, it is not "professional" and
having no prestige, might only reluctantly be claimed and explored by
feminist anthropologists uncertain of their standing. Feminist anthro-
pologists, in asserting their professionalism, may have had to differen-
tiate themselves from these women and to distance themselves even
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from the desire to communicate to a popular audience, an effort which,

as the case of Margaret Mead illustrates, undermines professional
stature. But perhaps here they should have called into question the
meaning of professionalism itself since implicit in the charges of un-
professionalism in the works of anthropologists' wives is a hierarchy
which we have already questioned with regard to objectivity. This is a
hierarchy in which the first term is associated with a valued masculinity
and the second a devalued femininity: professional/unprofessional,
objective/subjective, abstract/concrete, theoretical/descriptive, cita-
tional or related to the literature/based on personal observation.
Feminists from Virginia Woolf on have attacked professionalism
itself as a destructive exclusionary practice that works against women
and is associated with a mode of operating linked, as Dorothy Smith
puts it, to the apparatus of ruling and administration.24 These critiques,
however trenchant, have not shaken the power of the professions nor
altered that hierarchy; it makes sense that feminist anthropologists
might find the risks of these sorts of ethnographic experiments too high.
If feminist anthropologists have not pushed as hard as they might on
epistemological issues nor experimented much with form, it is perhaps
because they preferred to establish their credibility, gain acceptance,
and further their intellectual and political aims.
These are the reasons feminist anthropologists have not been as
active in these anthropological debates as they might. But they have not
been much of a presence in the feminist debates about "objectivity" or
other issues in feminist theory either. Again, we must ask why. For one
thing, anthropologists are often relegated by feminists to the position
of repositories of information about origins and possibilities. They are
asked whether women have always and everywhere been dominated,
whether there ever have been matriarchies, whether there are sexually

23. Clifford and Marcus, 1986, p. ix.

24. See Virginia Woolf, Three Guineas, New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich,
1966 (1938).
 20 lAbu-Lughod

egalitarian societies anywhere. We have been more or less willing to

oblige in providing this information, feeling uneasy that somehow they
were looking to us for the wrong things, since at the same time we were
getting women into the record, we were wondering how secure any
knowledge about others could be, given the ways our theories had
missed so much before. The best work in feminist anthropology has
recast theories of social life and categories of analysis. So we respond
cautiously that we need to reconsider what we mean by status and
equality, we need to reconsider the dichotomies by which we usually
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understand social life—public/private, symbolic/material, produc-

tive/reproductive, and so forth. This did not provide the clear answers
they wanted, so our audience became more bound by discipline; we
directed our work mostly to other anthropologists.25
A second reason anthropologists have not been much of a presence
in feminist theorizing is that they find it hard to speak about "Woman."
When feminist scholars in a variety of disciplines began to follow out
the implications of seeing as masculine such things as objectivity or
other qualities that had previously been considered universal and un-
marked, they found a rich space in which to explore the question of

25. It is probably safe to say that what has had the greatest appeal outside of
anthropological circles have been the two arguments that most closely approx-
imate arguments about "universals": Michelle Rosaldo's arguments about
locating the roots of sexual asymmetry in the domestic/public distinction, and
Sherry Ortner's argument about whether male:female::culture:nature? See
Michelle Rosaldo, "Woman, Culture, and Society: A Theoretical Overview,"
in Woman, Culture, and Society, edited by Michelle Z. Rosaldo and L.
Lamphere, op. cit.; Sherry Ortner, "Is Female to Male as Nature is to Culture?"
in Woman, Culture, and Society, edited by Michelle Z. Rosaldo and L.
Lamphere, op. cit.. Both are arguments that have generated controversy and
criticism within anthropology (see Michelle Rosaldo, "The Uses and Abuses
of Anthropology: Reflections on Feminism and Cross-cultural Understand-
ing," Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, Vol. 5, No. 3, 1980,
389-417; Carol MacCormack and Marilyn Strathern, eds., Nature, Culture and
Gender, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980) where the trend is
toward the preservation of cultural specificity in the analysis of gender. See also
Jane Collier and Sylvia Yanagisako, eds. Gender and Kinship, Stanford: Stan-
ford University Press, 1987. Perhaps the exception to this absence of feminist
anthropologists from the general debates in feminist theory is in the area of
political economy where feminist anthropologists have been at the forefront of
work on gender and the international division of labor. See June Nash and
Maria Patricia Fernandez-Kelly, eds., Women, Men and the International Divi-
sion of Labor, Albany: SUNY Press, 1983; Aihwa Ong, Spirits of Resistance
and Capitalist Discipline: Factory Women in Malaysia, New York: SUNY Press,
1987.
 Feminist Ethnography I 21

