Gender and Genre in Ethnographic Writing 2021

PALGRAVE STUDIES IN
LITERARY ANTHROPOLOGY
Gender and Genre in

Ethnographic Writing
Edited by
Elisabeth Tauber · Dorothy L. Zinn
Palgrave Studies in Literary Anthropology
Series Editors
Deborah Reed-Danahay, Department of Anthropology, The State
University of New York at Buffalo, Buffalo, NY, USA
Helena Wulff, Department of Social Anthropology, Stockholm
University, Stockholm, Sweden
This series explores new ethnographic objects and emerging genres of
writing at the intersection of literary and anthropological studies. Books
in this series are grounded in ethnographic perspectives and the broader
cross-cultural lens that anthropology brings to the study of reading and
writing. The series explores the ethnography of fiction, ethnographic
fiction, narrative ethnography, creative nonfiction, memoir, autoethnog-
raphy, and the connections between travel literature and ethnographic
writing.
More information about this series at

http://www.palgrave.com/gp/series/15120
Elisabeth Tauber · Dorothy L. Zinn
Editors
Gender and Genre

in Ethnographic
Writing
Editors
Elisabeth Tauber Dorothy L. Zinn
Faculty of Education Faculty of Education
Free University of Bozen-Bolzano Free University of Bozen-Bolzano
Bressanone-Brixen, Bolzano, Italy Bressanone-Brixen, Bolzano, Italy
Palgrave Studies in Literary Anthropology

ISBN 978-3-030-71725-4 ISBN 978-3-030-71726-1 (eBook)
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-71726-1
© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer
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Series Editors’ Preface
Palgrave Studies in Literary Anthropology publishes explorations of new

ethnographic objects and emerging genres of writing at the intersection
of literary and anthropological studies. Books in this series are grounded
in ethnographic perspectives and the broader cross-cultural lens that
anthropology brings to the study of reading and writing. By introducing
work that applies an anthropological approach to literature, whether
drawing on ethnography or other materials in relation to anthropolog-
ical and literary theory, this series moves the conversation forward not
only in literary anthropology, but in general anthropology, literary studies,
cultural studies, sociology, ethnographic writing and creative writing. The
“literary turn” in anthropology and critical research on world literatures
share a comparable sensibility regarding global perspectives.
Fiction and autobiography have connections to ethnography that
underscore the idea of the author as ethnographer and the ethnogra-
pher as author. Literary works are frequently included in anthropolog-
ical research and writing, as well as in studies that do not focus specifi-
cally on literature. Anthropologists take an interest in fiction and memoir
set in their field locations, and produced by “native” writers, in order
to further their insights into the cultures and contexts they research.
Experimental genres in anthropology have benefitted from the style and
structure of fiction and autoethnography, as well as by other expressive
forms ranging from film and performance art to technology, especially the
internet and social media. There are renowned fiction writers who trained
v
vi SERIES EDITORS’ PREFACE
as anthropologists, but moved on to a literary career. Their anthropologi-

cally inspired work is a common sounding board in literary anthropology.
In the endeavour to foster writing skills in different genres, there are now
courses on ethnographic writing, anthropological writing genres, experi-
mental writing, and even creative writing taught by anthropologists. And
increasingly, literary and reading communities are attracting anthropolog-
ical attention, including an engagement with issues of how to reach a
wider audience.
Palgrave Studies in Literary Anthropology publishes scholarship on
the ethnography of fiction and other writing genres, the connections
between travel literature and ethnographic writing, and internet writing.
It also publishes creative work such as ethnographic fiction, narrative
ethnography, creative non-fiction, memoir and autoethnography. Books
in the series include monographs and edited collections, as well as shorter
works that appear as Palgrave Pivots. This series aims to reach a broad
audience among scholars, students and a general readership.
Deborah Reed-Danahay and Helena Wulff

Co-Editors, Palgrave Studies in Literary Anthropology
ADVISORY BOARD
Ruth Behar, University of Michigan
Don Brenneis, University of California, Santa Cruz
Regina Bendix, University of Göttingen
Mary Gallagher, University College Dublin
Kirin Narayan, Australian National University
Nigel Rapport, University of St Andrews
Ato Quayson, University of Toronto
Julia Watson, Ohio State University
To the memory of Helena Malinowska Wayne (1925–2018)
Acknowledgements
To state how this volume has relied on the contributions of many other
people is not a perfunctory gesture on our part: from the inception of the
symposium that led to its development all the way to the actual publica-
tion process, we are grateful for the cheerful, supportive and constructive
participation of many persons. First, we would like to thank the members
of the Scientific Committee of the Malinowski Forum for Ethnography
and Anthropology (MFEA) for their guidance in preparing the sympo-
sium we held in September 2019 in Bolzano: Andre Gingrich, Chandana
Mathur, Valeria Siniscalchi, Jaro Stacul and Marilyn Strathern. Special
acknowledgement goes to Marilyn Strathern, who has been as rigorous
and unflagging as ever throughout the entire process, from first written
words (the symposium abstract) to spoken words (as discussant at the
symposium), and back again to written words (her Afterword here). We
could not have gotten the event off the ground without the financial
support of the Faculty of Education at the Free University of Bozen-
Bolzano and the logistical assistance of Silvia Cunico, a student collab-
orator. The atmosphere in Bolzano was perfect for an intense, collegial
discussion among the writers you find in this volume. We should also
mention Almut Schneider, who gave us precious input in the early stages.
At the symposium’s conclusion, we had the chance to take the participants
to the Malinowski Villa in Oberbozen, thanks to the generous hospitality
of grandchildren Rebecca M. Stuart, Lucy Ulrich and Patrick Burke. We
are so honoured that they have shared their family legacy with us, from
ix
x ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
this home to their intangible memories. At Palgrave, we first of all thank

the Series Editors for receiving our proposal with interest, and the prod-
ding of an anonymous reviewer helped us clarify our vision for this book
and provided us with many useful suggestions. It was a pleasure working
with Mary Al-Sayad and Madison Allums, who followed the first phases
of the publication project, and as it came to fruition, we have appreci-
ated the efficient support of Elizabeth Graber, Liam McLean and Sham
Anand. Finally, we thank our other friends and colleagues for their interest
and support in our work, but most especially, we thank our families for
their patience and care as we ourselves have sought to balance our own
gendered positions and the work of writing for this book and editing it.
Matera and Viums

January 2021
Praise for Gender and Genre in
Ethnographic Writing
“This remarkable volume draws us into a gripping conversation regarding

the process by which lived experience is transmuted into ethnographic
writing, reminding us forcefully that matters of authorship and its rightful
acknowledgement remain to be settled. Delineating both how ethno-
graphic accounts are written from multiple positions of marginalisation
and how they are subsequently read, it vividly shows us a field that
continues to abound with disparities of power.”
—Chandana Mathur, Maynooth University, Ireland
“A timely and ambitious book that shows how issues of gender are
far from exhausted. The introduction is compelling, providing a wide-
ranging plot in which a novel examination of Malinowski’s collaborative
work with his wife Elsie Masson may lead to an exploration of dialogic
and collaborative ethnographic research and writing. Based on their varied
ethnographic experiences, the contributors provide thought-provoking
insights into how recent anthropology of gender has contributed to this
trend in ‘writing culture’.”
—Signe Howell, University of Oslo, Norway
xi
Contents
Prologue 1
Lucy Ulrich and Rebecca M. Stuart
The Graphy in Ethnography: Reconsidering the Gender
of and in the Genre 7
Elisabeth Tauber and Dorothy L. Zinn
Towards an Anthropological Appreciation of Silence
as an Ethnographic Key: Homely, Instrumental, Ethical 45
Nigel Rapport
Feminist Ethnography in a Women’s Shelter:
Self-Reflexivity, Participation and Activism in Ethnographic
Writing 71
Marina Della Rocca
Can There Be Feminist Anthropology in Turkey?:
Histories, Continuities, and (Dis)Connections of Gender
and Genre 99
Hande Birkalan-Gedik
Uncertainty, Failure and Reciprocal Ethnography 133
Paloma Gay y Blasco
Thin, Cruisy, Queer: Writing Through Affect 163
Omar Kasmani
xiii
xiv CONTENTS
Incorporated Genre and Gender: Elsie Masson, Her

Writings, and Her Contribution to Malinowski’s Career 189
Daniela Salvucci
Afterword 219
Marilyn Strathern
Index 231
Notes on Contributors
Hande Birkalan-Gedik (Ph.D., Indiana University) is Professor of folk-

lore, anthropology and gender studies and Former President of the
Anthropology Association, Turkey (2010–2014). Currently, she is leading
a DFG-project at the KAEE-Goethe University: ‘Traveling Theories’:
Die Geschichte der Anthropologie in der Türkei (1850–1950). Her
research deals with the anthropology of Europe/Turkey, the history of
anthropology and feminist anthropology/ethnography.
Marina Della Rocca (Ph.D., Free University of Bozen-Bolzano) is an
Anthropologist and a feminist activist who has worked as an antiviolence
operator supporting women who have suffered from domestic violence.
Her research focus is on the intersection between gender-based violence
and migration and on the advocacy of migrant women who are survivors
of domestic violence. She has conducted postdoctoral research on percep-
tions of gender-based violence and empowerment among migrant-origin
women.
Paloma Gay y Blasco is a Senior Lecturer in Social Anthropology at
the University of St Andrews and has published extensively on Romani
issues and collaborative anthropology. She has written three monographs
(Gypsies in Madrid: Sex, Gender and the Performance of Identity, 1997,
Berg; How to Read Ethnography, with Huon Wardle, second edition
2019, Routledge; Writing Friendship: a Reciprocal Ethnography, with
Liria Hernández, 2020, Palgrave).
xv
xvi NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS
Omar Kasmani is a post-doctoral Research Associate in social and

cultural anthropology at the Collaborative Research Center Affective Soci-
eties at Freie Universität, Berlin. His research is situated across the study
of religion, queer and affect theory and pursues ideas of postmigrant
be/longing, queer temporalities and public intimacy. His monograph on
queer affect and saintly bonds in Pakistan is forthcoming from Duke
University Press.
Nigel Rapport is Professor of Anthropological and Philosophical Studies
at the University of St Andrews, and Founding Director of the St Andrews
Centre for Cosmopolitan Studies. He has been elected Fellow of the
Royal Society of Edinburgh (FRSE), and of the Learned Society of Wales
(FLSW). His most recent book is Cosmopolitan Love and Individuality:
Ethical Engagement beyond Culture (Rowman and Littlefield, 2019).
Daniela Salvucci (Ph.D., University of Siena) is Sociocultural Anthro-
pologist. She is a Junior Lecturer at the Free University Bozen-Bolzano,
where she currently works on cultures of mountain people from a compar-
ative perspective and on the history of the Malinowski family in South
Tyrol. She has carried out ethnographic and archival research in Italy and
Argentina on kinship and family cultures, rituals and indigenous territories
in the Andean region, cultural heritage and the history of anthropology
in South Tyrol.
Marilyn Strathern is Emeritus Professor of Social Anthropology at
Cambridge. Her research career began with work on kinship and gender
relations, with a Melanesian emphasis, and she is most well known for
The gender of the gift (1988). She was subsequently involved in anthro-
pological approaches to assisted conception, intellectual property, audit
cultures, as well as interdisciplinarity. A recent book is Relations: an
anthropological account (2020).
Rebecca M. Stuart is a Freelance Translator, Editor and Writer living in
Berlin. She works primarily in the cultural sector—both high and low,
translating for numerous film festivals as well as historical museums.
Elisabeth Tauber is an Associate Professor for social anthropology at the
Free University of Bolzano. Working with semi-nomadic Sinti, she has
been publishing on gift-economies, gender, marriage, mnemonic prac-
tices and nomadism. More recently, she has been focusing on human-
non-human relations in high alpine contexts. With Paola Trevisan, she
NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS xvii
edited La Ricerca Folklorica 2019 Archive and Ethnography: The Case of

Europe’s Roma and Sinti (19th–21st century).
Lucy Ulrich lives in Basel and is an Editor and Translator, specialising
in financial markets and banking. She was a journalist for a number of
years and then worked at the Bank for International Settlements and the
International Monetary Fund.
Dorothy L. Zinn is Professor of Sociocultural Anthropology at the Free
University of Bozen-Bolzano. Her research has focused on the political
economy of Southern Italy, patronage-clientelism, migration and multi-
cultural society. She is co-founder of the Malinowski Forum for Ethnog-
raphy and Anthropology. Her monograph Raccomandazione: Clientelism
and Connections in Italy appeared in English in 2019 with Berghahn
Books.
Prologue
Lucy Ulrich and Rebecca M. Stuart
Talk delivered by at the 4th Biennial Symposium Anthropological Talks in

South Tyrol “Gender and Genre in Ethnographic Writing” September 2019
Family Chatter
Good morning. I’m Rebecca Stuart and my mother was Jozefa Mali-
nowska, Bronio’s oldest daughter.
And I’m Lucy Ulrich. My mother was Helena Malinowska, Bronio’s
youngest daughter.
RS
At this point, we would like to give credit to Lucy’s mother, Helena
Malinowska Wayne. We have garnered some of our information from a
very interesting talk she gave in the early 1980s to the Anthropological
L. Ulrich
Basel, Switzerland
e-mail: lucy.ulrich@gmx.net
R. M. Stuart (B)
Berlin, Germany
e-mail: ingress@rmstuart.com
© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature 1

Switzerland AG 2021
E. Tauber and D. L. Zinn (eds.), Gender and Genre in Ethnographic
Writing, Palgrave Studies in Literary Anthropology,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-71726-1_1
2 L. ULRICH AND R. M. STUART
Society of Oxford on the key women in Malinowski’s life, entitled ‘Bro-

nisław Malinowski: the influence of various women on his life and works’
(1984). It was later published in the society’s journal and subsequently
by the American Anthropological Association (1985).
We can only talk about Bronio’s relationship with women ‘according
to family legend’ since neither of us ever met our grandfather. But we
certainly heard a lot about him from our mothers. Because Lucy’s mother
was Bronio’s ‘favourite’ child, while my mother, Jozefa, was her mother,
Elsie’s, they had somewhat different perspectives on their father, to put it
mildly.
I believe that, while Helena revered her father, my mother, Jozefa, in
many ways resented him—feeling that he was not present enough after
our grandmother started to become ill, and then for virtually abandoning
her to take care of her two younger sisters after their mother died.
There is no doubt that the most formative influence on Malinowski’s
attitude towards women was his mother, Józefa Ł˛acka. She guided his
early education and, as Helena wrote: ‘She was a woman of outstanding
intellect, great determination, and utter devotion to her gifted son’
(Wayne 1985: 529f).
After Malinowski’s father died when Bronio was only 14, he and his
mother lived in various flats in Cracow, surviving on her widow’s pension.
As Helena goes on to write: ‘A constant problem was Bronio’s health.
(…) He had especially severe trouble with his eyes’ (ibid., 530).
For much of his schooling, ‘he was an external student, working at
home, having for much of the time to lie in a darkened room, his
eyes bandaged. His mother took him through his schoolwork in all his
subjects, including Greek and Latin, which she had to learn in order to
be his guide’ (ibid., 530).
Even my grandmother Elsie said of her husband’s relationship to his
mother: ‘[letter 17th August 1918] I am sure she was far, far more impor-
tant to you than most mothers are to sons because you thought and
worked together’ (Wayne 1995, Vol. I).
LU
We know very little about our grandfather’s love life when he was a
very young man. But as we grew older, our mothers let slip hints making
it clear that they did not believe chastity was a virtue he practiced with
any enthusiasm.
In her talk at Oxford, my mother goes into some detail about his rela-
tionship with a South African woman, Annie Brunton. They met while
PROLOGUE 3
Bronio was studying in Leipzig, and all but lived together for a while in
London. To observe the proprieties, Bronio kept rooms nearby in which
he worked and kept his belongings. Helena says, ‘One can say that it
was Annie Brunton who brought Malinowski bodily into the English-
speaking, English-reading world from the relative obscurity of the Polish
language. I needn’t stress what a difference that made to his entire career
and to the dissemination of his ideas. It gave him a world stage’ (Wayne
1985: 532). Despite Mrs. Brunton’s importance in Bronio’s life, my
mother never mentioned her to me.
It was in Australia, in 1915, that our grandfather met the next woman
of importance in his life: Nina Stirling, the beautiful daughter of Sir
Edward Stirling of Adelaide. To quote Helena’s paper, ‘…they fell in love
and he proposed, too hastily. I think it was his first engagement’ (Wayne
1985: 533). Note the use of ‘I think’.
And then, in 1916, Bronio met Elsie Masson, our grandmother. A
friendship grew as she helped him with his Trobriand field notes; it grew
into love and they began to discuss marriage. However, Elsie’s parents, Sir
David Orme Masson and Mary, Lady Masson, did not approve. A scandal
ensued when a family friend, Sir Baldwin Spencer, found out and made
public the fact that Bronio was engaged to Nina Stirling and had had
several further flirtations in Melbourne. Flirtation was the term Helena
used, but she told me (I suppose when she felt I was old enough to hear
this without having the vapours) that the relationships with those women
and with Elsie almost certainly involved sex.
Bronio does seem to have been a thoroughly inconstant lover. When
he proposed to Elsie, by letter, in 1918 he had still not broken off his
engagement with ‘poor’ Nina, as my mother always referred to her. It
was Nina who finally ended the engagement. Bronio and Elsie married in
Melbourne in 1919.
In August 1920, Bronio and Elsie’s oldest daughter, Jozefa, was born
in Scotland; in January 1922, Wanda followed, in France; then came my
mother, Helena in May of 1925, here in the South Tyrol. Although my
mother tried to include both her long-dead parents in her children’s lives,
it was Elsie who became a real person to us, despite having died twenty
years before my birth and more than 22 years before my brother’s.
Helena said in her Oxford talk that her father kept up a steady corre-
spondence with his daughters after their mother’s death. She also says
that he was uncertain whether they were really intellectual material and
felt that they should aim for practical, non-academic careers. For Rebec-
ca’s mother, Jozefa, for example, he envisaged social work in a hospital.
She became a successful journalist and editor.
But the only two stories I ever heard of Bronio interacting with one
of his children was when my mother told me that she had once said to
him, ‘Daddy, what an ass you are’ and that he had written about it rather
admiringly in one of his books. I was small enough to have been fascinated
that he was not angry about it and horrified that she had been so cheeky
to her father.
My mother’s other story was confirmed by my aunt Jozefa. When
Bronio was angry with one of his daughters, he would ask: ‘Do you know
how much you cost me?’. His somewhat penurious youth seems to have
left its mark.
Bronio was, to us, a photograph in a leather frame showing a tired-
looking man at a desk. We knew he had done important work and we
knew quite a few of his former Ph.D. students, who used to come to visit
us from time to time.
The visiting anthropologists would tell us how proud we should be of
having had such a man as a grandfather. But I did notice that those who
had also known my grandmother would then often add, with a light in
their eyes, how wonderful and interesting she had been.
As we grew older, and as my mother began going through her father’s
papers at the LSE and elsewhere, we learned more about Bronio as
Mummy rediscovered aspects of her father. She once brought home
something she had found in a box of papers at the LSE, feeling guilty
that she had stolen it, but certain that it was not important. It was an
unsmoked cigarette, squashed flat, that Bronio must have left among his
papers. She lit it to see if it still tasted of anything, which it didn’t, and
then remarked that she had forgotten how much her father had smoked.
I was in my early teens, and an avid anti-smoker, so Bronio fell a few
notches in my estimation.
We grew up hearing about his hypochondria, which extended to one
of his daughters—Wanda—who was slim even as a young child. Bronio
decided she was sickly, even though she was perfectly healthy. Mummy’s
sympathy with Wanda came through loud and clear, and her two young
children thought our grandfather had been pretty foolish not to notice
that Wanda was a perfectly healthy child. If I may allow myself a moment
of pop psychology, it may be no accident that photos of Bronio and
Wanda as babies show two strikingly similar infants.
PROLOGUE 5
RS
Although our grandfather certainly loved his wife very much and
suffered greatly because of her multiple sclerosis and early death at the
age of 45, he continued to have affairs. He may have been faithful to
her while she was still healthy, but he certainly was not once she fell ill.
Helena once said that while she was going through her father’s papers
she began to list all the women with whom he had affairs. She said she
had, so far, eighteen names on the list. And that was only the women for
whom she had, as she put it, name, rank and serial number.
Malinowski certainly had affairs with some of his students. We know
that, after Elsie died, he had an affair with Audrey Richards, whom he
wanted to marry. She turned him down, as she knew that she would never
be able to make a name for herself in anthropology if she became Mrs.
Malinowska. The three Malinowska girls all regretted her decision as they
were fond of Audrey. I remember … a generation later … visiting her in
England as a young teenager and feeling an immediate bond of affection.
LU
Audrey remained an important figure in our lives acting as a kind of
grandmother to my brother and me. We miss her to this day.
RS
To come to the last key female figure in Bronio Malinowski’s life—
Valetta Swann, known universally in the family as ‘the wicked stepmother’,
as in a fairy tale.
Malinowski married Valetta in 1940. They had met in 1933 … Elsie
was still alive, but gravely ill … and had begun an affair. The Malinowski
girls disliked Valetta; Helena used to tell her children that while Elsie was
dying of pneumonia and multiple sclerosis in their rented house in the
village of Natters, near Innsbruck, Valetta was lurking in the neighbouring
village, waiting for Elsie to die. The feelings of a desperate and angry
ten-year-old ring through those words fairly clearly.
Bronio was so aware of the fact that his daughters loathed Valetta that
he did not tell them of the marriage until after the fact. The daughters’
loathing was only intensified by Valetta’s behaviour after Bronio’s death.
As he died intestate and as his daughters were still very young … Jozefa
was not quite 22 years old, Wanda was 20, and Helena one day shy of her
17th birthday, Valetta took possession of a number of things that should,
at the least, have been shared with the three.
My mother Jozefa’s mouth used to tighten whenever Valetta’s name
came up. And she told me, as Helena did her children, that Valetta took,
and sold, our Polish great-grandmother’s silver. According to my Aunt

