Cultural Anthropology Critique

Paper Summary:

This critical review comments on the themes, methodological challenges, suggestions and perspectives in the three articles: Nagar's "Exploring Methodological Borderlands through Oral Narratives", Miraftab's "Can you Belly Dance?" and Oyewumi's "Visualizing the Body: Western Theories and African Subjects". The writer maintains that these articles all fall within the tradition of feminist contributions to the re-evaluation of difficult challenges that arise within the fields of social anthropology and ethnography. Each adopts a very different approach, but all are thought-provoking, especially because none of the authors is a typical social anthropologist. The writer concludes that all three articles offer different insights and advice. However, the three are welcome voices, in that they smash the typical stereotype of white, Western, usually male cultural anthropologists.

From the Paper:

"This traditional situation is subverted by the women researchers in these three articles. For example, Nagar is a young, unmarried woman, from a lower-middle class Hindu family in India, who has affiliations with Western universities, as well as a white boyfriend in the USA. She is multilingual, well educated and a part of the elite in the sense of being globally mobile and funded to do research. In that sense, she is entirely different from the people she researches. On the other hand, when she researches the Asian community of Dar Es Salaam, she has sufficient common ground with some of them - e.g. being Asian, being Hindu, sharing languages, ability to adopt approved clothing styles, such as salwaar kameez, or a sari, depending on context - that she can frequently be accepted by these communities as an insider. This positions her vis-a-vis the communities she studies in an utterly different position than if she had been a white, American man, who quite obviously could not simply don a sari and blend into a social group of Asians in Dar es Salaam! This unusual situation on the one hand puts her in a much less powerful - for example, the American male would probably not be sexually propositioned by an interviewee. However, her entree into these communities must surely enable her to gain more understanding of the communities."

Sample of Sources Used:

• Miraftab, Faranak. (2004). Can you belly dance? Methodological questions in the era of transnational feminist research. Gender, Place and Culture, 11(4).
• Nagar, Richa. (1997). Exploring methodological borderlands through oral narratives. Thresholds in Feminist Geography: Difference, Methodology, Representation. Eds. John Paul Jones III, Heidi J. Nast and Susan M. Roberts. New York: Rowman and Littlefield Publishes, Ltd.
• Oyewumi, Oyeronke. (2005). Visualizing the body: Western theories and African subjects. African Gender Studies: A Reader. Ed. Oyeronke Oyewumi. New York: Macmillan.

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