what a woman's or feminist alternative might be.26 Everywhere femi-

nists began asking: What would a woman's university be? A women's
political order? A woman's writing? A feminist sociology? A feminist
method?27 A gynocentric science? Here feminist anthropologists, as
anthropologists, could find little place for themselves with their insis-
tent question, Which woman? What kind of feminine? I can speak
about my experiences of reading feminist theory as a split person. The
American white middle-class woman in me gets exhilarated reading
Rich on compulsory heterosexuality, MacKinnon on consciousness-
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raising as feminist method, and Helene Cixous on female-sexed texts

in which "I-woman am going to blow up the Law... in language."28
That same part of me feels charmed and vindicated in my femininity
by Gilligan's notion of a morality based on care and connection rather
than rights and autonomy, Sara Ruddick's notions of maternal thinking,
or Hilary Rose's proposal for a superior science that combines hand,
heart and brain.29 The anthropologist in me, as professional recognizer
of cultural difference, as fieldworker who lived with Egyptian Bedouin

26. For an astute critique of the dangers of cultural feminism, see Alice Echols,
"The Taming of the Id: Feminist Sexual Politics 1968-83," in Pleasure and
Danger, edited by Carole Vance, Boston: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1984.
27. See, for example, Linda Alcoff, "Justifying Feminist Social Science,"
Hypatia, Vol. 2, No. 3, 1987, pp. 107-27; Sandra Harding, "The Method
Question," Hypatia, Vol. 2, No. 3,1987, pp. 19-35; Shulamit Reinharz, "Ex-
periential Analysis: A Contribution to Feminist Research," in Theories of
Women's Studies, edited by Gloria Bowles and Renate Duelli Klein, London
and Boston: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1983, pp. 162-91; Liz Stanley and Sue
Wise, Breaking Out: Feminist Consciousness and Feminist Research, London:
Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1983.
28. Helene Cixous, "The Laugh of the Medusa," translated by K. Cohen and
P. Cohen, in The Signs Reader, edited by Elizabeth Abel and Emily Abel,
Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983, p. 291; Adrienne Rich, "Compul-
sory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence," Signs: Journal of Women in
Culture and Society, Vol. 5, No. 4, 1980, pp. 631-60; Catharine MacKinnon,
op. cit.
29. Hilary Rose, "Hand, Brain and Heart: A Feminist Epistemology for the
Natural Sciences," Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, Vol. 9, No.
1,1983,73-90; Hilary Rose, "Women's Work: Women's Knowledge," in What
is Feminism?: A Re-Examination, edited by Juliet Mitchell and Ann Oakley,
New York: Pantheon Books, 1986, pp. 161-183; Sara Ruddick, "Maternal
Thinking," Feminist Studies, Vol. 6, No. 2,1980, pp. 342-67; Carol Gilligan, In
a Different Voice, Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1982. For an espe-
cially ethnocentric study inspired by Gilligan's work, see Mary Belenky, B.M.
Clinchy, N.R. Goldberger, and J.M. Tarule, Women's Ways of Knowing, New
York: Basic Books, 1986.
 22 / Abu-Lughod

women who don't seem terribly feminine by our standards, and as a

person who went into anthropology for what it could tell me about my
own personal experience of growing up between two worlds, that of my
American mother and of my Palestinian father, resists each bold claim
in these feminisms. In each woman's alternative I see the tell-tale
imprint of a specific cultural context and meaning of femininity, just as
in radical feminists' laundry lists of crimes against women—where
veiling, footbinding, clitoridectomy, and sati are equated with rape,
pornography and stiletto heels, I see an unacceptable failure to contex-
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tualize. Which women, which kind of feminine? Committed to cultural