Helena, as soon as the war ended, Valetta sent her brother to collect it
from the bank vault in London where Bronio had stored it before he left
for the US. It would have been nice to have inherited some of that silver,
just as a way of marking our Polish ancestry.
Helena and Jozefa were also enraged many years later by the publi-
cation in 1967 of ‘A Diary in the Strict Sense of the Term’, saying that
Valetta’s very selective abridgement of Bronio’s diaries, and her approval
of some very dubious translation, had clearly been aimed at boosting sales
by making the book sensationalist.
LU
When I asked my mother once why Bronio had married Valetta if she
was so nasty, her answer was that she was very attractive to men, i.e. sexy,
although she was not pretty. It was said in a tone of contempt.
RS
We can’t be certain of Malinowski’s feelings towards all these women.
Expressing emotions was not something men of his era and class were
trained for. Those feelings towards women undoubtedly covered a wide
spectrum, from filial love and respect towards his mother to a somewhat
distant love towards his three children, and everything in between.
But we do know … by looking at and reading about the women them-
selves … that he was attracted not to the kind of women whom men of
his era and class were expected to marry—educated and skilled in certain
arts, but nonetheless mostly accepting of their status as secondary to their
husbands. Instead, Bronio chose women of independence and spirit, who
were in many cases willing to defy the dictates of society and tradition.
References
Wayne, Helena. 1984. “Bronisław Malinowski: The Influence of Various Women
on His Life and Works.” Journal of the Anthropological Society of Oxford 15
(3): 189–203.
———. 1985. “Bronislaw Malinowski: The Influence of Various Women on His
Life and Works.”American Ethnologist 12 (3): 529–40.
———. 1995. The Story of a Marriage: The Letters of Bronislaw Malinowski and
Elsie Masson 1916–1920. Vol. I. London: Routledge.
The Graphy in Ethnography: Reconsidering
the Gender of and in the Genre
Elisabeth Tauber and Dorothy L. Zinn
On Sunday 24 April 1927 Elsie Masson wrote to Bronislaw Malinowski

from Gries, a district of Bozen/Bolzano in Italy:
Dearest One,
I have just been doing the copying and have got as far as I can – into the
middle of the song including the part about rejuvenation – and now I am
stopped for want of paper. I had to use backs for the last pages but they are
good backs and I know you don’t mind aesthetics if it is otherwise all right.
In making my résumé about rejuvenation I did not include the whole myth
about how mankind lost the power because I thought it was leading too far
away from the sex subject.
By the way, a thought occurred to me à propos of old age – I don’t think
that anywhere in your mss.[manuscripts] have you mentioned ‘the return of
age’ in women. Perhaps you have no special texts about it, perhaps the natives
E. Tauber (B)
Faculty of Education, Free University of Bolzano, Bolzano, Italy
e-mail: elisabeth.tauber@unibz.it
D. L. Zinn
Faculty of Education, Free University of Bozen-Bolzano, Bolzano, Italy
e-mail: dorothy.zinn@unibz.it

Switzerland AG 2021
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-71726-1_2
8 E. TAUBER AND D. L. ZINN
have not got any very definite attitude about the matter, but you should, I
think mention it …
Monday 25 April. … I have finished the ms. and shall post it tomorrow. I
feel very nervous till I get your judgment on it. (Wayne 1995, 91)
He responded enthusiastically to Elsie, finding her observations ‘excellent’

(ibid.), even if he ignored in his response her clear, friendly invitation to
look at the issue from a female perspective, a perspective that was taken up
by Annette Weiner fifty years later (Weiner 1976). This omission points
to the central question of this volume: in what voice (inside or outside
the academy)‚ can female as well as non-white male, can cultural sense-
making processes be described? Which authors are read, what authority is
ascribed to which text? As ethnographers, we know that one of the great
challenges after returning from fieldwork is to write down the experiences,
relational networks and meanings from other worlds. How do we write
which ideas and what do we write? This is as much a question of language
creation and style as it is of the ideas we use to describe other ideas. In
the words of Marilyn Strathern, ‘it matters what ideas one uses to think
other ideas (with)’ (1992, 10).
This book is inspired by the (working) relationship between Elsie
Rosaline Masson and Bronislaw Malinowski, whose intimacy, love and
mutual fascination and admiration lasted until Elsie’s death in 1935. Their
correspondence (Wayne Vol I and II, 1995) bears witness to this. Further-
more, the Malinowski grandchildren Lucy Ulrich and Rebecca M. Stuart
tell us in the prologue that she was described by their grandfather’s former
students as an immensely inspiring woman.
For us, the inspiration of Elsie Masson and her exchange with
Bronislaw Malinowski is, in a sense, tied to the place of our academic
activity. At the time she exchanged letters with Bronislaw, from 1922
to 1935, Elsie mainly lived in South Tyrol. The impetus behind the
Malinowski Forum for Ethnography and Anthropology (MFEA) harks
back to this biographical and local peculiarity in the couple’s lives (cf.
Salvucci et al. 2019). For the Malinowski Forum, Elsie is a central
figure whose role in Malinowski’s work and our discipline is given special
consideration. The present volume is the result of discussions from the
biennial symposium ‘Anthropological Talks in South Tyrol’, under the
aegis of the Malinowski Forum since 2017, which in autumn 2019
focused on ‘Gender and Genre in Ethnographic Writing’. This theme
stemmed from a conversation during the 2017 symposium that discussed
THE GRAPHY IN ETHNOGRAPHY … 9
Malinowski’s ethnographic legacy (Tauber and Zinn 2018). The subse-

quent symposium of 2019 was inspired by Frank Heidemann’s suggestion
to consider not only ethnographic fieldwork but also the question of
graphy, i.e. the process of ethnographic writing1 . The issue of writing
as a research activity also chimes with both the fragmented and fully
worked texts of Elsie Masson’s reflections on writing. We should also
note her campaigning journalism before her marriage (Masson 1915),
which Daniela Salvucci is elaborating in her contribution, her political
engagement in both Australia and, later, South Tyrol, where she metic-
ulously observed the colonial domination of the predominantly German
and Ladin-speaking region by Italian facism, not to mention the impor-
tant role she played in her partner’s writing. At the same time, through
her biography, we are reminded of the era of the rise of political femi-
nism in Australia, one of the first countries to grant women the right
to vote in 1908 and access to medical schools for the first time in 1889
(Melbourne University, Young 2004, 450–451). In a sense, Elsie Masson
acts as a guiding figure in our book: a talented and dedicated woman
who, without holding an academic position herself, through her own early
publications and as an editor and co-thinker helped shape her husband’s
work, as we read in Salvucci’s contribution. However, we do not know
if Elsie Masson would ever have wanted to be seen in this light. The
chapter by Salvucci sheds light on the figure of Elsie Masson and her
relationship to ethnographic writing, both in her accounts of Australia’s
Northern Territories and in her complex role in Malinowski’s production
of ethnographic texts. As Masson corresponded with Malinowski during
his field stay in the Trobriands, she referred to his future ethnography as
a ‘descriptive book’—a characterization that would come over the next
two decades to be hurled disparagingly at some of the women we will
consider below. In addition to emphasizing Masson’s own combination
of keen observation, engagement and well-crafted writing, Salvucci notes
that the Masson-Malinowski couple shared literary sensibilities, and in
fact, Salvucci highlights the prominent role Masson played in the writing
of Malinowski’s Argonauts and perhaps even some of his other texts. The
ethnographic genre was, evidently, more fluid at the time. What happened
to make Malinowski move in the direction of insisting upon ethnography
as a scientific endeavour, and how did this clash with his style? Reading in
Ulrich and Stuart’s Prologue about Malinowski’s mother and the other
strong women in his life, one might be tempted to read his asseveration
of ethnography’s scientific quality as an ambivalent exorcism of the femi-

nine in his writing, a question we leave open. Whatever the case may
be, by placing attention on Masson’s work in her own right, Salvucci
responds to Schrock’s call for ‘challenging the historical and ongoing
lack of recognition for important contributions of feminist ethnogra-
phers’ (Schrock 2013, 15), adding yet another woman to the genealogy
of under-recognized foremothers.
Elsie Masson was by no means the sole example of a male anthropolo-
gist’s wife living in her husband’s shadow (Tedlock 1995). Her role as the
partner of one of the founders of modern social anthropology reflects a
socio-political and academic tension that we are convinced we still have to
confront, albeit under new conditions. While certain structural inequali-
ties in terms of academic careers between white women and men seem to
have been overcome (and even this is opinable), our main focus in this
book is the question of the stylistic possibilities of ethnographic writing
in the context of gender, academic power, the authority of ethnographic
voices and anthropological theorizing. Somehow there is a paradox here;
Masson influenced Malinowski in terms of content and style, thereby
helping to establish a well-known academic style in our discipline. At the
same time, it raises the question: Who is it that emerges as ‘authorized’
when a wife is writing or contributing to her ethnographer husband’s
work? That is, who is bestowed with the status of an author, to have
her work recognized? But we also mean ‘authorized’ in another sense,
the more perfunctory one of being allowed, as historically, many women,
indigenous and people of colour in anthropology have not been able to
place their works alongside those that are regarded as canonically ethno-
graphic. At times, they either pursued such writing covertly, in parallel
with their ‘hegemonically academic’ work; at other times, they were kept
on the margins of an academic system that would have enabled them to
write in the relative comfort of guaranteed material necessities.
In the prologue by Ulrich and Stuart, we read that Audrey Richards
turned down Malinowski’s proposal of marriage, knowing that as Mrs.
Malinowska, she would no longer have the chance to be taken seriously
in academia. One hundred years after Malinowski, the opportunities for
white women have changed radically. But questions of style, rhetoric,
gender and authority remain relevant today: many white female anthro-
pologists, women of colour, men who do not live up to the heteronor-
mative white-male image, as well as female ethnographic research partners
have been at the foreground of looking for different forms of expression
that are capable of thinking and writing the other. In doing so, they break
through established academic writing conventions (see Paloma Gay y
Blasco and Omar Kasmani in this volume) to bring in culture and gender-
variant voices. Do these authors still risk being discredited, as Anne Tsing
needed to assert in 1993?
Two ways of being discredited have loomed particularly large: First, these
scholars can be classed with the semi-professional wives of male scholars
and administrators who write popular accounts of their travels; second,
they can be classed as radical ‘sisters’ who ignore the tenets of scholarship
in formulating a political creed. (Tsing 1993, 224)
Yet it is not only a matter of the women that Tsing describes here: the
operations of ‘the matrix of domination’ (Hill Collins 2000) have worked
equally to exclude men of colour and non-heteronormative men, whose
own gender positionalities have been inscribed within complex hierarchies
of race, class, ableism and sexual orientation. For this reason, drawing
on an awareness fostered through scholarship by women of colour and
concepts of intersectionality, we would like to underline that ‘gender’ in
our discussion is not limited to the category ‘female’, especially that of
white women.
The watershed moment in anthropology for a meditation on our
writing practices was, of course, the publication of Writing Culture (Clif-
ford and Marcus 1986). This was a work that brought to the fore a
focus on genre and craft in ethnographic writing, but it riled the femi-
nists of the time in its complete lack of attention to issues of gender and
feminist precursors in experimentation. Feminists were particularly frus-
trated over the outpouring of white-male angst about writing, making
experimentation and reflexivity the new trend, whereas women, people of
colour and some white men had long been held back when such genre
bending was belittled. In A Thrice-Told Tale (1992), Margery Wolf makes
it clear that she does not share the postmodern critique of the form of
ethnographic writing. By comparing her own three narratives of an event
during her fieldwork—short story, field notes and essay—she criticizes the
focus on form as exclusionary and unethical, accessible only to ‘first-world
academics with literary inclinations’ (Wolf 1992, 138). For Wolf, experi-
mentation with literary forms only makes sense as long as it can be made
accessible to a broad readership, but never for the sake of art itself. We
would add that ethnographic writing after returning from fieldwork is
always and for everyone experimentation and a search for the right form
according to the specific context.
The critiques of Writing Culture emerging in feminist anthropolog-
ical circles culminated in Behar and Gordon’s landmark volume, Women
Writing Culture (1995). A number of anthropologists, both women and
men, practiced a style of writing and reflection that deviated from the
established norm long before the reflexive turn of the 1980s. Yet the inte-
gration of stylistic deviations into a new canon takes time and cannot be
explained without reference to academic social, political, economic and
historical contexts. That a subjective, positioned attitude and content as
well as style preceded the reflexive turn is therefore nothing unusual. It
was there, but no one in the academic mainstream noticed or took it
up. Is this not similar to the dynamics of the emergence of a scientific
fact so vividly described by Ludwik Fleck (1975 [1935])? With this in
mind, we may again cite the work of Margery Wolf, who used literary
elements to describe the ‘private’ life of a Taiwanese family she lived
with (1967). Focusing on women, she examined kinship and family rela-
tionships, challenging the dichotomy between private and public and
anticipating postmodern reflection at length. In an interview with Lisa
Rofel, she recalls her experience with the review of her second major
work, Women and the Family in Rural Taiwan (1972):
The first review of Women and the Family was pretty mean. I was hurt. It
made me realize that I was fishing in the big guys’ ponds. I either had to
quit writing anthropology or to quit reading reviews. This may sound silly,
but it took me a long time to take myself seriously as a scholar. (Rofel and
Wolf 2003, 597)
We note how, well before Wolf, many such ethnographic works from
the 1920s and 1930s disappeared deep within the closed stacks of major
libraries, only to resurface in their online catalogues. It is to the credit of
a scholar operating in the field of rhetorical studies, Risa Applegarth‚ that
these early works have resurfaced to draw attention to how they defied a
mainstream positivist and objectivist genre‚ to display instead an obvious
tone of autoethnographic, fictional or fragmented self-reflection. While
prominent anthropologists feared, or sought to prevent, a ‘feminization’
of the discipline, such as Kroeber (cited in Applegarth 2014, 28), it
is precisely these ‘feminized’ authors who had a stylistically avant-garde
character.
To what extent have conditions changed today, some three and a half
decades after Writing Culture, and a quarter of a century after Women
Writing Culture? In what new directions might this intersection take us?
Both of us completed our doctorates in a post-Writing Culture period,
by which time the insights of the volume had become orthodoxy; much
less widespread, though, were the arguments of Women Writing Culture.
Looking back from our vantage point today, we felt that it was time
to renew a disciplinary reflection on the multi-stranded interconnections
of gender and ethnographic writing, without wanting to reinvent the
wheel, as Margery Wolf (Rofel and Wolf 2003) reminds us. To discuss
this, we brought together, in the intimate gathering of our symposium, a
heterogeneous group of anthropologists, both established and early career
scholars, women and men (for gender is not only about ‘women’), from
different origins and intellectual traditions. With this introductory essay
and the chapters that follow, we continue a tradition of paying homage
to the work of many, especially women, who have variously drawn atten-
tion to the gendered history of ethnographic writing (Behar and Gordon
1994; Visweswaran 1988, 1994, 1997; Schrock 2013). Today, we argue,
despite some excellent occasional reflections, the disciplinary conversa-
tion explicitly looking at gender and writing past and present appears
more muted than in its heyday of the early-to-mid 1990s, as the silence
surrounding Applegarth’s book would seem to testify2 . Indeed, not one
of the over fifty short essays in a recent collection, Writing Anthropology
(McGranahan 2020), considers the issue of gender. Have the insights of
past critiques and experiments been absorbed to the point where discus-
sion is no longer needed? Has the question of gender in writing been
superseded? To what extent does it make sense to still think of ethno-
graphic writing in terms of gender, and if so, what might be the relevance
of gender to ethnographic writing today? We present a series of contri-
butions that, each in its own way, is the continuation of those previous
insights, and this introductory essay lays out some questions of the gender
of genre and gender in genre.
Genre and Context

