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Transforming Knowledges

Anthropology’s Encounters with Feminism(s)
  • Piya Chatterjee
Chapter
Part of the Innovations in Science Education and Technology book series (ISET, volume 15)

Abstract

Ellen Judd, an anthropologist who writes on women’s political organizing in China, is reponding to a question posed by the editors of a recent collection on feminist ethnographic research: “Where do you place your work as a feminist within contemporary anthropology, and what directions do you see the relationship between anthropology and feminism taking in the future?” (Howard-Bobiwash 1999: 282) Both the question and Judd’s ambivalent, though powerful, reponse gesture towards the often tense—and indeed ambivalent—relationship between anthropology, the study “of women” and gender, and feminist scholarship writ large. Whether compensatory and/or critical in its perspective, feminist scholarship has had a profound, if vexed, impact on the discipline’s framings of cultural difference. Simultaneously, when feminist claims knowledge are also critiqued through other prims of difference—national location, race/ethnicity and class—then the task of “transformation” is inextricably coupled: women, gender, and cultural difference are mutually constitutive.

Keywords

Knowledge Claim Feminist Scholarship Gender Analysis Feminist Analysis European Philosophy 
These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.
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