difference and careful empiricism, feminist anthropologists could only
be negative.
And when I first began thinking about the question of a feminist
ethnography and what it might be, I turned for help to this literature
and played with many ideas that I eventually had to reject. I had a vision
of ethnography in a different voice and I wrote grant proposals in its
name. The voice was to be that of a woman ethnographer listening to
other women's voices. I looked to literary studies of women's writing
for confirmation of my vague desire to write in a non-dominating way,
to write about everyday experience, to write about women's views of
their society and their lives, to write about individuals bound up in
relationships with others, to look at the particular and avoid general-
ization, to write with care and attachment rather than distance, to
participate rather than remove myself.
I was confronted with two kinds of arguments about women's writing,
one Anglo-American, one French, which did not seem to agree on what
it was.30 Then came the problems within as women writers themselves
began to protest that they were not women writers. To argue that they
were indeed women writers, Elaine Showalter, one of the foremost
proponents of the "literature of their own" theory of women's writing,
reports a quip Gloria Steinem made at her 40th birthday party.31 When
someone tried to compliment her by saying she didn't look her age, she
retorted, "This is what 40 looks like." The message? Whatever women

30. See Toril Moi, Sexual/Textual Politics: Feminist Literary Theory, London
and New York: Methuen, 1985 for an outline of the two positions, if one biased
toward the French. For some important early statements from the Anglo-
American camp, see Annette Kolodny, "Dancing Through the Minefield:
Some Observations on the Theory, Practice, and Politics of a Feminist Literary
Criticism," Feminist Studies, Vol. 6, No. 1, 1980, pp. 1-25; and Elaine Showalter,
A Literature of Their Own, Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1977.
31. Elaine Showalter, "Women Who Write Are Women," New York Times
Book Review, December 16, 1984.
 Feminist Ethnography I 23

writers do is women's writing. The reason they deny being women

writers is that women's writing is devalued. It is the devaluation that we
need to fight. But does women's writing have any special characteris-
tics? The question is not answered.
Then we have the French feminists for whom Vecriture feminine is not
necessarily limited to women and not even achieved by most women
who merely mimic men, and is defined variously as writing from the
body, the fluids, the preconscious, the semiotic (that is, before the
symbolic of language and consciousness), or the repressed. For them
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"feminine writing" subverts male language, logic, and coherence, and

must be a kind of poetry. Appealing as this is, it both seems improbable
as a cross-cultural universal and not wise for an anthropologist to
attempt if she still wants to write ethnography—books about the lives
of other people, not poetry from her body.
It seems difficult to define the qualities of "ethnography in a different
voice" or a woman's or even feminist voice in ethnographic writing
without drawing on Western cultural stereotypes of femininity. This
crisis for ethnography parallels the most serious crisis within contem-
porary feminism, experienced in activist and academic circles—a crisis
often referred to as the crisis about difference. Put simply, what hap-
pened was that women began speaking up and saying to whatever
definition of womanhood was put forth by feminists, "That doesn't
include me and my experience. You can't speak for all women." Lesbian
feminists may have begun the objections about these totalizations, but
they were also clearly voiced by African-American feminists. The result
is that in just about every feminist article one picks up these days, there
appears a ritual incantation about black-and-Third-World-women-of-
color and how this statement or that refers only to white middle class
heterosexual women in modern Western capitalist society. Articles
appear on feminism and cultural imperialism, on the category of the
Third World Woman, on tokenism, on colonial discourse and so forth.32
The crisis, as Harding puts it, is that "Once 'woman' is deconstructed
into 'women' and 'gender' is recognized to have no fixed referents,
feminism itself dissolves as a theory that can reflect the voice of a

32. For example, see Maria Lugones and Elizabeth Spelman, "Have We Got a
Theory for You!: Feminist Theory, Cultural Imperialism and the Demand for
'The Woman's Voice'," Women's Studies International Forum Vol.6, No. 6, 1983,
pp. 573-81; Chandra Mohanty, "Under Western Eyes: Feminist Scholarship
and Colonial Discourses," Boundary 2, Vol. XII, No. 3/Vol. XIII, No. 1, 1983,
pp. 333-358; Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, "French Feminism in an Interna-
tional Frame," in In Other Worlds: Essays in Cultural Politics, New York and
London: Methuen, 1987, pp. 134-53.
 24 / Abu-Lughod

naturalized or essentialized speaker."33 It does not, she adds, dissolve

feminism as a political identity, but the most pressing issue for discus-
sion in feminist circles now is how to develop a politics of solidarity,
coalition, or affinity built on the recognition of difference. Some, like
Haraway, see this crisis in feminism as a positive development of the
new world order of modern post-industrial capitalism.34
I would argue that for feminist anthropologists, this juncture in the
trajectories of both feminism and anthropology presents an opportu-
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nity.