Literary studies tell us that genre cannot be considered independently
from social context. As abstract, socially recognized forms of the appli-
cation and use of language, genres are embedded in contexts just as
language is embedded in and constitutes social realities (Hyland 2002,
114). Moreover, as we have learned from Bakhtin, genres mediate

ideology, thereby constituting ways of seeing the world, and diachronic
transformations in genres are related to social change (Bakhtin 1984,
1986). Being a woman, African American or First Nations person inher-
ently entailed moving outside a particular context, on the margins, the
peripheries of inner academic circles. Sponsored by foundations but never
given established academic positions, this led to expression in new genres
that we now recognize as thoroughly contemporary.
Edbauer (cited in Applegarth 2014, 28) describes the establishment
of a text in the academic canon as conditioned by readers, authors,
contexts and requirements, and calls this phenomenon ‘rhetorical ecolo-
gies’ (Edbauer 2005). We can currently observe such a phenomenon in
academically recognized languages and styles. Rhetorical ecology develops
in parallel with central and peripheral discourses, authors of the global
North and the global South, de- and postcolonial writing practices, and
national linguistic hegemonies. For example, we can see a reproduction
of English-language writing styles. Linguists observe with concern the
increasing dominance of English in academic culture and the loss of
stylistic and linguistic diversity within different national traditions. The
far-ranging epic writing of Italian scholars is increasingly squeezed into
the tight corset of English-language essay writing, and French anthro-
pologists are conversant in English to a much greater extent than they
were thirty years ago. This phenomenon encompasses more than language
and genre; it strikes at the heart of anthropological self-understanding,
namely what can be translated and how, and whether are there possibly
concepts that are not translatable from one culture to another (Rubel
and Rosman 2003). Genre also encompasses different academic writing
cultures in different academic languages and national contexts, as Ribeiro
and Escobar (2006) have shown in their attention to world anthropolo-
gies. Sonia Ryang rightly states that:
…the matter is not simply about the use of a particular language as a

communicative tool between the author and the reader. The privileged
use of a particular language involves privileging of concepts and categories
historically and epistemologically defined by that language, thereby simul-
taneously subjugating concepts and categories defined by other languages.
(1997, 36)
Language(s), concepts, categories and genres risk being homogenized

within the framework of a linguistic imperialism and a global matrix of
domination. We ourselves refer exclusively to English-language literature
in this introduction, something that was a conscious decision. Although
we both draw on multilingual contexts and teach at a trilingual univer-
sity, we decided to focus on the dominant academic language in order
to look at developments and trends at the centre of events. This decision
is not one of exclusion—we have both published our important work in
German, Italian and French—but one that responds to the dynamics of
negotiating power over language and genre in the academic enterprise
(Nic Craithd 2016).
As for the rest of this volume, although it is in English, most of the
authors are not native speakers of the language, even if they are fully
conversant with Anglophone anthropology and ethnographic traditions.
In many ways, Hande Birkalan-Gedik’s chapter provides a counter-
point to the overall Anglophone emphasis by exploring the specific
historic relationship between gender and genre within Turkish ethnog-
raphy. However, Birkelan-Gedik also invokes her training in Anglophone
academia, which embeds her own anthropological and feminist socializa-
tion in a non-Turkish academic context, thereby enabling her to analyse a
Turkish nationalist process of diversity exclusion. In this specific political
and academic space of sameness, within its own matrix of domination,
ethnographies included women by moulding them into a patriarchal and
masculinist model of the Turkish state. Even so, Birkalan-Gedik shows
how inspiration and intellectual stimulation triggered by the Writing
Culture and Women Writing Culture debate, arriving in Turkey with
a considerable time lag, clashes with an academic resistance to feminist
textuality that in Turkey finds itself in stark contrast to feminist activism.
Her question whether to take this ‘“weak textuality” as a drawback or an
unconventional, yet down-played feature’ reverberates female strategies of
survival: ‘“strongly activist” and “weakly textual” ethnographies as strate-
gies to remain “alive” within academia’ as Birkalan-Gedik writes, bring us
close to approaches so familiar to women and minority groups.
As noted above, it seems that the genres and ideas with which we
describe other ideas have essentially become interwoven into a single web
of relations in the history of ethnographic writing. Clifford Geertz points
out how ‘the ethnographer “inscribes” social discourse, he [sic] writes
it down. In so doing he [sic] turns it from a passing event, which exists
only in its own moment of occurrence, into an account, which exists in its
inscription and can be reconsulted’ (Geertz 1973, 19). The inscription of

social discourses and the complexity of life is also related to our artistry
and, as Virginia Woolf called for, the use of ‘every quality of brain and
spirit’ (quoted by Nigel Rapport in this volume). Certainly, it is nothing
new to observe that aesthetics, complexity, discourse and perception are
never neutral. In literature, women have had to assert themselves against
male critical power by making gendered power dynamics their literary
subject. Nigel Rapport follows these traces, using Virginia Woolf as a
model, with, at the same time, scepticism about what can be said liter-
arily or even ethnographically without detracting from the complexity
of life. Rapport has silence per se in mind as a feminine and struc-
tural phenomenon, the silence that is there, not transformed and not
made visible, sayable, discussable through resonance with the world. He
proposes an anthropology of silence, again following Virginia Woolf, a
homely silence. Silence and solitude as closely related individual complex-
ities become, in Rapport’s anthropology, a mission through which we can
learn to understand being human. The privilege of silence into which he
retreats in his fieldwork with farmers in England is an inner world that
allows him to make no mistakes, no not-right statements. The habitus of
silence refers to the practice of porters giving space to the other as another
expression of the same. Nigel Rapport’s contribution engages with the
perspective of inscribed discourses of female experiences of silence to
reflect on these across two different ethnographic contexts. And his text
becomes an experiment in style and content in which he finds himself in
good female company.
Blurred Genres and Boundary Work

In the 1920s, as the discipline began to professionalize—Malinowski’s
first chapter from The Argonauts of the Western Pacific is only one
example of this—women‚ people of colour and indigenous people
were increasingly marginalized in academic anthropology (cf. Applegarth
2014, 26–27). Although Margaret Mead and Ruth Bunzel, writing as
late as 1960 in The Golden Age of Anthropology, were still convinced
that our discipline welcomed women and members of minorities, the
early years of academic professionalisation showed that while there was
rich participation by them in ethnographic research, many women,
people of colour and indigenous scholars still did not obtain access to
academic positions. These authors include Elsie Clews Parsons, Gladys
Reichard, Ella Cara Deloria, Ruth Underhill, Ruth Bunzel, Clara Lee
Tanner, Zora Neale Hurston, Esther Schiff Goldfrank, Erba Gunther,
Hortense Powdermaker, Edward Dozier (Tewa Pueblo), William Jones
(Fox), Gladis Tantaquitgeon (Mohegan), Louis Eugene King and Arthur
Huff Fauset to name but a few (ibid.). Furthermore, despite the indis-
putable prominence of Franz Boas, widespread anti-Semitism and anti-
non-white sentiment characterized the nascent professionalized discipline
in the US (ibid., 39, 61). Many female researchers fished for one research
grant after another, while their white-male colleagues established them-
selves in secure academic positions. As Risa Applegarth points out, in
many disciplines, the demarcation between professionals and amateurs has
proven to be a working strategy to secure the privileges associated with
academic positions (ibid., 2).
One possible way of drawing a dividing line between professionals and
amateurs was through the academic fixing of stylistic forms of ethno-
graphic writing. However, although some dividing lines have shifted,
these practices of inclusion and exclusion are by no means a thing of the
past. In her contribution, Paloma Gay y Blasco shares how an anonymous
reviewer questioned whether Writing Friendship (2020), her manuscript
co-authored with Liria Hernández, should be read as a scholarly text.
This experience is no exception. Although we would like to assume
that some things have changed since the 1920s and 1930s—when there
was an attempt to prevent the feminization and ‘indigenization‘ of the
discipline—recent research shows that we continue to reproduce struc-
tural inequalities and practice content exclusion within the European and
American academies in the early twenty-first century.
Voices on the peripheries write vehemently against the silence and
silencing: an outraged Zoe Todd (2016), for example, points to a range
of grievances, including the exclusion of Inuit knowledge and philos-
ophy from ‘ontological’ discourse on climate change, or male and white
dominance in structured academic positions in the UK. Georgina Stewart
(2017) uses critical discourse analysis and concepts from Māori philos-
ophy to respond to Eurocentric social science that continues to reproduce
itself following the work of Mauss. Indigenous scholars and feminists are
adding their voices through new publishing outlets, but the inner circle
seems to remain untouched. The publication landscape has changed, and
the opportunities to also have one’s voice heard in central forums have
become different, not least through digital worlds. A stirring experience
for many of us was the broad debate over publication practices in the
journal HAU that spawned, as a major consequence, an incredibly vocal

critique (at least in cyberspace) of white-male dominance in anthropology,
indicting publication and citation practices for reproducing a hegemonic
elite.3
From all these peripheral perspectives, it becomes clear that we still
have an epistemological problem with indigenous and female knowledge
in the broadest sense. The process of inclusion/exclusion, which Thomas
Gieryn (1999) has called ‘boundary work’, has never been interrupted,
even if genres and genders have been given more leeway. Boundary
work remains a core business of every academic discipline, and our book
aims to contribute to reflecting on and re-exploring new boundaries and
possibilities.
Feminist ethnography, it has been suggested, is itself a genre
(Visweswaran 1997). As feminist ethnography developed through third-
wave critiques, engagements with poststructuralism, postmodernism and
postcolonial/subaltern studies all opened new pathways for experimenta-
tion in the process of writing. As Ruth Behar has recently noted, ‘Every
ethnographer reinvents the genre of ethnography when sitting down to
write’ (Behar 2020, 49). This is also true on the level of writing that,
collectively, establishes traditions, as Hande Birkalan-Gedik points out
with regard to the case of feminist ethnography in Turkey. Birkalan-Gedik
herself trained in the US, and she indicates how she attempted to incor-
porate some of the stylistic devices, post-Writing Culture, into her own
work. And yet, agency in writing ethnography, as in any other genre, is
not free from relations of power and structural constraints impinging on
the conditions of production. As Women Writing Culture most force-
fully argued, the writings of a number of women anthropologists in the
first half of the twentieth century anticipated some of the forms of exper-
imentation celebrated in Writing Culture. However, Risa Applegarth’s
‘rhetorical archaeology’ of US anthropology, already mentioned above,
moves the dating back even further, to works dating from the 1880s,
and expands the historiography of experimentation within the genre to
include men of colour alongside white women and indigenous authors. In
any case, the writings of all of the figures variously remembered are char-
acterized by sundry features that suggest the theme of gender. As a caveat,
we should state that we do not subscribe to an essentializing position, one
that might argue that all experimentation is gendered ‘female’, or that
women ethnographers are inherently experimental in their approaches‚ or
at least‚ more experimental than men. By the same token, we do not want
to suggest that all men in the history of anthropology have been averse
to pushing the envelope of the genre, or that their gender necessarily
determines a conventional writing style. And yet, in examining the host of
ethnographic texts that can be defined as non-canonical or genre bending,
we can point to various features in writing that have, in recent decades,
been conscientiously theorized by scholars whose work is informed by
and imbued with thinking about gender.
One key element relates to descriptive modes of writing, which Evans-
Pritchard, referring to Margaret Mead, derogatorily labelled as ‘chatty and
feminine’:
This [Coming of Age in Samoa] is a discursive, or perhaps I should say

chatty and feminine, book with a leaning towards the picturesque, what
I call the rustling-of-the-wind-in-the-palm-trees kind of anthropological
writing, for which Malinowski set the fashion. (Evans-Pritchard 1951, 96)
The fact that Evans-Pritchard criticized Mead’s style here, while holding
Malinowski responsible for it (recalling Masson’s comment above) prob-
ably also has to do with the occasionally difficult relationship between
Evans-Pritchard and Malinowski (cf. Morton 2007). Such a style has
also characterized descriptive, often first-person accounts produced by
wives of anthropologists, as opposed to their husband’s ‘objective’, third-
person ethnographies (Visweswaran 1988; Tedlock 1995). Countering a
masculinist association of ‘science’ and the ‘rational’ with male writing,
Catherine Lutz’s contribution in Women Writing Culture contests the
dichotomy between theory and description and a parallel duo of ‘scien-
tific’ and ‘artful’ (Lutz 1995). She observes:
Theory has acquired a gender insofar as it is more frequently associated

with male writing, with women’s writing more often seen as description,
data, case, personal, or in the case of feminism, ‘merely’ setting the record
straight. (ibid., 251)
On the basis of this division, Lutz claims, the work of women anthro-
pologists (whether or not they have been attributed disciplinary standing
as anthropologists) has been devalued and its contribution to the canon
downplayed. According to Lutz, postmodernism in anthropology, with
its attendant stylistic features, has likewise been coded feminine. To what
extent does Lutz’s contention still ring true today? Although it is beyond
the scope of this essay, it would be interesting to verify to what extent

present-day scholars are saving more descriptive or experimental works
for when they have secured their academic position, as often seemed to be
the case in the past. In our own, anecdotal experience in hiring commis-
sions, we are finding that new generations of scholars are comfortable
with presenting ethnographically informed, non-academic publications on
their CVs. It may be that now, decades later, ethnographers have incor-
porated the lessons of Writing Culture as part of their authorial habitus.
Having done so, one might suggest that they have managed to push the
envelope of the genre to such a degree that Lutz’s dichotomy has soft-
ened and artfulness is no longer a taboo. And yet, does the subgenre of
the ethnographic novel—or, as we see increasingly today, the “(ethno-)”
graphic novel—hold the same effective value in the academic job market
as a more canonical representative of ethnography?
Like Lutz, Lila Abu-Lughod (1990) has also treated the
theory/description duality as a gendered distinction, placing it along-
side other dichotomies: professional/unprofessional, abstract/concrete,
citational/personal observation and subjective/objective. Taking up this
latter pair, another crucial dimension of arguably gendered writing has
been the problematization of objectivity. Certainly, feminist anthropolo-
gists were rankled by Writing Culture’s pretence to be at the forefront
of debunking omniscient narration, textual constructions of (masculine)
authority and objectivity. They were quick to point out how, already
in the early twentieth century, the works of Zora Neale Hurston, Elsie
Clews Parsons, Ella Cara Deloria, and Gladys Reichard offered alternative
textual models.
In contrast to the monological narrator’s voice that dominated ethno-
graphic works of her period, Zora Neale Hurston (1935, 1938), for
example, employed a polyphonic style. However, following Writing
Culture and interest in the scholarship of Bakhtin, the attempt to render
texts more dialogic or polyphonic has become much more mainstream.
Other devices that ethnographers have employed to break with the old-
school style have included confessional forms and first-person narration,
these emerging as part of the well-known reflexive turn. Today, few
anthropologists would bat an eyelash at them.
The whole question of subjectivity and objectivity entailed in reflexive-
turn discussions led to an increasing awareness of the embodied nature
of the ethnographer’s existence in and out of the field. Already in works
like those of Zora Neale Hurston and Ruth Landes (1947)‚ precursors
did not erase their embodied subjectivities as ethnographers. We cite

Risa Applegarth (2014), again, for her detailed analysis of the rhetor-
ical strategies used by early women in the discipline through a genre
she categorizes as ‘field autobiographies’; in this, she includes Gladys
Reichard’s Spider Woman (1934). Moreover, Applegarth also discusses
how Ella Deloria and Zora Neale Hurston, themselves members of the
groups studied, subverted the purportedly objective authority of white-
male anthropologists by appropriating the genre of ‘folklore collections’.
As Applegarth notes, ‘the “native ethnographer” is an impossibility in
Malinowksi’s version of fieldwork’ (Applegarth 2014, 112).
In spite of her analytic merits, the fact that Applegarth is a scholar
outside the discipline is apparent in her lack of reference to autoethnog-
raphy, which embraces both of these types of writings. While there is
no definitive agreement on the definition of autoethnography, Deborah
Reed-Danahay—one of its most prominent proponents—has emphasized
that the term refers both to ‘autobiographical writing with ethnographic
interest’ and to works by ethnographers studying their own group (Reed-
Danahay 1997, 2). Reed-Danahay situates the growth of autoethnog-
raphy within the context of a revival of life history in anthropology since
the mid-1980s, concomitant with postmodern questionings of identity
and position; in our view, however, Caroline Brettell justly highlights the
role of feminism, alongside postmodernism, in having ‘directed our atten-
tion to the autobiographical dimension of the anthropological encounter’
(1997, 224). We editors‚ too, as ethnographers from a subsequent gener-
ation, have benefitted from these trends: within our ethnographies today,
we are able to take for granted that we can ‘place the self within a social
context’ (Reed-Danahay 1997, 9). For example, when Dorothy Zinn
wrote her monograph about South Tyrol (Zinn 2018), she included an
excursus with recollections from her own childhood in South Texas to
situate how she experienced ethnolinguistic division in Italy’s German-
speaking province. She did so with little concern that this might be seen
as a navel-gazing operation, convinced instead that it contributed to a
clearer understanding of her position and how her perception of South
Tyrolean society was connected to her own biography.
From the 1990s on, the visibility of the ethnographer’s self flourished
even further, not only with general reflexivity, but also through a specific
attention to the body in the development of anthropologies of the senses
and the concomitant treatment of sensual dimensions in ethnographic
writing. Such an attention to all of the senses helps us to counter the
privileging of vision and visual metaphors that have long been the stan-
dard in ethnographic writing, and which have long been associated with
a dominating, male gaze. As Constance Classen (1998) has pointed out,
modern Western culture has associated the ‘lower’, non-visual senses with
the female. Paul Stoller (1989, 1997), who has championed sensuousness
in ethnographic writing, observes how it not only improves our descrip-
tions for reader, but also better grasps central metaphors and ways of
experiencing and remembering in many societies. However, the theme
of embodiment has still other ramifications on an epistemological level,
as Stoller notes, citing feminist and post-structuralist critiques of phallo-
centric Cartesianism (ibid). Negating the possibility of an objective, ‘god
trick’ view, Donna Haraway has insisted on a notion of situated knowl-
edge, based on what she calls a ‘feminist embodiment’ (Haraway 1988).
Similarly, and also related to the discussion of autoethnography, Lila Abu-
Lughod (1991) recognizes the crucial nature of positionality. Haraway’s
situated knowledge has to do with truth claims and a broader problemati-
zation of positivism; along these lines, in much feminist and queer writing,
we find the writing dwelling in uncertainty and how to render it textu-
ally, a theme that emerges in the essays in this volume by Paloma Gay y
Blasco, Nigel Rapport and Omar Kasmani.
Writing for Whom?

