Women Writing Culture

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