Feminist Fields: Ethnographic Insights

Rae Bridgman, Sally Cole and Heather Howard-Bobiwash (eds.), Peterborough: Broadview Press, 1999, 314 pages.Reviewer: Jasmin HabibFeminist Fields: Ethnographic Insights edited by Canadian anthropologists Rae Bridgman, Sally Cole and Heather Howard-Bobiwash and published by the independent Broadview Press presents essays about feminism, women in anthropology and feminist practices in the field. In the introduction, the editors write that they set out to attract young and old practitioners and to make the text “friendly to lay and undergraduate readers” by “encourag[ing] authors to enliven their texts with stories and first person narratives to bring tangled theoretical concepts to life” (p. 2).Though in many ways this is an uneven text, in most cases the writers accomplished their editors goals. The best essays offer exceptional insights and are accessible, reflexive, and most importantly for someone reading this text for its methodological contributions, (“ethnographic insights” being the subtitle of the book), they challenge feminists to rethink the study of gender in anthropological terms. The book covers a range of topics in 17 essays, including the role of women and feminism in academia; the problematic representation of women’s practices; the changing social and political economies and their effects on women; the frontiers of women’s organizing and political practices; and reflexive feminism in the “field.” This review will focus on the best of these essays, reflecting my interest in feminist research methodologies.Most impressive was “Home has Always been Hard for Me” by Susan Frolick who chooses to situate her own privileged mobility in order to gain insight into what can be the disorienting and demanding experience of homelessness and single-motherhood. Of one woman’s struggles, she writes how: She politicized home as an impossible space wherein she has had an ongoing struggle to find and make a place for herself and her son against barriers of poverty, abuse, homophobic and sexist discrimination, and her own inability to overcome the politics and weightiness of “home” work. (p. 91)Through her vulnerability as a lesbian, as well as through her poverty, Raine mediates her understanding of home–as a secure place of belonging–as a reality she has never been able to “afford,” symbolically or materially, nor likely will in the future (p 92).In her chapter on homelessnes, Rae Bridgman adds to her analysis a reflection on the vulnerabilities of the subjects of any ethnographic project, something feminist sociologists who were at the forefront of the development of feminist research methodologies wrote about in the early 1980s but it seems anthropologists still need to be reminded of.On the politics and problematics of representing–in anthropological and feminist terms–women’s practices, Parin A. Dossa’s chapter entitled “Narrating Embodied Lives: Muslim Women on the Coast of Kenya” begins with this provocative statement: My purpose is to suggest a frame that goes beyond the listening-telling paradigm of life narratives (Ong, 1995), that seek to address the “crisis of representation” in feminist/subalternist anthropology, but ultimately, remain confined to capturing “words” (p. 157)….[D]espite my painstaking efforts to listen to women’s stories, I was missing out on a critical element: images of women’s bodies at work, engaged in aesthetic and creative endeavours, on the move and in positions of repose. The telling and listening paradigm became inadequate…. (p. 158)Dossa “returns” to do field work in the village of Lamu in her “home” region, though as she writes, not as a “native”: “[a] ‘native’ stance would be pretentious as my advanced education in the West and my profession as an academic have created cultural and class differences that need to be taken into account” (p. 160). In the paper, she “show[s] that there is no simple equation between veiling/seclusion and women’s oppression and lack of opportunities.