Historically, and to a greater extent than among their male counterparts,
a number of women writing ethnography have been viewed as ‘popularis-
ers’ in their writing style, their publication venues, or both. Salvucci notes
how Malinowski himself was interested in reaching popular audiences,
and Elsie Masson seems to have played a role in the style he adopted.
Indicting a gendered prejudice, scholars have commented on how ‘pop-
ular’ genres of ethnographic writing have been devalued in the academic
economy, both historically and in contemporary times. But what does
popularising mean stylistically, and for whom might we popularise? This
question raises the issue of audience, which is a factor that is part-and-
parcel of a genre, for as Threadgold notes, genres specify ‘typical modes
of address and possible positions for an audience’ and must be understood
‘both as models for making texts and, once made, as models for under-
standing them’ (Threadgold 1997, 96–7). One level of popular audience
would, of course, be the general public ‘back home’, more apt to enjoy a
work devoid of the trappings of a conventional scientific text and graced
with a literary sensibility. One thinks here of Margaret Mead, of course,

who wrote in a way that made her ethnography accessible to lay people, as
in Coming of Age in Samoa (1928), or Ruth Benedict’s writerly Chrysan-
themum and the Sword (1946). But the public popularity of women
authors, including Margaret Mead herself, was considered an indication of
their lower academic credibility (Tedlock 1995; Lutekehaus 1995). Many
commentators have noted how such writing has been disparaged as not
sufficiently scientific (see Evans-Pritchard above), and it has generally not
been particularly helpful for gaining job security within the academy (Abu
Lughod 1990; Lutz 1995; Visweswaran 1988). The ethnographic fictions
and factions of some anthropologists, such as Ella Deloria’s Waterlily
(1988) or fieldwork memoirs like Elisabeth Fernea’s Guests of the Sheik
(1969) have followed yet another avenue to accessibility. Although many
of the female authors mentioned were not included in the academic
canon, they have had influences on multiple changes to the ethnographic
genre. These women have contributed significantly to a public anthro-
pology, both within the disciplinary confines of academia and through
their insertion of ethnographic descriptions into the public sphere. What
we emphasize as increasingly important today—reflecting on forms of
communication with a wider public, genre and the question of sharing
our knowledge, as well as permitting bridge-building to the non-academic
world—was practiced by many of these early women writers. In the
history of anthropology, the risk to one’s career of publishing a popular
work has been palpable, for many of these women have published their
works with pseudonyms: the case of Laura Bohannan is emblematic, with
her Return to Laughter (1964) written under the pen name of Elenore
Bowen Smith. Presently, we are witnessing a blossoming interest in these
non-canonical forms, favoured in part by the ease of circulation through
self-publishing, online platforms and blogs.4
Ethnographers have also gone beyond the standard academic formats
of the journal article or monograph to convey ethnographic material and
insights within popular containers: Mead, again, was a primary example of
this as a prolific public intellectual, publishing in newspapers and maga-
zines, including women’s magazines.5 In contemporary anthropology,
Scandinavian ethnographers have been particularly effective in estab-
lishing a public presence (Eriksen 2006). Indeed, Helena Wulff (2016)
has made a strong case for the value of such writing and the positive
spillover effect it has on academic writing. In addition to conventional
print media, digital media have become important channels for educating
and engaging a general public, particularly with blogs and social media
accounts—what George Marcus has called ‘commons of various sorts’
(Marcus 2012, 429).
At another level of audience, ethnography has the potential to embrace
publics that can use ethnographic knowledge in order to guide action.
Writing of this sort would include reports for non-governmental organi-
zations and policy makers, an activity in which anthropologists are increas-
ingly involved. But ethnography can also guide action by addressing
practitioners directly, as we see in the example provided in Marina Della
Rocca’s chapter in this volume, which relates how she wrote up her
ethnography of women’s shelters and the migrant women who turn to
them. Della Rocca is attentive to ways she can reconcile feminist principles
with the construction of a Ph.D. thesis, a classic genre for an academic
audience—one in which ethnographic writing is arguably most rigid, part
of the rite of passage that proves a novice worthy of admission to the
scientific community. Della Rocca recounts her efforts at making her
work understood by the operators in women’s shelters; moreover, she
emphasizes how her ethnographic writing was permeable to the termi-
nology used by the operators themselves, drawing on a shared feminist
epistemology that itself has political implications for the work they do.
In this sense, Della Rocca stands in the tradition of feminist ethnography,
whose understanding of research is that it should be socially and politically
relevant for its research subjects: she explicitly refuses a neutral obser-
vation point—the ‘god trick’—and instead adopts a stance that is both
committed and oppositional.
This leads us to yet another potential audience, that of the research
participants themselves. Indeed, Paloma Gay y Blasco’s co-author Liria
Hernández is very explicit in reclaiming the right to be able to read
what is being written about her. Just as with the piece by Marina Della
Rocca, Gay y Blasco’s contribution raises sensitive questions that Judith
Stacey (1988) already explored forty years ago. The promise of a feminist
ethnography of equality and reciprocity can be misleading and threatening
to research subjects; keeping this promise may not be feasible. As with a
feminist ethnography’s assumption of universal female experiences leading
to a fading out of power relations between researcher and research subject
(Lila Abu-Lughod 1990), the promise of reciprocity is tricky. Gay y Blas-
co’s chapter takes us through her own ten-year process of working with
Liria Hernández, in which she has to deconstruct ethnographic thinking
and writing in order to relearn it. It is the non-academic anthropologist
Liria who‚ through her presence as co-author‚ shows the academic Paloma
how the anthropological world works. The radical nature of the genre is
an exemplar of Donna Haraway’s ‘being at risk’, in that Gay y Blasco
allows her own framework to be shaken up. In this sense, her contribu-
tion in this book is also an ethnography of the mechanisms of a discipline
that is driven by competition and fierce rivalry with and demarcation from
the outside world.
Although addressed decades ago, dilemmas of the privileged voice
continue to preoccupy feminist researchers today. How can we simplify
technical language and meet the responsibility for the representation of
research subjects (cf. for example Frank 2000 or Lather and Smithies
1997)? At the same time, how can we address the specificity of the
research subject, the local context and culturally situated knowledge with
sensitivity? And how can we meet the self-conscious demand of research
subjects who want to be actively involved in the process of analysis
and writing? As Elizabeth Enslin narrates, challenged by her Nepalese
sister-in-law, she rethought her writing in the context of feminist prac-
tice, avoiding the use of disciplinary jargon, paying attention to the
concerns of the participants in order to enable them to contribute to ‘a
written work reflecting a collective, dialectical process of building theory
through struggles for change’ (Enslin 1994, 545). We also find this action
and practice orientation from the legacy of feminist perspectives to be
particularly strong in the case of Turkish feminist ethnography, which
Hande Birkalan-Gedik tells us (this volume) has a weak textual coun-
terpart. Nonetheless, works with a strong applied or activist dimension
have not always been held in the highest regard academically: in her
critique cited above, Catherine Lutz (1995) argued that they have occu-
pied a subordinate ‘female’ slot in a gendered division of theory and
practice, whereby they have long been seen as the academy’s stepsister.
Much more recently, however, there is an increased legitimacy of anthro-
pology ‘at home’. With scholars performing ‘third mission’ service from
within a university, or as anthropologists who are finding work outside of
academia or are serving in research and consulting roles while they seek
a tenured position, applied work and activism in ethnographic writing
have gradually gained in status (Tauber and Zinn 2015). Yet within
the academic world itself, ‘public’ genres, such as journalism, creative
nonfiction and ethnographic fiction still do not have the credibility and
credential-building capacity of conventional ethnography. That is, within
academic institutions—and it is especially explicit with contemporary eval-

uation processes—the energy and effort expended in such writing are by
no means regularly rewarded with recognition towards tenure and promo-
tion. If we may attribute genders to these genres, we find an interesting
reversal of the public/private dichotomy discussed at length in second-
wave feminism, where ‘male’ is associated with the public sphere, and
‘female’ with the private (or domestic) sphere (Rosaldo 1974). What we
find here is that ‘public’ genres of ethnographic writing are symbolically
aligned with the feminine, devalued with respect to the ‘private’ academic
sphere, a masculine-gendered boys club.
There are some timid steps, however, to bring about change in this
regard. The same universities that follow hiring and promotion proce-
dures attributing fewer merits to public, popularising texts are increasingly
called to justify their ‘relevance’ to stakeholders and to society at large.
While we should be aware that this development bears the risk of teth-
ering research to extra-academic agendas, unduly limiting the freedom
of research, it does have a positive potential for creating an incentive to
give such works visibility. Tuning into this zeitgeist, in 2017 the American
Anthropological Association published a report in which they recognized
the problem posed by public genres for career evaluation and offered
a set of guidelines for hiring and tenure committees on how to eval-
uate public outreach writings and applied texts of various sorts.6 In Italy,
where we work, the agency that evaluates university research outputs,
ANVUR, recognizes the value of activities like ‘public engagement’ and
‘social-cultural impacts’ in its periodic research assessments; however, this
opening has not yet affected directly and concretely the academic careers
of individual scholars.
Writing with Whom?

Writing may take on various aspects of collaboration, whether among
scholars or between researchers and their participants. With regard to
the question of gender, we focus here on the different ways in which
collaborative work with research subjects takes place in the production of
ethnographic texts. The well-known concern here—the combined legacy
of Writing Culture, feminist and postcolonial theory—is that standard
practices in ethnographic writing, emerging from masculinist and colonial
histories of studying ‘Others’, objectify Others through various aspects of
textuality and the writing process itself. Experimentation in ethnographic
writing has therefore included a careful attention to forms of represen-

tation, and within this, the degree of voice that research subjects have in
the text. Collaborative approaches in the process of creating ethnographic
writing have emerged, in part, as a decolonizing strategy (Lassiter 2005),
and in part as the result of a feminist ethos.
Not coincidentally, along with public and applied work more generally,
collaborative approaches have increasingly come to the fore in ethno-
graphic research projects. Although there is a feminist-inspired emphasis
on practice, there is a suspicion in some quarters that experimentation
in textuality is simply a makeover without deeper effects (cf. Harrison
1991). Collaboration does not necessarily mean co-authorship, though it
well might.
While it is somewhat artificial to separate out the research and writing
aspects of doing ethnography, since our focus here is on writing, we hold
to the division provisionally in order to examine collaboration in the
process of writing the results for some particular audience, rather than
dwell on possible collaborative features in doing research itself. Given that
the world is, in many ways, more interconnected than in Malinowski’s
day, it is one in which it is ever more likely that ‘they read what we write’
(Brettell 1993). The ethos of reciprocity has, in collaborative work, made
it standard practice that we give our texts to the people with whom we
worked. Both of us as authors have had to face the uncomfortable fallout
of publishing a work when the people we have written about reacted to
it. As women who have married into the groups we have studied, the
personal has become an ethnographic political in ways that are not always
easy to negotiate in writing. For Elisabeth Tauber (2007, 2014) in partic-
ular, writing became a balancing act between stylistic considerations for
an academic non-Sinti audience, cultural considerations for a Sinti audi-
ence living with us who associates every form of writing with scepticism
and mistrust, but also with expectations and political strategies (Trevisan
2008), and weighing what can be told and how when a non-academic
audience is also reading on sensitive topics such as female peddling and
begging. It is another matter, however, to involve our research partic-
ipants in some fashion in the crafting of these texts. Often scholars will
show drafts of their work in progress to their research participants, seeking
their feedback for verification of the analysis, or simply as a means of elic-
iting further data. But the question of authorship remains squarely in the
hands of the researcher, who may or may not incorporate this feedback
to varying degrees. Moving a step further along the continuum, ethnog-

raphers may actively seek the involvement of the text’s subjects in order
to disrupt their monologic voice, thereby yielding ‘dialogical ethnogra-
phy’ (Lassiter 2000). While Lassiter applauds the intention and results of
dialogical ethnography, pointing to its similarities with writings that can
more substantially be defined as ‘collaborative’, he observes that ‘dialogic
ethnography is ultimately about creating better and more nuanced texts
for the academy’ (ibid., 610). It is here that he draws a distinction with
collaborative ethnography, whose final goals more clearly embrace those
of the collectivity studied. Lassiter points to the focus that collaborative,
rather than ‘merely’ dialogical, ethnography places on dialogue regarding
the production of the text itself. As he puts it, ‘Collaborative ethnography
is thus, in the end, a moral and ethical undertaking, one that ultimately
privileges the discourse between consultant(s) and ethnographer over a
disciplinary discourse’ (ibid.).
Marina Della Rocca’s essay incorporates many of these goals and
insights, and she reviews the ways in which her feminist stance led her
to involve the women’s shelter operators and migrant women in the
writing of her thesis, more fully collaborative in the former case, and more
dialogically in the latter. In the process, she creates a work that is highly
autoethnographic, embodying feminist principles of reflexivity, dialogicity
and ‘giving voice’. She seeks ways to render her academic text permeable
to the women she is working with, especially the members of the associa-
tion operating a women’s shelter, cultivating a ‘reciprocal contamination’
(p. 90). She allows for a degree of collaboration in the writing process
itself, hence the decision to actively involve the DoRi association in the
textual representation. The process is not always smooth, and Della Rocca
exposes some of the bruises she picked up along the way, fully embodying
the figure of Behar’s ‘vulnerable observer’ (Behar 1996).
There are no hard-and-fast rules for such forms of collaboration,
and the choices made have to grapple with various other factors in
ethnographic practice. For example, this can be the appropriateness of
guaranteeing anonymity versus acknowledgement of a degree of partic-
ipants’ intellectual property within the ethnographic enterprise, or the
value that a co-authored text may or may not have in the academic
economy. Nor, in the rapture of a romantic vision of collaboration or
friendship (see Lawless 2000), should we fall into the trap of presuming
that our research participants themselves share such a view, against which
Bruegemann (1996) cautions us. On the basis of her own difficulties in
doing ethnography among the hearing impaired, Bruegemann concludes:

‘I do not think it entirely ethical that we unequivocally assume that
they want to be involved, to collaborate, to respond, to co-construct
representations with us’ (Bruegemann 1996, 33).
On the other hand, in a more recent reflection, Sara Gonzales
promotes the notion of ‘writing with community’. She states:
By this I mean not coauthoring with community members but conducting

research with community such that the writing which follows – collab-
oratively or singularly authored – is part of a broader effort to disrupt
earlier colonial narratives and to decolonize the practice of researching and
writing Native histories. (Gonzales 2020, 104)
Bearing in mind Bruegemann’s admonition, this kind of writing with

community advocated by Gonzales might be one possible strategy within
collaborative ethnography to effect a shift from the level of merely recog-
nizing different knowledge and positions—a crucial insight of feminist
standpoint theory (Harding 2004)—to a more active co-creation of
knowledge.
Ethnographers can take dialogism to yet another level when they create
spaces of co-authorship that actually yield control over the text to a
greater extent, enhancing the dialogical or polyphonic qualities of the
text. It is in this sense, according to Lassiter, that we have a ‘collabo-
rative’ text, or what feminist anthropologist Elaine Lawless has termed
‘reciprocal ethnography’ (Lawless 1993). Lawless places the emphasis on
how this differs from conventional authorship:
I am quick to point out that ‘reciprocal’, as I use it, refers to the emergent
dialogue in field research that is then carried into the scholarly writing. The
exchange of ideas and meaning is reciprocal—we learn from each other and
no voice is privileged over the other. (Lawless 2000, 199)
The chapter by Paloma Gay y Blasco discusses the challenges and

dilemmas of producing just such a truly collaborative work. Whereas Gay
y Blasco defines it as ‘reciprocal ethnography’, using Lawless’s expres-
sion, the reciprocal nature of her work is even more radical, in that her
interlocutor and co-author, Liria, mirrors her own ethnographic enter-
prise, studying and representing Paloma and her Payo (non-Gitano)
world from her own Gitana positionality. Gay y Blasco’s chapter recounts
the process of developing her collaborative book with Liria Hernandez,

Writing Friendship (2020). The book they wrote follows a well-trodden
path of life histories, of women writing about other women—think, for
example, of Marjorie Shostak’s Nisa, Geyla Frank’s Venus on Wheels,
or Ruth Behar’s Translated Woman 7 . As Gay y Blasco describes it, the
book seems to represent an example of the feminist testimonial subgenre
(Visweswaran 1997, 24), but it conducts a much more radical decol-
onization by helping make her subject/co-author’s own anthropology
emerge, thereby ‘willing [hegemonic] anthropology to listen’. In this way,
more than an ‘autoethnography’, the book is an ‘alterethnograpy’. In
the process, Gay y Blasco situates herself squarely in dialogue with her
co-author, and at the same time, she recognizes the situatedness of her
experience of uncertainty. In the process of her reflection here, she yields
a new metaphor for ethnographic texture: not the Geertzian ‘thick’ or the
‘thin’ espoused by Omar Kasmani in this volume, but ‘lumpy’.
Gender in Genre: From Writing