The Convergence in Feminist Ethnography

To understand the nature of this juncture though, we have to step

back and see that anthropology and feminism as academic practices are
two disciplines which arise out of and focus on the two fundamental and
political systems of difference on which the unequal world of modern
capitalism has historically depended: race and gender. Both are rooted
in and deal with the problem of historically constituted self/other
distinctions. But they come at the issue of self and other from different
places within the structure of difference. Anthropological discourse,
with its roots in the exploration and colonization of the rest of the world
by the West, is the discourse of the self. It defines itself primarily as the
study of the other, which means that its selfhood was not problematic.
Some would even argue that the Western civilized self was constituted
in part through this confrontation with and picturing of the savage or
primitive other.35 Even when anthropology is in crisis, as many would
argue it is today, and even when the focus of that crisis is precisely the
self/other problem, as it is in reflexive anthropology and the new
ethnography, the divide tends to remain unquestioned. What worries
ethnographers now is not the history of the creation of the distinction
between self and other, but how possibly to communicate across the
divide, how to dialogue with the other. That there is an "other," with
the corollary that there is a self which is unproblematically distinct from
it, is still assumed. To question that assumption would be to look at the

33. Sandra Harding, The Science Question in Feminism, Ithaca: Cornell Uni-
versity Press, 1986, p. 246.
34. Donna Haraway, "A Manifesto for Cyborgs: Science, Technology, and
Socialist Feminism in the 1980s," Socialist Review, Vol. 80, 1985, pp. 65-107.
35. Stanley Diamond, In Search of the Primitive, New Brunswick, N.J.: Dutton,
1974; Edward Said, Orientalism, New York: Pantheon Books, 1978.
 Feminist Ethnography 125

relationship between anthropology, colonialism, and racism in the

construction of the Western self.36
Feminist discourse, in a sense, begins from the opposite side in the
other great system of difference in our society: gender. As Simone de
Beauvoir pointed out so long ago, women have, at least in the modern
societies of the west, been the other to men's self. This has meant two
things. Feminists could never have any illusions about the innocence
with regard to power of a binary like self/other. They knew that this
system of difference was hierarchical and was about power. It is becom-
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ing increasingly recognized that perhaps the very system of difference

constitutes sexism and thus has to be understood and dismantled.
Second, although feminism was an attempt to turn those who had been
constituted as other into selves, that is, into subjects rather than ob-
jects, the crisis which followed so quickly on the heels of this attempt
(the crisis of multiple differences I just discussed), showed them both
the violence inherent in the business of creating selves and the necessity
of rethinking the question of identity. What feminists had to face was
that womanhood was only a partial identity. That means that we work
from fragmented selves and we must work together as different selves
who only partially intersect.
What implications does this sort of selfhood have for the anthropo-
logical project? I do not want to argue that because women know what
it is to be other that they can have some special empathy with those who
are other in another system of difference. I want to make a more
structural argument about the kind of dynamic the positioning of
feminist ethnographers sets up. Although any attempt to define a
woman's voice in ethnographic writing is highly problematic, one point
can be made about a feminist ethnography. If it were an ethnography
with women at the center written for women by women (even if the
women at the center were mostly women from other cultures and the
women it was written for were mostly Western women who wanted to
understand what gender means, how it works, and how it produces
women's situations—that still being the unequal structure of the world
and the structure of anthropology), something important would have
shifted. By working with the assumption of difference in sameness, of
a self that participates in multiple identifications, and an other that is
also partially the self, we might be moving beyond the impasse of the
fixed self/other or subject/object divide that so disturbs the new ethnog-

