This teaching resource is meant to help orient students toward the kind of thinking, reading, and writing they will engage in an upper-level anthropology course, Women’s Lives. The class is designed to highlight the lives and writing of women anthropologists, many of whom are non-Western and are Black, Brown, or Indigenous. Students are encouraged to bring a critical lens to their own way of life as they are asked to consider questions like How can you empathize, relate to, and connect with the ethnographic accounts we read together? as they engage in an ongoing write-to-learn activity (see Goldsmith, et al. 2022). The course draws upon linguistic justice, establishing the validity of a multiplicity of dialects (of English and other world languages) spoken in the university classroom (Baker-Bell 2020). Students are encouraged to compare linguistic concepts across several languages in pursuit of deeper insights while exploring concepts of linguistic diversity, language loss, and linguistic identity as part of the larger phenomenon of cultural belonging within anthropology. As a sort of teaching philosophy, the content of this resource can be used in the course syllabus, discussions, and assignment sheets. The student writing assignment included asks students to consider writers’ purpose along with how the ideas presented fit in with students’ lives.
Sarah Page, Anthropology
An Orientation to Reading & Writing: Why Read about Women, Why Write about Them?
In this course, we will be reading a genre that is specific to anthropology: ethnographic writing. In particular, we will be reading a subgenre of ethnography since our focus is women and anthropological writings about them: feminist ethnography. Why should we read about women? Well, I argue, we should read about women to gain a breadth of understanding about wide-ranging experiences that show us the diversity of women’s lives across cultures. But we can also read for comprehension of the vast convergences that exist amongst women’s lived realities with regard to power structures, gender norms, access to personal development, autonomy, and agency. I encourage you, each time you read, to look for evidence of these divergences and convergences and to take notes on them.
Why does feminist anthropology exist? Well, feminist anthropology emerged in the late 1960s as greater numbers of women began to train in the discipline, only to realize that male anthropologists had largely left women out of anthropological inquiry, leaving shallow, incomplete, or outright hostile accounts of women in the anthropological record as a result. In the. 1970s, women anthropologists sought to change this. It is with them that we begin our journey: revisiting classic sites of study, documenting cultures in which women have power and influence, and eventually, to turn the anthropological lens on women in developed societies, too. Later, Black and Brown feminists would help expand the feminist frame to be more inclusive of this minoritized population and giving rise to Black Feminism/Womanism. Later, lesbians, bisexuals, gay men, transwomen and transmen, as well as nonbinary scholars helped expand the discipline once again, and Queer Theory was born. In each of these iterations, the anthropological study of women has been guided by critique and discourse from within in pursuit of more accurate representation of women ethnographically. For these reasons, I argue that an anthropology cognizant of gender struggle and cultural misrepresentation is a more scientific approach to anthropology.
What is the potential of feminist anthropology? I introduce you to feminist anthropology because its approach is intentionally expansive across other intersectional identities: race, sexuality, socioeconomic status, educational attainment, and gender identity. Given this course’s focus on empathy, I invite you to invest in an ethics of care and love (as inspired by Black feminist bell hooks – yes, her name is lowercase on purpose) as a part of your quest to acquire an anthropological lens. What is an ethics of care and love? This is how hooks defines it:
“To live our lives based on the principles of a love ethic (showing care, respect, knowledge, integrity, and the will to cooperate), we have to be courageous. Learning how to face our fears is one way we embrace love. Those of us who have already chosen to embrace a love ethic, allowing it to govern and inform how we think and act, knowing that when we let our light shine, we draw to us and are drawn to other bearers of light. We are not alone” (2000: 101).
When learning about the lives of women across time and space, it is incumbent upon us to use this approach to understand the dilemmas and danger encountered by women in the ethnographic accounts we read. We will undoubtedly read women’s stories which challenge us mentally, ethically, and emotionally. By digging into this ethos, we reach toward a more complete understanding of the complexity those women navigate.
Learning Environment
Many of the accounts we will read contain languages other than English. We will endeavor to pronounce the non-English text in the readings as accurately as possible, and to cultivate knowledge about unfamiliar ideas, concepts, and paradigms presented in these texts. In addition, we recognize that members of our learning space also may speak other versions of English, and other languages which are equally valid. This helps establish our classroom as a space where we are affirmed in our identities, where it is safe to ask questions using the language skills we can access at that time, and where we can move beyond ourselves to gain understanding of the lives of women who live in different times and locations than we do.
As we lean into an ethics of care and love, we also must acknowledge that like gender oppression that has become an overwhelmingly common reality for women all over the world (and you will gain a better idea about over this semester), there are other, interlocking forms of oppression with which we also must also contend, such as racism, ablism, and homophobia. I encourage you to look for ways in which intersectionality (see Kimberlé Crenshaw’s work, below) creates additional difficulty, vulnerability, or harm for the women we learn about. Because we will be encountering both systematic and individual manifestations of harm against women, we must use this ethics of care and love to identify, unpack, and process such harm together via reading logs and classroom discussions.
Writing Assignment
Your goal is to summarize each reading and engage with the author’s purpose for writing, to discover why your instructor has asked you to read this piece, as well as to continue to broaden your knowledge of gender and women’s lives cross-culturally. Write these journals as if you were explaining this week’s readings to a classmate in this class. You are permitted to use more informal language, and do not need to stress too much about writing mechanics, just focus on what is important in the readings. This journal is meant to help you consistently engage with the readings, take notes on the significance of the readings, and to ask meaningful questions about what you are learning and how this fits into your growing knowledge of gender and sexuality in cross-cultural perspective. NOTE: Only you and Dr. Page will be able to see these journals, so they are confidential.
1. Write a 3-sentence summary of each reading.
2. What is the author’s purpose for writing? Why do you think Dr. Page assigned it? What do you think the central message of this week’s readings is?
3. Did this reading challenge your understanding, your personal ethics, or in some other way? If so, how, and how did you move through this challenge?
4. After reading these pieces together, what questions do you still have?
Works Cited
Baker-Bell, April. 2020. Linguistic Justice: New York and London: Routlege.
Crenshaw, Kimberlé. 1991, Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and Violence against Women of Color. Stanford Law Review, Vol. 43, No. 6 (Jul., 1991), pp. 1241-1299
Goldsmith et al. “Expanding Reflective Writing Theory for Inclusive Practice.” Association for Writing Across the Curriculum workshop, April 6, 2022 https://www.bu.edu/teaching-writing/resources/reflective-writing-prompts/ Accessed May 30, 2024.