About Women to Probing Gender
One of the initial insights of feminism in anthropology was that, in
the history of a discipline initially known as the study of man, the
‘second sex’ was oftentimes ignored or subsumed under the study of
a universalizing category of males. Even so, some of the earliest works
produced by women forebears in anthropology offered striking exam-
ples of ethnographic writing about women and gender-related issues, and
it was an important merit of Women Writing Culture, foremost among
other efforts to draw attention to this history.8 Whether or not all of
those early works should be defined as ‘feminist ethnography’ is, for
our purposes, a moot point, although Visweswaran advocates a defini-
tion of feminist ethnography that would include them, thereby contesting
a widely held historiography that locates its origins in the second wave
of feminism (Visweswaran 1997). Despite these valuable texts, women
appearing as agents in ethnographic depictions remained relatively under-
represented, particularly with a professionalisation of the discipline that, as
discussed above, coincided with a consolidation of male hegemony among
its practitioners. Later in the twentieth century, though, second-wave
feminist voices in anthropology started to comment on the problematic
nature of ethnographic descriptions of women (Rosaldo and Lamphere
1974, v–vi; Reiter 1975). Certainly, it was necessary to recover the female
presence, offering more accurate accounts of women in specific cultures

and societies and the aspects that most regarded them. At the same
time, however, from the 1970s on, the attention arising from second-
wave feminism in anthropology no longer simply constituted what some
commentators have sardonically called the ‘add women and stir’ approach
(Moore 1988), but increasingly offered fundamental theoretical contribu-
tions arising from thinking about gender (exemplary ethnographies from
this point of view are Strathern 1972 and Weiner 1976).
Significant as it was, even this engagement with women and gender
was not sufficient, as demonstrated by the intersectional critiques levied
by women of colour and lesbian writers, prominent among these being
the authors in Cherrie Moraga and Gloria Anzaldúa’s edited collection
This Bridge Called My Back (Moraga and Anzaldúa 1981). Indeed, Behar
observes that Women Writing Culture was not merely a reply to Writing
Culture, but was equally inspired by Moraga and Anzaldúa’s book. The
dominant forms of feminist ethnography came to realise the necessity of
incorporating insights into racial and sexual positioning; reflecting back
on Women Writing Culture, Deborah Gordon noted this of the younger
anthropologists emerging in those years:
They were also more prepared, as newer Ph.D.s, to use modes of academic
writing that would allow them to participate in a feminism accountable
to racial and cultural positioning. Antiracism became a discourse through
which feminists in anthropology could borrow from and alter the notion
of ethnographic dialogue that had been opened up by scholars interested
in ethnographic writing. (Gordon 1999, 63)
Gordon regrets, however, that the intersectional dimension of class,

emphasized by Moraga and Anzaldúa, was lost in the process—even
in Women Writing Culture—and she reflexively draws attention to the
effects of the nexus of nation and class in producing this effacement.
Now, over twenty years later, as recent discussions of decolonization
show, anthropologists are being called to account for their positionali-
ties within the globalized late capitalist system. The dimension of gender
has been a fundamental, albeit not all-encompassing, point of departure
for rethinking ethnographic writing. Looking at gender in ethnographic
writing with the benefit of third-wave feminism has opened the way
to a textual engagement that brings together many strands of position-

ality, including class, sexuality and disability. In this sense, as Visweswaran
writes:
…a broader conception of the relationship of feminist theory to social

movements means that women should not be seen as the sole subjects,
authors, or audiences of feminist ethnography. Various forms of critical
ethnography might thus be productively read as feminist ethnography
(Visweswaran 1997, 593–94).
Ethnographic Writing,
Masculinities And Queerness
As issues of gender gained traction during the 1970s and 80s, gender as
a focus for ethnography implied for many anthropologists women writing
about, with or for other women. However, in the 1980s, and especially
after Stanley Brandes’ Metaphors of Masculinity (1980), which was the
first ethnographically explicit study of men, academic space finally opened
up to research that addressed questions of masculinity and men, as well
as questions of femininity and women. We should remind ourselves of
the years at the beginning of the twentieth century, when effort was put
into establishing the discipline in an academic context. The fact that men
perceived ‘unfeminine’ women as a threat at this time falls into a histor-
ical context in which modern masculinity as an unmarked category was
repeatedly challenged: ‘“Unmanly” men and “unwomanly” women (…)
were becoming ever more visible. They and the movement for women’s
rights threatened that gender division so crucial to the construction of
modern masculinity’ (Mosse 1996, 78).
However, the first works of critical examination of culturally shaped
masculinity did not emerge in the 1970s, after the student movement
had thrown overboard ossified systems of power and restrictive sexual
ideas, but sporadically at the beginning of the 1980s. White men also
did not have to defend themselves against cultural invisibility: as Matthew
Gutmann (1997) notes, they were in dialogue with each other and always
present in both anthropological theory and ethnographic descriptions.
How and what to write about was negotiated in these inner circles.
It is therefore quite understandable that the discussion of masculinity
as an engendered and ‘engendering’, reality situated in historical and
cultural contexts was slow to gain a foothold, only then—as Gutmann
(ibid.) irritably notes—to examine masculinity in a paradoxical way with

the exclusion of feminist theories. This tendency stands in stark contrast
to Visweswaran’s call for a ‘broader conception of the relationship of
feminist theory to social movements’ and the understanding of crit-
ical ethnography as feminist ethnography (Visweswaran 1997, 594; see
above).
Nevertheless, the disruption of hegemonic masculinity through ethno-
graphic work on other masculinities has spurred the ethnographic theory
debate as much as the feminist debate. The rapid growth of masculinity
studies since the 1990s, inspired by feminist social constructivism, has
put the spotlight on sub- and other-ordered masculinities, their social
constitution through or in the absence of relational systems with women,
sexuality, violence, rituals, as well as on male corporeality, which today
allows us to look at a flourishing literature. Gutmann (2014) notes
that through anthropological comparison of historical and contempo-
rary gender relations, we are forced to acknowledge that they contain
a deep diversity, tolerance and cooperation, often alongside and in simul-
taneous contradiction with the more commonly noted power imbalances
and divisions.
Comparison as the third pillar of the construction of anthropolog-
ical knowledge is also important to Cornwall and Lindisfarne in their
anthology Dislocating Masculinity (1994). Alongside feminist concepts,
the ultimate aim of cultural diversity is to describe varied masculinities
as well as their embeddedness in various cultural expressions of gender
relations: ‘In so doing, we offer a new perspective for viewing gendered
identities and subverting dominant chauvinisms on which gender, class,
race and other hierarchies depend’ (ibid., 2). Twenty years later, Piscitelli
and Simoni (2015) conclude that the main anthropological findings from
the 1990s on masculinity and gender are still significant.
In much of the ethnographic work on masculinities, stylistic experi-
mentation in writing is implicit or not negotiated at all. This is not the
case with Omar Kasmani, who in this volume makes intimate and mascu-
line public spaces in Berlin accessible to the reader with a view through a
finely woven veil of thin descriptions. Experiences of male intimacies are
worked into the filigree linguistic texture of the fabric of relationships
via stylistic experiments. The vulnerability of the ethnographer, whose
own sense-making process differs greatly from white heteronormative
masculinity, enters a different—now visible—in-between space, provokes,
irritates and brings a context closer via a new form of ethnographic narra-
tive. Through stylistic craft, he finds a form that accommodates and does
justice to the specific ethnographic context of Berlin Neukölln. The ‘Späti’
next door becomes as familiar to the reader as the white sheets on the
empty bed and the Sufi ritual. It combines creativity with facts and empir-
ical description (cf. Ingridsdotter and Kallenberg 2018). Overall, we can
say that feminist reflections on the analytical writing process in partic-
ular—writing and analysis belong together (Lykke 2014)—have led to a
turn towards creative writing that distinguishes genre not as a stylistic
device‚ but as part of the analytical process.
We may consider Kasmani’s chapter within the queer sexualities and
transgender themes that have comprised a rapidly growing field within
ethnographic writing. These approaches have been developing since the
1990s, alongside wider social changes internationally, such as the rise of
LGBTQIA + movements and the diffusion of ‘transgender’ as a cate-
gory (Valentine 2007). Inspired by the thinking of scholars like Sarah
Ahmed, Eve Sedgwick, José Esteban Muñoz and Judith Butler, the
volatile, creative ferment arising from these quarters has also impacted
writing styles to the point that an entire field of queer rhetorics has
emerged in recent years (Cox and Faris 2015; Dadas and Cox 2019).
Indeed, with a view to our own interests here, queering ethnographic
writing is as much a matter of style as it is a choice of subject matter,
which does not necessarily have LGBTQIA + themes as their central
object. While we might be tempted to define Omar Kasmani’s contri-
bution as ‘autoethnography’—which Jones and Adams (2010) declare to
be a queer method—he looks explicitly, among other things, to Maggie
Nelson’s notion of ‘autotheory’ (Nelson 2015), in which embodied expe-
rience is used to generate theory9 . Without wanting to encapsulate queer
writing aesthetics within a rigid classification, we can note generally that
a certain ‘messiness’ that seems to characterize it goes a step beyond
the Writing Culture critique of (masculine) objectivity, disrupting the
pretence to linear cohesiveness. This is reflected, too, in Kasmani’s use of
a stylistic mode that attempts to capture a quantum aesthetic, as shaped
by Karen Barad’s feminist-queer quantum physics.
A branch of queer, feminist and postcolonial scholarship relates to a
niche of works known under the heading of the ‘affective turn’ which
has developed in recent years in anthropological writing. In ethnographic
works lying within this affect orbit, we see a tendency to recover features
traditionally coded as ‘female’—emotion, affect and interiority—and a
grappling with how to render these in writing. Though the affective turn
does not appear to be entirely new (Skoggard and Waterston 2015), we
may well ask how often doing affect has translated into actual textual
practice (cf. Beatty 2010). The chapters in this volume by Nigel Rapport
and Omar Kasmani provide two stimulating meditations on this, although
in different ways: while Rapport probes the possibilities of writing interi-
ority through a consideration of silence, Kasmani proposes the model of
‘thin attachments’. In developing his own take on writing affect, he looks
admiringly to Kathleen Stewart’s evocative works (1996, 2007), which
have been highly influential in this vein of ethnography.
Conclusion
Having expounded upon the motivations behind this volume and
outlined what we find to be key issues and developments in our central
theme, gender and genre in ethnographic writing, the last thing that
remains for us to do here is to trace how what follows will unfold. While
an anonymous reviewer of the book project suggested that the different
chapters of this book might be considered variations on a theme à la
Rachmaninov, seeing as we are based in Italy we tend instead (in a very
Italian way) to think of the volume as a feast comprising several courses.
We first serve up the prologue by two Malinowski granddaughters, Lucy
Ulrich and Rebecca M. Stuart, which blends information from Mali-
nowski’s daughter Helena together with assorted family memories, as an
amuse-bouche for the reader. But even an amuse-bouche has its substance,
and their Prologue leads us to some provocative reflections about the
über-ethnographer Malinowski and his relation to ‘the other sex’. Nigel
Rapport’s chapter exploring silence and interiority is a soup course that
warms us and nurtures our insides. Drawing inspiration from women’s
writing, Rapport brings examples from two of his fieldwork experiences
in order to probe silence and ask how it should be rendered ethnographi-
cally. We follow this course with the contribution by Marina Della Rocca,
a homemade pasta dish with contrasting seasonings that nonetheless work
together. Della Rocca describes questions of writing that emerged in
her ethnography of anti-violence shelters and the migrant-origin women
using these services. It is a pasta made by hand with loving care, a collab-
orative feminist kneading and shaping of the pieces. The next chapter
by Hande Birkalan-Gedik is a succulent meat dish, roasted in the fires
of feminist engagement. Birkalan-Gedik addresses the history of femi-

nist ethnography in Turkey, seeking to understand why feminists within
anthropology have not picked up on the Writing Culture legacy to the
extent that non-anthropologists doing ethnography have. The next course
comes from Paloma Gay y Blasco, who serves us a Payo (non-Gypsy)
dish laden with Gitana spice. Her reciprocal ethnography makes visible
a Gitana perspective on the Payo world, including that of Paloma as a
Paya academic. The outcome is a paragon of culinary fusion. The essay
by Omar Kasmani is not one of those trendy hipster dishes that he dispar-
ages in the bourgeois-bohème cafés of Berlin, but rather an intriguing,
deconstructed plat du jour from molecular cuisine. His autotheoretical
articulation of ‘thin attachments’ offers a queer rendering of his position-
ality as ethnographer, foregrounding elements of affect. To round out
the collection, the chapter by Daniela Salvucci brings us full circle in our
discussion, coming back to Elsie Masson—a fine, aged cheese to close the
savoury portion of our meal. Salvucci draws our attention to Elsie Masson
as a writer and quasi-ethnographer in her own right, opening up a number
of questions about her writerly collaboration with her renowned husband,
putative founder of the ethnographic canon. Finally, the Afterword by
Marilyn Strathern could not be anything if not a dessert, followed by a
shot of an Italian herbal digestivo drink to wash down the whole meal.
At this point, we can only wish you, dear reader, ‘Buon
appetito/Guten Appetit’, and an enjoyable experience of reading. Hope-
fully, you will find elements of stimulation to nourish your own ethno-
graphic writing.
Notes
1. Frank Heidemann was among the colleagues who read and commented
an earlier draft of this essay, along with Alessandra Gribaldo, Chandana
Mathur and Barbara Sorgoni. We thank them for their insightful remarks
and suggestions for improvement‚ and any remaining flaws are our own.
We would also like to acknowledge Francesca Bettocchi and Maria Lord
for translations and linguistic consulting.
2. It is interesting to note that Applegarth’s meticulous study fell on remark-
ably deaf ears within the world of anthropology itself, where not one review
of the volume appeared in a major anthropological journal.
3. Among the most active online spaces, see the HauTalk and AnthroSoWhite
Twitter hashtags: https://twitter.com/hashtag/anthrosowhite?src=has
htag_click and https://twitter.com/hashtag/hautalk?f=live. Other online
contributions to the discussion, only to name a few, are from the Society for
Cultural Anthropology website: https://culanth.org/fieldsights/series/
from-reciprocity-to-relationality-anthropological-possibilities; Zoe Todd’s
piece in the Anthro{dendum} blog: https://anthrodendum.org/2018/
06/15/the-decolonial-turn-2-0-the-reckoning/; and this from AllegraLab:
https://allegralaboratory.net/shocked-not-surprised-hautalk/ Since 2017,
the Cite Black Women movement has drawn attention to the question of
citational practices: https://www.citeblackwomencollective.org/.
4. The Anthro{dendum} blog (formerly Savage Minds) is one such space:
https://anthrodendum.org/. See also Otherwise Magazine: https://www.
otherwisemag.com/magazine. As for conventional print, Anthropology and
Humanism publishes poetry and fiction by anthropologists.
5. We should keep in mind that Mead was a pre-internet writer: while it is
beyond of the scope of this essay, we think it would be worth asking what
stylistic changes and modifications in content have been brought about
by the transition from handwriting and typing to the PC and internet.
Considering the effects of the conditions behind ethnographic writing,
we may ask what writing is all about in late capitalism (Brenneis 2016;
Hannerz 2016), and in what ways this has impacted the flow of narratives.
In the light of these newer writing environments, one might also ask if this
‘middle stage of scholarly production’ (Ghodsee 2018, 417) has undergone
a fundamental transformation (see Wulff 2016).
6. The American Anthropological Association report and recommendations
are available on the Association website: https://www.americananthro.
org/AdvanceYourCareer/Content.aspx?ItemNumber=1667&navItemNu
mber=582 [last accessed 14.12.2020].
7. While life histories and life stories have mostly been associated with women,
we should recall how Vincent Crapanzano’s Tuhami (Crapanzano 1980)
constituted a remarkable example of the genre focusing on the life of a
Moroccan man.
8. In this regard, both Visweswaran (1997) and Applegarth (2014) invoke
women anthropologists who were active in the Victorian era in the U.S.,
from the 1880s on.
9. Nelson’s autotheory has interesting resonances with autoethnography as
anthropologists know it, though we cannot explore this here. Autotheory
is best known in connection with her book The Argonauts (2015), leading
any anthropologists in the house to wonder if her work was somehow
intended as a riff on Malinowski’s book (it was a reference to Barthes).
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Towards an Anthropological Appreciation
of Silence as an Ethnographic Key: Homely,
Instrumental, Ethical
Nigel Rapport
Preamble: The ‘Femininity’ of Silence

‘Life escapes’. This was how Virginia Woolf (1938: 148) felt about
the literature that was popular in the early twentieth century, litera-
ture primarily from male writers: H. G. Wells, John Galsworthy, Arnold
Bennett. Is it not the writer’s task, Woolf went on, to convey the
experience of human consciousness: ‘this varying, this unknown and
uncircumscribed spirit, whatever aberration or complexity it may display,
with as little mixture of the alien and external as possible’? (1938: 148–9).
And yet, filling pages in the way customarily undertaken—plot, char-
acter, probability—risked misappropriating such experience: the ‘myriad
impressions’ that ‘fall upon the mind’, ‘incessant, shaping themselves into
different moments’, ‘however disconnected and incoherent in appear-
ance’ (ibid.). No method and no experiment in genre must be forbidden
towards this end, Woolf concluded (1938: 153), only falsity and pretence:
N. Rapport (B)
Social Anthropology, University of St. Andrews, Fife, Scotland, UK
e-mail: rapport@st-andrews.ac.uk