36. For a recent statement on anthropology and imperialism, see Edward Said,
"Representing the Colonized: Anthropology's Interlocutors," Critical Inquiry,
Vol. 15, No. 2, 1989, pp. 205-225.
 26 / Abu-Lughod

raphers. To speak more plainly and concretely, imagine the woman

fieldworker who does not deny that she is a woman and is attentive to
gender in her own treatment, her own actions, and in the interactions
of people in the community she is writing about. In coming to under-
stand their situation, she is also coming to understand her own through
a process of specifying the similarities and the differences. Most impor-
tant, she has a political interest in grasping the other's situation since
she, and often they, recognize a limited kinship and responsibility.37
What feminist ethnography can contribute to anthropology is an
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unsettling of the boundaries that have been central to its identity as a

discipline of the self studying other. These boundaries are being unset-
tled from another quarter too—the native quarter. I'm referring to the
rise of indigenous anthropologists and especially "halfies"—people
between cultures, the West of their upbringing, one parent, or training,
and the culture of their origin, their family's origin, their other parent's,
or some part of their identity, in which they do fieldwork.38 The practice
of these anthropologists who know that their selves are multiple also
break down boundaries of self and other, subject and object in produc-
tive ways. Their agony is not how to communicate across a divide but
how to theorize the experience that moving back and forth between the
many worlds they inhabit is a movement within one complex and
historically and politically determined world. When Appadurai argues
that there have never been such things as "natives," that is, people who,
unlike us Westerners, are incarcerated in modes of thought and partic-

37. The importance of the fact that the women we encounter in the field often
recognize us as women, however different, has not received much attention.
For evidence that the fieldworker's gender matters to women in the field, see
Roger Keesing, "Kwaio Women Speak: The Micropolitics of Autobiography
in a Solomon Island Society," American Anthropologist, Vol. 87, No. 1,1985,
pp. 27-39.
38. I borrowed this term from Kirin Narayan (personal communication).
Perhaps even the work of Americans on American culture may fit in here too,
although there is a sense that being the self studying the self sets up a different
dynamic than the other and studying the other. See my "Writing Against
Culture" op. cit., for a more developed discussion of the differences. For more
on women halfies, see Dorinne Kondo, "Dissolution and Reconstitution of
Self: Implications for Anthropological Epistemology," Cultural Anthropology,
Vol. 1, No. 1, 1986, pp. 74-88; Lila Abu-Lughod, "Fieldwork of a Dutiful
Daughter," in Studying Your Own Society: Arab Women in the Field, edited by
Soraya Altorki and Camillia El-Solh, Syracuse: Syracuse University Press,
1988; see also the other essays in that collection.
 Feminist Ethnography 127

ular places, he is trying to get at this.39 When Edward Said in Oriental-

ism says that the East is not a place, he's suggesting the same thing. The
(imaginative) setting up of the divide between East and West went hand
in hand with the domination of the newly defined other and was a way
of creating a separate self. Feminists know how negative that kind of
binary division has been for women. In both feminist and halfie ethnog-
raphy, the creation of a self through opposition to an other is blocked,
and therefore both the multiplicity of the self, and the multiple, over-
lapping, and interacting qualities of other cannot be ignored.
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Given this, it seems to me that both feminist and halfie ethnography

are practices that could shake up the paradigm of anthropology itself
by showing us that we are always part of what we study and we always
stand in definite relations to it. Built into anthropology was the assump-
tion that we stood outside: most of the new ethnography has not been
able to break with that myth. This may be the time for feminist anthro-
pologists to undermine it. The reflection on ethnographic writing itself
has created a space within anthropology for this kind of effort premised
on the situatedness and partiality of all knowledge and representation.
The crisis in feminism, on the other hand, has given us a wider audience
for cross-cultural work on gender and women. Feminist ethnographies,
ethnographies that try to bring to life what it means to be a woman in
other places and under different conditions, ethnographies that explore
what work, marriage, motherhood, sexuality, education, poetry, tele-
vision, poverty, or illness mean to other women, can offer feminists a
way of replacing their presumptions of a female experience with a
grounded sense of our commonalities and differences. It can also make
clear our relationships, since it is a pretense to think that we do not live
in one interconnected world, a world that brings us together in field-
work but also a world in which my privilege of being able to have written
this lecture on a computer and to answer the Bedouin girls' question
about the computer they heard about on a radio soap opera depends
on underpaid women in southeast Asia spending long hours in multi-
national electronics plants assembling these computers. So, to return
to the question I posed at the outset—Can there be a feminist ethnog-
raphy? It is time we began to explored the many things it might be.

Lila Abu-Lughod is an anthropologist who will join the faculty of Princeton

University in 1990. She is the author o/Veiled Sentiments: Honor and Poetry
in a Bedouin Society, University of California Press, 1986.

39. Arjun Appadurai, "Putting Hierarchy in its Place," Cultural Anthropology,

Vol. 3, 1988, pp. 36-49.