Switzerland AG 2021
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-71726-1_3
46 N. RAPPORT
there were surely ‘infinite possibilities’ if the writer were to draw on ‘every
quality of brain and spirit’.
The ‘writer’ that Woolf primarily had in mind here was the novelist, but
I have nevertheless been inspired over the years, as an ethnographer, by
her invitations. Should it not be the case that the structure, the style, and
the content of anthropological writing should reflect alike the ethnogra-
pher’s experience of the experience of those individual research subjects
with whom fieldwork engages?
But I have recently been more daunted. Is this something I have
personally ever achieved, or even seriously attempted? Could one achieve
it? Virginia Woolf’s sister novelist, Elizabeth Jane Howard (1982),
expresses some of these doubts when she considers that to venture expla-
nations of the behaviour of others is necessary to fall back on kinds
of invention that reveal more about the writer’s self than another. To
write of others is to write fiction; even the description of a lover or close
friend deploys ‘public words’ for the making of a ‘public image’, meaning
that ‘everything of significance is lost’, everything personal ‘obscured’
(Howard 1976: 259).
Woolf’s and Howard’s feminine, indeed feminist, reservations
concerning the genre and scriptural conventions of a predominantly
masculine literary world lead me to wonder about silence: my own silence
as an ethnographer and a writer of anthropological descriptions and anal-
yses, and the silence of my research subjects. What new purchase may
I gain on human experience through an appreciation of silence and
its writerly use: purchase on the way that the personality and person-
alism of subjective consciousness threaten to escape words? There is
an extensive feminist literature that celebrates silence, indeed, for its
potential to subvert and rebut a ‘phallocentrism’ that has traditionally
vaunted the speechifying male. Silence offers a measurelessness, an aper-
ture and interval, a meditative and ironizing space, to be reclaimed as
more than ‘female’ and ‘domestic’ (Irigaray 1985; Knowles 2015; Godart
2016). More narrowly in this context, might I look to silence as a means
more authentically to incorporate human otherness in an anthropolog-
ical text, however paradoxical this might sound? The irony of having
my words replace research subjects’ silence—while insisting that it is
silence that remains the focus—will make the fiction of the writing more
plain, at least. At best, the ‘secrecy of subjectivity’ (Levinas 1985: 78)
that is another human life is brought into sharpest focus, cautioning
TOWARDS AN ANTHROPOLOGICAL APPRECIATION OF SILENCE … 47
against a merely ‘customary’ writing, as Woolf urged, and challenging

experimentation.
Writing Phenomenological Subjectivity

A place to begin is provided by the ‘trope theory’ of James Fernandez
(1971, 1977) and his consideration of the tension between the ‘tropic’
and the ‘inchoate’. The elemental vectors of human existence, Fernandez
suggests, concern how we, as individual beings, project bodily states out
into the world beyond us. Tropes of cultural convention—the formulae
of words and behaviour by which social life is habitually conducted
and exchanged—are deployed by individual members of those cultures
and societies as means to attempt to come to terms with their own
bodily experience: to know it, and to communicate it in the hope of
sharing it. ‘This is what I feel and see; this is who and how I am;
this is how I construe the world; and you?’ Here is the motivation
for cultural expression and social belonging. Individual experiences of
body and mind— psycho-somatic, ‘anchored in our body’ (Fernandez
1977: 478)—ramify out into the world, via cultural symbologies in social
milieux. The body, according to Fernandez, is to be appreciated as the
site where individual emotions and intellections, and cultural codes and
social practices and ecological conditions meet.
But this is no steady-state phenomenon. For psycho-somatic experi-
ence is in flux, first in reaction to how prior projections of that experience
are met by the environing world, and then because ‘This is what I feel and
see; this is who and how I am’ are matters of ambiguity. The experience
of self lacks precise or constant form: it is inchoate, Fernandez argues:
it may concern silence rather than a tropic formalism. In other words,
if culture and society are motivated to exist by individuals endeavouring
to express their bodily states, then those states are transitory, and those
states escape easy comprehension and definition even for the individual
themselves. We should not underestimate the ubiquity and significance of
what is inchoate in human experience, Fernandez writes, ‘identities are
problematic and not precisely defined’ (1982: 544).
The main objective of anthropology, Fernandez concludes, is
phenomenological subjectivity: trying to get an impression of the partic-
ular sensory apparatus, operating from a particular embodied point of
view, on which an individual’s conceptions are based. Anthropology is
the attempt to register the ‘sensorium [in which] minds are enmeshed’
48 N. RAPPORT
(Fernandez 1992: 127, 134). What makes this feasible as social science,
according to Fernandez, are precisely the tropes, the cultural forms and
social institutions, in which and by which individuals will endeavour to
express themselves. Metaphors and metonyms, analogies and narratives,
conventional gestures, can properly be understood in their individual
usage as kinds of hypothesis brought to bear on the often inchoate subject
of personal consciousness such that subjectivity might accede to more
concrete treatment by the individuals that inhabit consciousness and those
bodily sensoriums. Such tropic usage represents attempts to compose
individual experience: to figure out what lives are like (Fernandez 1992:
134–5). Hence, the focus of anthropological analysis may shift from
individual experience as such—its fluxional nature, its possibly inchoate
character, its intrinsic ambiguity or ‘silence’—to how language in public
exchange glosses the phenomenological problematic.
But here I depart from Fernandez. There is certainly methodological
convenience in shifting the focus of anthropological study from individu-
als’ phenomenological subjectivity per se to the cultural and social media
in which the former seeks expression: a canopy of formulae, rituals and
narratives. But while practicable, such methodological strategy also alters
the topic of anthropological investigation: a focus on the tropic does
not do justice to phenomenological subjectivity—its shifting, possibly
inchoate nature—and the silence that may be its enduring state. To focus
not on silence as such but its translation into the tropes of sociocultural
exchange, its transformation, risks missing silence tout court. And rather
than a phenomenological approach one risks a (dismissive) structuralist
one: ‘Deep down in the silence of your interiority, [every competence]
has first to come from the outside, to be slowly sunk in and deposited
into some well-constructed cellar whose doors have then to be carefully
sealed’ (Latour 2007: 212).
In this essay I would retain a focus on silence as a thing-in-itself, and
ponder what might be learnt anthropologically from silence as human
experience: silence as a key component of human identity and individual
expression; hence key, too, to cultural tradition and social interaction.
There may be much in human experience that dwells in silence, both for
the individual inhabitant of consciousness and for those social others with
whom the individual interacts.
Explorations of Silence
How might such anthropology of silence proceed? I have in the past imag-
ined a definition of social anthropology as the study of the effects that
human beings—as individual, energetic things-in-the-world—have upon
one another, as their distinct and often incommensurate worldviews and
life-projects come into contact via social institutions and cultural forms
(Rapport 2003: 75–6). These effects will often be inadvertent and indi-
rect, unintended. In this essay I would extend the effects that individuals
are responsible for to include silence: the social effects of the individual
who is silent to themselves —unable or unwilling to ‘speak’ of themselves to
themselves—and the social effects of the individual who is silent to others —
unable or unwilling to engage by way of the conventional tropes of social
interaction and cultural exchange.
I have also in the past imagined the possibilities of anthropology of
individual interiority: incorporating the internal conversation that an indi-
vidual will maintain with themselves over a conscious lifetime (Rapport
2008a, 2012). I have felt that such a study would have a founda-
tional significance, indeed, for a true appreciation of what ‘crosses the
boundaries’ of (private) individual selfhood—and becomes the public
forms of society and culture. Only by seeking to know how individuals
live with themselves internally—inhabit their consciousness—can anthro-
pology hope to know how individuals intend to live with others: how
they come to animate cultural–symbolic forms and social institutions with
personal purpose. The present essay would extend the imaginary of indi-
vidual interiority to include what is experienced in and as silence—and the
effects of this latter on others.
The essay must be indicative rather than conclusive: an indication
of the range of issues that anthropology of silence might anticipate
addressing. Silence I shall explore as key to the homeliness of an indi-
vidual’s being with themselves; also as instrumental in social conformism,
in managing the distance between individual separateness and ‘noisy’
interaction; or, equally, as manifesting a significant withdrawing or with-
holding, a refraining from engaging with self and other; and finally, silence
as party to a ‘cosmopolitan politesse’ where the individual is socially
recognized and included not as member of a collective category but as
themselves alone.
50 N. RAPPORT
The Homeliness of Silence

There is a suggestive passage in Virginia Woolf’s novel, Orlando (1980:
196), where she supposes that individuals talk aloud only because the
different identities of which they are composed—the many discrete selves
that they have created for themselves—are conscious of disagreement or
misunderstanding among themselves. The public space of tropic exchange
is entered so that individuals may better communicate with themselves;
when this has been established, they fall silent.
To the Lighthouse likewise sees silence playing a significant role. The
novel is often described as a roman à clef ; the book’s paterfamilias, Mr
Ramsay, stands in for Virginia’s father, the philosopher Leslie Stephen,
while the materfamilias, Mrs. Ramsay, is an evocation of Virginia’s mother
(who died when Virginia was 13). Virginia herself most nearly resembles
the young Cam Ramsay, who wants to be a writer. The setting is a holiday
house on the Isle of Skye, modelled closely on the Stephens’ country
retreat, Talland House, in St. Ives, which looks out onto a bay and
the Godrevy Lighthouse. Virginia made a boat trip to this lighthouse in
1892, as concerns the main action in her novel and its sentimental main-
spring. In one scene, Woolf describes Mrs. Ramsay knitting by herself in
a room, having tended all day to the needs of her family and houseguests
(including ‘Lily’ and ‘Augustus Carmichael’):
For now she need not think about anybody. She could be herself, by
herself. And that was what now she often felt the need of—to think; well,
not even to think. To be silent; to be alone. All the being and the doing,
expansive, glittering, vocal, evaporated; and one shrunk, with a sense of
solemnity, to being oneself, a wedge-shaped core of darkness, something
invisible to others. (…) When life sank down for a moment, the range
of experience seemed limitless. And to everybody there was always this
sense of unlimited resources, she supposed; one after another, she, Lily,
Augustus Carmichael, must feel, our apparitions, the things you know us
by, are simply childish. Beneath it is all dark, it is all spreading, it is unfath-
omably deep; but now and again we rise to the surface and that is what
you see us by. (…) This core of darkness could go anywhere, for no one
saw it. They could not stop it, she thought, exulting. There was freedom,
there was peace, there was, most welcome of all, a summoning together,
a resting on a platform of stability. Not as oneself did one find rest ever,
in her experience (she accomplished here something dexterous with her
needles) but as a wedge of darkness. Losing personality, one lost the fret,
the hurry, the stir; and there rose to her lips always some exclamation of
triumph over life when things came together in this peace, this rest, this
eternity. (Woolf 1955: 95–6)
Later, Woolf revisits Mrs. Ramsay’s silence, but now seen through the eyes
of Lily, a younger woman. Lily interprets Mrs. Ramsay’s silence in her own
way, but she too recognizes how characteristic it is for Mrs. Ramsay to sit
like this, even in company:
Mrs. Ramsay sat silent. She was glad, Lily thought, to rest in silence,
uncommunicative; to rest in the extreme obscurity of human relationships.
Who knows what we are, what we feel? Who knows even at the moment
of intimacy, This is knowledge? Aren’t things spoilt then, Mrs Ramsay may
have asked (it seemed to have happened so often, this silence by her side)
by saying them? Aren’t we more expressive thus? (Woolf 1955: 255–6)
In these extracts, Woolf’s observations concerning Mrs. Ramsay—and the

mother she remembered—seem to me ‘ethnographic’ in their authen-
ticity. That is, I can imagine them as keen observations and authentic
representations of an individual who actually lived, and hence as human
truths. In particular, I can see them as insightful concerning the place of
silence in an individual’s life and in relation with others. Mrs. Ramsay’s
silence as she sits and knits, experiencing her ‘wedge of darkness’,
comprises a kind of homemaking that she establishes for herself: she is
comfortable in silence; this is where she knows herself best; this is where
she is most at-one with her surroundings. Her silence was habitual, some-
thing that Mrs. Ramsay often felt the need for, and where she found
freedom and peace and stability: restfulness and the homeliness of truly
contemplating and understanding self and world. In her silence Mrs.
Ramsay experienced a sense of the unlimited resources that she contained,
the personal depths that lay beneath the apparitions of conventional role-
playing that she might publicly adopt. At the same time, in her silence
Mrs. Ramsay was her most expressive. Woolf sets up a triangle between
herself and her protagonists such that Mrs. Ramsay’s silence becomes the
state where she is known to Lily as most characteristically herself.
‘How much better is silence; the coffee cup, the table. How much
better to sit by myself like the solitary sea-bird that opens its wings on
the stake’ (Woolf 1983: 199). The stories that Woolf creates add to an
anthropological appreciation of how, universally, in company or alone,
individual human beings may occupy a homely silence.
52 N. RAPPORT
The Adventure of Silence

There is something else that Woolf’s treatment of silence brings to
the fore, something also latent in Fernandez and his treatment of the
inchoate. This is solitude. For Fernandez, culture and society arise out
of an individual drive to move from solitude to social relationality. The
individual creates and deploys symbolic tropes so as to have some means
possibly to communicate and share original personal experience. The
extent to which this is successful, given the uniqueness of individual
human embodiment and the intrinsic ambiguity in symbolic forms—what
do others intend by words and behaviours socially exchanged?—is moot.
For Woolf, what is most characteristic about Mrs Ramsay is her content-
ment and her need to be alone: when she is silent she is alone enjoying
her own unlimited resources of imagination and feeling. In Philip Lark-
in’s haunting image, supported on the ‘giant palm’ of ‘uncontradicting
solitude’, ‘there cautiously / Unfolds, emerges, what I am’ (1988: 56–7).
Philosophically, much attention has been given to the solitudinous
nature of human existence and the silence with which this might manifest
itself. Such philosophical observations also concern our ability to know
ourselves: to adopt an ‘ironic’ stance in regard to the consciousness that
is our window on the world so as to reflect critically on the worldviews we
adopt and the life-projects through which we come to know what is other.
And while tropic communication and comparison with others might go
some way to overcoming the uncertainties of judging the nature of reality,
the conscious self remains an Archimedean point of uncertainty:
We cannot tie down or place the organizing centre of experience (…) and
make it just another object among the things we apprehend. It is not
known as things are known but as a condition of knowing. (Lewis 1973:
35)
We know we have thoughts and feelings, we know what it is like to be

ourselves, but we do not know how we know, think and feel this:
My distinctness, my being me, is quite unmistakeable to me, there can be

nothing of which I am more certain, but it is also unique and ultimate,
not unique like a rare vase or painting where we can indicate the properties
that make it unique, but unique in a final sense of just being itself. (Lewis
1982: 55)
It is perhaps to Friedrich Nietzsche (if not Søren Kierkegaard) that we

look for the origin of concerted modern philosophical attempts to reflect
on individual embodiment as the source of conscious being-in-the-world,
and the limits to knowledge and expression that this might inevitably
incur. However carefully—conscientiously—we record the facts of our
own being as they seem to us, Nietzsche urged (1979), self-analysis
cannot remove us from the processes of our own consciousness and our
habits of interpretation. We cannot know whether we are truly knowing
ourselves—even whether we have a consistent self to know—because it
is our self, with its biases and preferences, that is our only instrument
of discovery. Our consciousness, Nietzsche concludes, is perhaps better
considered as a surface to our being, beneath which lies a morass of
emotion, will and spirit, body and desire: ‘impurities’ to reason which
nonetheless colour our knowing.
At the same time, Nietzsche maintained, from his earliest years, a
habit of recording introspective explorations. Also, testing his body and
diet to ascertain the conditions of best performance, and recording the
results. Thus he would hope to reach more reliable truths about himself
by combining ideation and affect with observation. Moreover, if the
economy of the mind was ultimately that of the body, then experi-
ments with the latter—in relation to food, sex, music, walking, brainwork,
say—could be of great spiritual consequence. It was perhaps the case
that through practice and will one could come to know one’s uncon-
scious habits of being, and overcome them. Nietzsche can be said to
have developed a passion for exploring the paradoxes, and enquiring
of the limits, of an individual’s capacity to know themselves; in his
adult philosophy he proposed such introspective exercises as necessary
for all those aspiring to truth. Through such engagement, people might
know themselves deeply—however contingently—as individuals. More-
over, introspection opened a way not only to self-control, self-overcoming
and self-improvement but also to moral improvement: ‘egoism belongs to
the essence of a noble soul’ (1978: 185).
Nietzsche’s paradoxical attitude towards introspection is explained in
terms of the power that he saw the practice giving onto. It may not ever
be possible to reason truthfully about the properties of the world—or
to uncover a true self—from our place within it. Nevertheless, a habit
of close observation and experimentation accustoms the individual to
looking at themselves askance and possibly transcending themselves: over-
coming what are found to be present aspects of self and aspiring to better.
54 N. RAPPORT
Perhaps one’s introspective ventures do not descend into the true depths
of being, but introspection enthralls because of its potential for adven-
turous fullness. Nothing in experience is so fruitful and entire, or as
consequential for one’s consequent tropic expression:
* I love that introspective business, that interest in oneself.
* I have always looked forward to seeing what I could fish out of myself.
I am a treasure island seeker and the island is myself.
* The most unexpected thing I ever came across was myself.
* There is no-one I more love to meet than myself; no one whose society
I more covet than my own.
These are not the words of Nietzsche but of Stanley Spencer, the English
painter and visionary (cited in Collis 1962: 203). The thought of a whole
day with himself filled him with ‘the romance of adventure’, Spencer
admitted. He also described the time as a vital ‘arriving at himself’: ‘One-
self is a being which can only fulfil itself by a constant and passionate
attention to that fulfilment and never swerving from it’ (cited in Glew
2001: 171). This fulfilment Spencer saw as a creative act. He was pressed
by a great urge for self-expression, but before he could paint he had to
journey to those regions of mind that he knew perhaps less well and felt
less in control of, regions where emotions of like and dislike dwelled. It
was here that he found the authority for what and how to paint, as well as
the capacity to identify the exact likeness, the true identity, of things. The
creative process Spencer described as ‘definition through passion’ (cited
in Glew 2001: 176).
Spencer recounted the ‘open-mindedness’ and ‘generosity’ with which
he sought to approach his own mind. He determined not to concern
himself with what was ‘good’, ‘bad’, or inconsistent, but to like all he
found in himself. For only when ‘the whole committee of “mes” had been
consulted’ (see Glew 2001: 198), and every kind of desire and wish to
feel been satisfied, did he know what he wished to say and how he might
complete a work of art. Instead he would appreciate the whole since it
derived from the same individual source; he would pay passionate atten-
tion to himself and exercise an openness to the complexity and fullness of
his passions.
Moreover, Spencer knew the creative act as a social and a moral act.
An artist’s life, he felt, was a continual celebration of ‘marriage’ between
himself and what he wanted to paint. When he introspected and discov-
ered his own ‘integral harmony’, he was also given to seeing the identity
of others; it was when he came to know himself most fully that he opened
himself up to the complex appreciation of what his senses revealed of
otherness beyond the self. For Spencer, painting was an act of connection,
of love even, between true selves.
When Stanley Spencer exclaimed, ‘I like my life so much that I would
like to cover every empty space on a wall with it’ (cited in Glew 2001:
117), this is not to be taken (merely) as a sign of egotism. For it was
through examining his life, taking time to ponder his own identity, that
he felt he discovered the world. ‘If you wish to understand others you
must intensify your own individualism’ Oscar Wilde counselled (1913:
156), and Spencer took him at his word. Moreover, the key to this was
solitude: a silent introspection, a responsible and confident individuality.
As soon as one tried to adhere to ready-made standards, rules and codes
of conduct, one found oneself ‘cut off from [one’s] essential humanity’
(cited in Glew 2001: 199).
What may be learnt from Spencer and from Nietzsche is the ‘adven-
ture’ of silence: the ‘capital’ of its ‘mountaintop plenitude’: ‘silence
as wealth exponentially increasing’ (Roth 2000: 44). The individual
communing with himself or herself uncovers the source of creativity.
One introspects and journeys through one’s body, bringing to mind its
habitual needs and preferences, its remembrances, its flights of fancy. This
is also a source of anxiety. What can be known definitively? The uncer-
tainty of securing for oneself a stable point of self-reference gives to one’s
adventurous solitude a limitlessness that is vertiginous as well as fulfilling.
The Pragmatism of Silence

Proposing a mapping of what he calls ‘the distribution of discourse’,
George Steiner (1978) has argued that human linguistic expression can be
seen as divided into two distinct portions: the audible and inaudible; the
voiced and unvoiced. ‘Internal speech-acts are as important as external,
societal speech-acts, and it is very likely that they represent the denser,
statistically more extensive portion of the total distribution of discourse’
(Steiner 1978: 65). Quantitatively, Steiner contends, there is every reason
to believe we speak inwardly and to ourselves more than outwardly to
56 N. RAPPORT
anyone else: ‘the major portion of all “locutionary motions”, (…) of all
intentionalities of verbalization, whether audible or not, is internalized’
(1978: 62); what breaches the surface of the self may be a fragment of an
individual’s linguistic production. Qualitatively, the inward and unvoiced
may enact primary and essential functions of identity: testing and verifying
our ‘being there’, fixing us in time and space, engendering self-knowledge
and self-satisfaction. In unvoiced or silent linguistic expression may be
lodged the fundamental stream or current or currency of consciousness,
whether waking or sleeping, practical or fanciful. At the very least, voiced
discourse should be understood in the context of the individual’s contin-
uous and complex unvoiced, internal conversation. Truly to comprehend
what a person speaks, to apprehend its significance fully and most truly, it
would be necessary to contextualize it by way of everything that remains
silent: that that individual is at the same time not saying aloud (Rapport
1993).
At the least, the relationship between voiced and unvoiced discourse
is a variable one: uncertain, ambiguous. Virginia Woolf also adverted to
this in Orlando (1980: 192–3). Even as the biographer of a fictional char-
acter, how was one to deal with the complexity, the manifoldness, of the
individual subject? Their versions may number in the thousands—may
be numberless. Did one know how to chart the relationship between
the ‘distribution of discourse’, between the silent and the enunciated,
such that what was publicly expressed was authentic? How was Woolf
to persuade the reader that her account of Orlando’s utterances—the way
that Orlando gave verbal and behavioural form to a phenomenological
subjectivity—was a telling one?
In short, the relationship between voice and individual identity is
always an ambiguous one, complex and partial (Rapport 2008a; Irving
2009). The listener—the novelist, biographer, anthropologist—cannot
assume that they know another individual by virtue of what they enun-
ciate. Is what one hears from another a true, entire, open and plain
expression? Very likely not. What is held to be dearest and truest and
most personal may be what is withheld, what individuals are most loath
to give up to public scrutiny; what is dearest and truest and most personal
may be the hardest to enunciate in public language.
Moreover, the ambiguous relation between what is publicly voiced
and what is voiced internally, in silence, is an issue for the speaker as
well as the listener. How to enunciate and what to enunciate of private
consciousness is a problematic ubiquitous to social life. ‘Useless knowl-

edge’ was the ominous phrase chosen by Charlotte Delbo (1995) to treat
her internment in Auschwitz-Birkenau as a Communist member of the
French Resistance. What use was it to learn as a result of experiences in
the Lager that hunger made human eyes sparkle while thirst dulled them;
or that at night one hoped for life but come the morning one wished for
death; or that when one witnessed the body of one’s murdered mother
one was not necessarily brought to tears. This kind of knowledge must be
withheld or withdrawn, unrehearsed and unlearned, Delbo concluded, if
one wished to go on living: the trauma must be silenced, both internally
and externally.
Delbo’s insight introduces a range of possible circumstances where it
might be impossible or inappropriate to voice what an individual knows
and could express, and might otherwise feel a need to express. All manner
of situations of politeness and taboo, of mood and temperament, as
well as extreme alienation and dehumanization, might militate against
the expression of personal knowledge and against engagement. Silence
becomes a strategy for the survival of personality (Lothe 2017: 20–21).
More mundanely, a functioning social system may be based on certain
forms of institutional reticence and ignorance. A complex organization—
a hospital, an orchestra, even a family—may function according to certain
myopia or blindness regarding the true feelings that one section has for
another. For the effectiveness of their role-playing it is appropriate that the
medical consultant or orchestral conductor do not hear what the porter
or the percussionist truly experiences from their contrary position. More
mundanely still, a functioning marriage may be based on ‘kindness and
lies’ (that are ‘worth a thousand truths’) (Greene 1974: 58). How appro-
priate is it to tell a spouse one’s true feelings for one’s in-laws, or that
their ageing diminishes their attractiveness in one’s eyes? In George Eliot’s
poetic image, were we to exercise ‘a keen vision and feeling’ to all aspects
of ordinary life, ‘we should die of that roar which lies on the other side
of silence’ (1994: 185).
There is, in short, a politics to silence, and a personal temper. Meaning
and identity are not truly expressed because of shyness, laziness, kind-
ness and psychological health, because of mannerliness and convention,
because of political expediency, because of social functionality. Even
should an individual give public voice, a release from ambiguity is not
vouchsafed. If the original context of an individual’s expression is their
personal worldviews—the selves and landscapes in which they construe
58 N. RAPPORT
themselves consciously to be living and acting—then their public voic-

ings, their ‘externalizations’, always risk mistranslation when interpreted
by others (Rapport 1993, 2008a).
The Privilege of Silence

There is a culture and a sociality to silence. Its connotations can be
negative:
* Nigel’s a deep one! You need “Twenty Questions” to get anything out
of him!
* Nigel is quiet and hard to know.
* Why are you so quiet, Nigel? Is it money?
* I think Nigel needs more appreciation from us. I don’t know about his
secretive ways, and silences… He can’t be a real Welshman!
* I said you were deep, Nigel, when Sid asked me; and that you said nowt
unless you were asked.
These are all assessments by Doris, a farm-wife, of me, her new farm
labourer. The occasion is my first fieldwork as an anthropologist, in
Wanet, a rural valley in the north of England (Rapport 1993, 1994).
Doris is in her mid-thirties and I am ten years younger. But in terms of
my skills and local knowledge I am younger again, more like her teenage
children: Doris has come to treat me as another child of the farm, her
farm, Cedar High. I am a ‘waif’ and ‘stray’ whom she and her husband
Fred, in kindness, have taken in—housing and feeding—and whom they
tolerate in exchange for daily labour on the farm. That is, she and Fred are
teaching me how to be a tolerable farm labourer: how to muck-out cow
shippons, feed the sheep on the high fells, drive a tractor, fence and dry-
stone wall, mix and lay concrete, ‘haytime’, show animals at market, birth,
castrate and bury them. Equally importantly, Doris and Fred are teaching
me how to be a responsible member of the Harvey family. For now I am
‘Nigel of Cedar High Farm’: I bear the family reputation around Wanet
village, in what I do and what I say and my demeanour, since nothing
can easily be kept secret and I must be wary when I step beyond the farm
bounds. In return, Doris and Fred will be discrete about my ignorance

and stupidity: as intrinsically useless as ‘a chocolate fireguard’; as out of
place as ‘tits on a bull’.
My status as farm labourer had nevertheless been hard-won. It had
taken months and come to feel like a triumph, a sinecure, estab-
lishing myself as a legitimate local actor. Wanet is a beauty spot as
well as a farming valley, and home to a sizeable community of second-
home owners, retirees, commuters and tourists. These ‘offcomers’ of
‘off-comed-uns’ were generally disparaged by Wanet locals who felt hard-
pressed to maintain what was felt to be a way of life that was hard but
rewarding, and theirs alone—in the face of aliens with money but no
sense, and no right to be there. Offcomers were an alien breed. They
acted differently and they used words differently: glib talkers who were
willing to argue that ‘black was white, and yellow no colour at all’. By
rights, offcomers should return to the cities of grime, crime, morbidity
and miscegenation that was their natural (squalid) habitat. I had worked
hard to extricate myself from the classificatory company of these incomers
and to insinuate myself into local exchange. I had served as a waiter in
a locally run restaurant, been a pub regular for evenings of darts and
dominoes, attended local whist drives and church services. I saw the error
of my erstwhile urban ways: being a farmer, belonging to Wanet, was
the best life. Being accepted as Doris and Fred’s farm labourer—from a
weekend trial to a full-time irregular ‘appointment’, housed in a single-
seater caravan bought for the purpose—was my reward. I was fit, I was
keen and I was biddable.
I was also, however, child-like in my ignorance of farm life and my
naivety in local ways—indeed, the ways of the world. And Doris knew
her duties in regard to children, whether her own or strays she had, out
of kindness, taken under her wing. The world was a cold, hard place,
Doris found. People could be dwarfed by its size and its threats, natural
and manmade. The best chance of survival (and happiness) came from
hard work and careful attention to one’s own affairs, one’s own busi-
ness. Ideally, a human community like Wanet village amounted to a set
of cooperating businesses: dairy farming, beef farming, sheep farming;
pubs and shops; guesthouses, perhaps camping and caravan sites. Each
accounted for the survival of an individual or a family. Sadly, however,
Doris found that people did not behave realistically. Some were dili-
gent, but others were lazy, incompetent, unable to accrue a skill or keep
a business afloat. Some minded their own business, but others wanted
60 N. RAPPORT
something for nothing, or were envious of those who improved them-

selves and wished them ill. Moreover, the flood of strangers into Wanet
had only exacerbated bad behaviour, threatening local life and tradition.
The offcomers thought you could live differently, but they were wrong: to
survive in Wanet you needed a different kind of intelligence from theirs,
one that was bred into you. What Wanet people knew was second nature
to them, most of it not coming from school-learning but from stamina
and common sense.
It is increasingly the case, nevertheless, that Doris finds she and Fred
cannot trust their Wanet neighbours. Nosey, deceitful, gossiping, rumour-
mongering, insulting, hypocritical, duplicitous, thieving, trespassing: you
could hold something against every one of them, all in Wanet being ‘black
souls’ in some respect. Little wonder that Doris feels aggrieved. Here she
is, born in Wanet, bred for Wanet, bringing up four children in Wanet,
maintaining a farmhouse that has stood since the 1600s, turning Cedar
High Farm into a modern, profitable concern, and yet she is surrounded
by people—locals as well as offcomers—who would jeopardize her family,
her happiness and her business survival. But Doris refuses to be cowed.
Wanet is her home and it will remain so: no way of life could be better.
She will stay put, she will protect her own and she will improve her lot.
She is canny; she has a mature grasp of how the world works, how people
truly are, and how the business of life has to be conducted. There is, after
all, no escaping the laws of Nature, whether this concerns the breeding
of animals or of people. People are what they are bred to be, and many
offcomers should not be allowed to breed at all:
* It must be clear to everyone, Nigel, that some folks are just six-to-a-
dozen. And then you have to send their kids away to special schools ‘cos
they’re deformed and too stupid to go to a normal school. It’s terrible!
But what can you expect when their parents are a pair of thickheads?…
Why do they let that sort of thing continue, Nigel? Why isn’t something
done about it?
One thing that Doris is absolutely determined to do is to keep her

own house in order. She and her family and her business will behave as
they should, as they must. Of overriding importance is that her children
are protected from those that would threaten them, and the immorality
the latter convey. Doris arms herself for the supremely important task of
properly rearing her children, sons and daughters: recognizing ‘where her
children are coming from’, and directing their futures as family members
and Wanet locals. There must be discipline, obedience, distinguishing
right from wrong, while not being so hard that the children rebel or go
mad (and end up with no manners and doing nothing right at all).
Perhaps the key to good parenting is the knowledge an adult has of
a child’s character—knowledge that they themselves do not: what their
family history and parentage decrees, what body language reveals, what
signs of the Zodiac instruct. The main problem with children, when they
are not releasing high spirits, or fighting boredom or throwing temper
tantrums and getting hysterical, is their being spiteful: daring you to
establish who is in control. And that needs careful attention. Spitefulness
and wilfulness need ‘braying’ out of children because only with maturity
is there self-awareness and self-understanding. At least she and Fred are
good parents, Doris is assured. They understand what kind of creatures
children are: how they develop and what they need, and how ‘from little
things big things grow’. Moreover, instilling right and wrong into her
children to some extent makes up for the mess in which she finds the
world beyond Cedar High Farm. The farm is a kind of heaven where a
traditional, natural, way of life can be respected. However rude, nosey
and interfering people off the farm might be—as if she and Fred did not
know the natural laws of survival and what was for the best on their own
‘shit-heap’—they will maintain family standards: polite children, careful
to give nothing away, party to the farm’s health and reputation.
Which brings Doris to the question of Nigel: a ‘college student’,
but also a child (in maturity and temperament) whom she and Fred
have kindly taken in for a spell. His family seems mysteriously absent or
distant—although a sister came to visit—and, in loco parentis, she and
Fred have undertaken to instruct him: how to be on Cedar High Farm
and also how to be as a grown-up male in Wanet. But Nigel is moody,
it seems: secretive, hard to trust. He has said he was from Wales, but the
Welsh are known for their singing, and loquaciousness, so Nigel’s silence
only makes the mystery deeper. He must learn to curb these immature
and unsociable traits. Some children can suffer from a tendency to be
‘underneath’ when they are growing up, which they can find difficult to
overcome. It is also a matter of Nigel’s developing a thicker skin and not
taking it too much to heart when she or Fred have to ‘call’ him or curse
him to set him right. Reticence is one thing—not saying inappropriate
things to farm outsiders—but being silently aloof, non-participatory, is
quite another…
62 N. RAPPORT
In sum, silence was not something that legitimately pertained to the

role of ‘child’ whom Doris would incorporate and instruct. Being silent
was a behaviour that in Wanet, as a labourer at Cedar High—as an anthro-
pologist hoping to maintain a hard-won local identity—I felt I dared not
practice. And yet, it was a ‘privilege’ to which I aspired, for the liberty it
might afford me to remain inscrutable or at least non-committal (Rapport
2017). For how could I be sure of the right thing to say? I could not risk
being construed indefinitely as the outsider, the offcomer. But not only
was I ignorant of how to engage in the routines of mundane interaction
in Wanet—even more on Cedar High Farm and amid Harvey family life—
when I did have a response ready it did not seem to accord with what was
being normatively expressed around me. I did not agree with how Doris
engaged with her children, often, or how Fred treated his animals. I did
not agree with their opinions on city life, on urban poverty, on punish-
ment, on immigrants, on Blacks and Jews. But nor did I feel I could
seriously engage with their diatribes and disparagement without showing
myself up. It was, after all, not an exposure of their world to mine that
I was in Wanet to effect, but the opposite: silence, then, was a kind of
compromise, a being among them while biting my tongue. There was a
big advantage, too, that in my silence I was more able to secure in my
memory what I was hearing and seeing and feeling for later retrieval in a
private fieldwork diary.
But silence was not a normative option in Doris’s moulding of me. If I
was to stay around them in Wanet—be taken under her and Fred’s wing,
mix freely and frequently with them and their children, be known as of
Cedar High Farm—then I had to speak as and when was appropriate.
I must learn the proper way to pronounce ‘tup’ (a ram), to learn that
‘gay far!’ was the Wanet phrase not ‘pretty far!’ while ‘Thanks a lot!’ as a
sarcastic rejoinder had no place in ‘Wanet talk’ at all. On saying the right
thing in the right way Doris was happy to drill me:
Doris : Nigel’s stomach’s touching his backbone, isn’t it Nigel? Your

stomach’s touching your backbone!
Nigel : It’s past it!
Doris : No. First you say, ‘My stomach’s touching my backbone’,
and then an hour or two later you can say: ‘I’ve past it!’ (She
smiles)
Nigel : I thought it was, ‘My stomach thinks my throat’s been cut’.
That’s what Fred said.
Doris : Yes, that’s another one you can say. Like Tom does too: ‘I’m
so hungry, my stomach will be thinking my throat’s been cut!’
The Habitus of Silence

The space afforded to silence was somewhat different among the porters
at Constance Hospital in eastern Scotland: the setting of another field-
work some 20 years later (Rapport 2008b). Part of the British National
Health Service, Constance Hospital was a large teaching hospital with
a full range of medical expertise. The porters, some 150 men (plus
two women), counted as ancillary staff and were not accorded the same
status as medics. Indeed, porters found themselves at the base of a hier-
archy of hospital skills, in the company of the (female) domestic cleaners.
Constance Hospital, nevertheless, was a caring institution, not only in its
primary function to manage the wellbeing of the sick but also in that its
managers had care for its staff—including the porters—their job satisfac-
tion and security, in a post-industrial area of Scotland where there was a
history of unemployment.
The porters prided themselves on their knowledge of the large site
of Constance Hospital and how best to traverse it. Reminiscent of taxi
drivers, they boasted about the best way to transport a patient (or a body
or body parts) on a bed or a trolley or a chair from A to B. The doctors
and nurses, the managers, laboratory technicians, clerks and even janitors,
would be sure to get hopelessly lost, being committed to only one work-
site, and the complex organization would surely break down were it not
for the mediating knowledge and ferrying work of the porters.
Furthermore, the porters assured themselves that it was they who
maintained the right attitude towards Constance Hospital. Everyone else
seemed to have sold themselves body and soul to the institution—and
the hope of inflated salaries. But the porters held back and kept a sense
of proportion. This was merely a job; there were other things in life, in
particular to being a man. Manly fulfilment came from a range of things:
working and earning money, yes, but also spending money on booze and
women; also playing football, fucking and fighting. Even in a hospital
it was important not to have sickness and weakness rub off, to keep its
contagion at bay, and to hold in view what a man’s life was and how it
was achieved (Rapport 2010). The porters prided themselves on knowing
how to have a good time.
64 N. RAPPORT
At the worksite there was also a rhythm to uphold. Portering work

comprised on the one hand being assigned particular transporting jobs
around the hospital, and on the other waiting for assignments in the
porters’ lodge—or (locally) ‘buckie’. The buckie consisted of two small
rooms below ground level. An outer room opened onto a corridor while
an inner room was entirely enclosed. Here, the porters and their charge-
hand received the ferrying requests of wards and clinics and operating
theatres and laboratories; and here the porters gossiped, ate snacks, read
newspapers, joked and laughed—and, if necessary, settled differences
among themselves through physical means (and behind closed doors).
The buckie was a macho environment: real men proudly displaying and
enjoying the masculinity of their bodies: toned when young; ‘battle-
hardened’ through lives of application if old.
Another rhythm to portering life again, one wholly managed among
themselves, was a move between engagement and silence. There may have
been ‘rules of engagement’ laid down by the hospital concerning how
jobs would be phoned through to the porters, and how the portering
chargehand on duty would receive these on the telephone, record them
in a book and dispatch porters as available. But these rules were ‘finessed’
by the porters: the chargehand evaluating the requests’ importance, the
politeness with which they had been framed, how overworked—‘put-
upon’—the porters as a group had been that day, and also how much
particular porters had been ‘messed about’ by management and not
shown respect. In other words, there were informal norms whereby
the porters decided for themselves the ways and extents to which they
would disengage from hospital rules, determining how willingly and how
efficiently they would respond to requests that they leave their buckie
‘retreat’ and go on a job.
It was part of this informal habitus, too, that the porters maintained
a norm whereby an individual might retreat from explicitly engaging
with his fellows—the banter and bravado and expressive camaraderie—
and commune silently with himself. A sign of this might be an individual
shielding himself behind a newspaper, or reading a book, or concentrating
on a meal, or even retreating to the porters’ changing room (deeper in the
bowels of Constance again). These signals that the individual porter did
not wish to engage with his fellows for a while were generally respected—
as a sign of membership, of being deemed a fellow porter, an equal. The
silent porter was granted the space to retreat into himself in peace. If the
buckie was a kind of sanctum that the porters created—a space that was
theirs amid the institutionalism and hierarchy of the hospital’s complex

organization in which they could practice their natural masculine ebul-
lience without pretence or restraint—then being silent by oneself and with
oneself was an inner retreat that the porters allowed one of their number
when he felt the need.
But one had first to belong. This was made very plain to me by Ian
Scott, a porter with a big reputation among his fellows for also being
a highly skilled semi-professional footballer. Acting as something of a
gatekeeper, Ian would make it known to me in my early days of being
a porter—moonlighting, for some obscure reason, from my job at the
University—that how I spoke and how I was silent, and whether I was
permitted to practise either, had to be earned. ‘Ha! Nigel will soon
have stripes on his arm’! was how Ian witheringly drew attention to my
apparent eagerness to answer the buckie telephone, and in an officious-
sounding voice—the chargehand being in the toilet and no one else being
interested to stop the ringing. And again: ‘Don’t read that, Nigel! The Sun
and Daily Record are crap’! was Ian’s ironic gibe on catching me reading
the newspapers that the porters bought and then left in the buckie; I
was not (yet) ‘one of them’, and surely such newspapers were beneath
the contempt of someone middle-class-seeming such as me. Finally, Ian
would hold court in the buckie, happily entertaining the porters with
his banter, but also making it plain that the repartee—who spoke, who
was spoken about and who was spoken to, and who might partake in
silence—was for portering insiders only:
* Is it snowing outside, Arthur. Or has your hair gone more grey!
* Does Jim have a hole in his trousers? Looks that way from here…
* Oh! Watch it, everyone! Nigel’s studying us! [I am seated in the outer
buckie reading a newspaper, but I lean around the door to espy Ian’s antics
in the inner room] Ooo, hoo hoo hoo hoo. [Ian makes chimp noises—as
if he and the porters were zoo exhibits. I initially pretend not to hear, and
then I smile] There, he goes! Smiling! I told you he was listening. You see
the porters’ mentality, Nigel? Isn’t it terrible! [He laughs]
In sum, the space in which to be silent was a kind of respect that the
porters gave one another. One had to belong, but if one did there was
a kind of informal but normative engagement that enabled a porter to
66 N. RAPPORT
be included in the community at Constance and yet, at least episodically,

to be silent and by himself. There was a habitus of silence in which one
could be a man and also communing with oneself alone.
Envoi: An Ethics of Silence

I have urged the possible significance of silence for description and anal-
ysis. I have wanted to provide an initial mapping of silence, proposed as
a psycho-social terrain: there may be a homeliness to silence, a solitudi-
nousness, a pragmatism, a privilege, a habitualism. There may, indeed,
be far more: an enforced silence of imprisonment, ostracism and exile;
a meditative silence before action and even before intention. Silence as
social strategizing may include how silence masks, censors, intimidates,
pressures another into garrulous self-exposure.
In her treatise The Way of Love, Luce Irigaray espouses the ethical
significance of silence. She suggests an ethos of silence as a way in which
anyone, any human being, might be included in social interaction—
incorporated as full members in a universal human community— not
as categorized or classified persons (gendered, ethnicized, classed and so
on) but as themselves. Individuality can perdure in silence, she proposes,
needing never to be transmuted into a public persona or role. I would
end the essay on the theme of the ethics of silence, the direction, I feel, of
Virginia Woolf’s and Elizabeth Jane Howard’s opening, feminist critiques
of literary genres as well as Irigaray’s efforts—an idealized version too,
arguably, of the habitus practised among their own by the Constance
porters.
Human history to date has seen us exist as ‘eunuchs of the heart
and the flesh’, Irigaray begins (2002: 3), in that we have encountered
otherness but not been sufficiently attentive or respectful. Rather than
‘dialoguing in difference’, we have sought to incorporate otherness in
culture: one meaning, one comprehensive order. The history of social
interaction has actually been a history of human beings moving away from
one another, using tropes—conventional practices and tired meanings—
that violate and cause a vanishing of Other and Self both. No culture
and no language to date has done more than veil the irreducible core of
human being in collective forms. Purporting to apprehend and legislating
for the world, cultures have sought to overcome nature—through ideas,
concepts, words and things—but this negates ‘the initial being of each
human’ and relinquishes a hold on singular experience (Irigaray 2002:
140). Culture ‘remain[s] outside the most intimate and the most nuclear
of subjectivity’, Irigaray concludes (2002: 47).
The path to the Other that she would promote entails forgetting words
and practices previously defined, for these paralyze Being—life, breath
and energy—in collective traditions. We need to practice a ‘loving speech’
that does not simply ‘seize’: predetermine, name, reproduce. This may
not be an easy project. Indeed, it entails a constant, ongoing work, since
loving speech cannot be invented only once. But it is possible. For in
our freedom ‘we live before speaking’ (Irigaray 2002: 84–5). We are not
prisoners within the horizons of our languages, and we can ‘transgress’
their already learned forms. We may establish a language of exchange that
does expressive justice to the encounter with otherness and accedes to
real unknown meanings: unveiling the human in itself.
Irigaray elaborates. To draw fully on the way in which we live ‘before
speaking’ could be to practice a loving speech that develops the ‘negative’
linguistic technique of silence. Loving speech is a silent being-with that
avoids reducing the Other linguistically to an object of ego’s own culture.
The encounter entails tentative approaches and withdrawals, questionings
that do not amount to a designating. Here is a temporality different
both from linearity and repetition, and a movement that eschews a
need or expectation of representation. One touches the Other, visually
and acoustically—maybe even physically—but the ‘silent’ being-with is
characterized by an ‘indirection’ that has no (cultural) telos.
Loving speech is a dialectical process whose indirect movement—
advance and withdrawal—is assured because of the integrity of the
individual subjects who thus encounter one another. Neither is master
of the movement, and neither expects to overcome their difference and
make the Other the same. Nor can either anticipate any external measure
that might assess the authenticity of what is co-built at the meeting:
the relationship is a work of interior blossoming—silent—and held by
no external standard. Loving speech effects a meeting between human
beings who remain subjects of their own individual phenomenology. Even
being face-to-face with the Other is always ‘a relationship with a Mystery’
(Levinas 1989: 43): a bodily proximity that refuses synthesis. The formu-
lation ‘I love to you’ is probably more respectful than ‘I love you’,
Irigaray concludes, more indicative of the silent encounter that negates
any reducing of the Other to ego’s object (2002: 60; cf. Rapport 2018,
2019).
68 N. RAPPORT
‘Nothing was more intimate than silence’, novelist Graham Greene

offered (1985: 101): a means to ‘settle’ as much between human beings
as was possible to settle. The ‘humanity’ of silence is what I have wanted
to claim here, its universal nature, over and against specific cultural
classifications and characterizations.
Yet silence remains no simple anthropological object. (Is it not para-
doxical to write silence?) I have found it hard, even here, not to
gloss ‘silent’, variously, as ‘inchoate’, ‘uncertain’, ‘reticent’, ‘withholding’,
‘withdrawing’, ‘solitudinous’, ‘interior’. But its very difficulty may recall
what is being ventured: an account of, and an accounting for, individual
human otherness where life does not escape.
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Feminist Ethnography in a Women’s Shelter:
Self-Reflexivity, Participation and Activism
in Ethnographic Writing
Marina Della Rocca
Introduction
Feminist qualitative research favours reflexivity and participation as a
means of promoting a non-hierarchical approach to research in order to
ensure a balance between the power of the researcher and that of the
research participants. Feminist research necessarily has a public-focused
approach because of its commitment to subverting the patriarchal social
order within the scientific disciplines, as well as with respect to the
objects of the research. Critical reflections on modern anthropology origi-
nated within the feminist perspective and its postmodern and postcolonial
approaches that emerged mostly during the 1980s. These reflections
involved methods, perspectives and writing styles that paid attention to
gender relations and perspectives, the relationship of the ethnographers
with their interlocutors, and the anthropologists’ positioning and its influ-
ence on research outcomes and texts. As an anthropologist who focuses
on violence against women, I recognize that the relationship between
M. Della Rocca (B)

Independent Scholar and Activist, Bolzano, Italy
e-mail: marina@dellarocca.it

Switzerland AG 2021
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-71726-1_4
72 M. DELLA ROCCA
ethnographic research and the feminist perspective is highly productive.

My experience as an operator in an Italian women’s shelter confirmed
this assumption. The critical contribution of the ethnographic method
enables my feminist approach to overcome the risks of homogenous and
ethnocentric gazes on women’s perspectives and their forms of agency.
This article focuses on specific aspects concerning the writing style of
my Ph.D. thesis, which analysed the practices carried out by the anti-
violence operators of the women’s shelter where I worked. The research
focused specifically on the experiences of migrant-origin women and on
the reproduction of structural violence in the advocacy practices that
involved them. During the process of research, I decided to develop
a specific methodology that reflected both the research field and the
aim of the research. Here, I will discuss the process of an ethnographic
writing that mirrored the feminist-engaged approach of my investigation.
In particular, I will describe the public-oriented, self-reflexive and partic-
ipatory stances of the research, and how these influenced the structure of
the final ethnographic text. This analysis highlights the challenges that I
faced as a feminist researcher, including the choice to engage in writing an
ethnographic text that aspired to cross the borders of academy and that
would make its political goals more effective within the institutional and
professional spaces that deal with gender-based violence and migration.
Background
My interest in this research started in 2010 when the Association DoRi1
of Bolzano offered me a social worker role in the women’s shelter, where
I am still involved as a political activist. I worked in the shelter until 2014
when I then decided to propose a Ph.D. project at the Free Univer-
sity of Bozen-Bolzano. During my four-year work experience in DoRi,
I supported 152 women, 62 of whom were migrants.
DoRi was founded in 1999 by a group of women whose aim was to
win a tender issued by the Social Services of the Municipality of Bolzano,2
the main town of South Tyrol. Ten years earlier, in 1989, and following
the hard work and activism of local feminists, the Autonomous Province
of Bolzano3 enacted a specific law concerning the function and principles
guiding the establishment of local shelters for battered women. Following
the enactment of this law, five women’s shelters were then established
in the province. Local administrative institutions have always played an
FEMINIST ETHNOGRAPHY IN A WOMEN’S SHELTER … 73
important role in the development of the South Tyrolean women’s shel-

ters. The shelters are financially dependent on the local administration and
are professionally accountable to it. Two of the shelters are run directly
by the public social services, another by a women’s Catholic association,
and the other two by women’s associations that are explicitly feminist
and are members of the Italian network of women’s shelters. One of
these is DoRi, which for twenty years has been providing an anti-violence
centre managed by specialized operators, a safe house and an emergency
phone line that is available 24/7. The shelter’s practices are guided by
the following Italian feminist principles (De Cicco 2003):
• relationships among women that focus on gender solidarity, ‘in which

one woman gives her trust or entrusts herself symbolically to another
woman, who thus becomes her guide, mentor or point of reference’
(Plesset 2006, 100);
• taking the woman’s side, which implies supporting women oppressed
by the patriarchal social order, and advocating for women to enable
them to exert their own rights. This requires working only with
women, not with men, in order to ensure a place of safety reserved
for women, and for their specific experiences;
• developing autonomy, that is, working in ways that foster the devel-
opment of each woman’s abilities and her economic and emotional
autonomy;
• anonymity, which requires respecting the privacy of each supported
woman (and where the woman is not forced to say her name); and
• streamlined procedures, which ensure an immediate response to each
support request and/or emergency (De Cicco 2003).
DoRi’s extensive expertise in providing resources for women expe-

riencing violence represents a great resource for the local adminis-
tration, and is frequently referred to by the Provincial administration
when addressing South Tyrolian policies concerning the phenomenon of
gender-based violence, specifically in the domestic sphere. While the local
administration does not control the work of DoRi, DoRi’s activities must
adhere to the requirements of the tender. The anti-violence operators
must work in close collaboration with the local social services, particu-
larly when a woman with children comes into the safe house. The aim is
to allocate a social worker who must ensure the care and the protection
74 M. DELLA ROCCA
of the woman’s children, or of the woman herself as a mother who expe-

riences her own social vulnerability. The women’s shelter also informs
the courts when a woman with children enters the safe house. This
aims to prevent the woman’s partner from pressing charges against the
woman for a supposed abduction of the children. This procedure repre-
sents a legal safeguarding, but implies that the women are also required to
report their experience of violence to the police, who contact them a few
days after they enter the safe house, in order to evaluate the women’s
status and those of their children. Agreements such as these aim to
guarantee institutional protection, however they also expose the organiza-
tional cultures and policy logic of local institutions and the impacts these
have on the supportive work of the women’s shelters and on the lives
of the abused women themselves. In my research, I decided to explore
how these dynamics affect migrant women in ways specifically related
to their migration backgrounds and experiences. Many studies reveal
the specific vulnerability of migrant women suffering domestic violence.
Most of them are referring to the theory of intersectionality as outlined
by Kimberlé Crenshaw, an important figure in critical race theory. She
underlines that male violence against women implies the need to consider
‘how the experiences of women of colour are frequently the product of
intersecting patterns of racism and sexism, and how these experiences
tend not to be represented within the discourses of either feminism or
antiracism’ (Crenshaw 1991, 1244). In 2011, a group of female Euro-
pean researchers, Ravi Thiara, Stephanie Condon and Monika Schröttle,
edited a text collection focused on the specific vulnerability of migrant
women entitled: ‘Violence against Women and Ethnicity: Commonali-
ties and Differences across Europe’. This book includes a number of
contributions by European scholars and professionals who adopted the
intersectional perspective in analysing the multiple system of oppression
and marginalization connected with migration, and proceeded to unveil
the structural and interpersonal dynamics that migrant abused women
have to deal with in order to escape violence (Thiara et al. 2011). Many
other scholars underlined the multi-layered systems of power that affect
migrant-origin women who experience gender-based violence (Raj and
Silverman 2002; Menjivar and Salcido 2002; Welchmann and Hossain
2005; Gangoli and Chantler Gangoli et al. 2011; Gill and Anitha 2011;
Bimbi and Basaglia 2013). Some of them are anthropologists who ques-
tioned issues related to specific forms of violence (Volpp 2000; Akpinar
2003), the relationship of violence against women and racism (Ribeiro-

Corossacz 2013; Davis 2014) and the oppression of institutional violence
against migrant women (Gribaldo 2014; Speed 2014, 2016).
My own experience working in DoRi highlighted some important
aspects related to this issue. Firstly, how migration laws concerning resi-
dence permits often force migrant women back to their violent partners
because these women risk deportation if they seek a legal separation.
Secondly, the lack of institutional and service resources to respond
adequately to migrant women’s needs, and the intricate legal matters
related to migration.4 Further, frequent misunderstandings about the
strategies employed by migrant women to escape violence (structural
and interpersonal5 ), or the women’s inability to respond according to
service expectations, subjects them to judgements made by social service
and institutional operators who tend to scrutinize their decisions and
behaviours. This work experience made it clear to me that there are
different dimensions to be considered when attempting to understand
a woman’s vulnerability to domestic violence: the legal, economic and
social status of the abused woman influences the woman’s abilities and
opportunities to liberate herself from situations of violence. With these
issues in mind, I decided to critically investigate the reproduction of struc-
tural violence (Farmer 2003) in the practices of DoRi’s operators towards
the migrant women who turned to them for assistance. In my analysis,
I considered the influence of the political and social context in which
the women’s shelter is embedded, and the institutional system of power
that involves both the anti-violence operators and the women who turn
to them. The aim of the research was to identify possible practical ways
to overcome the structural violence that affects migrant-origin women
and to foster a transformative process that would necessarily involve the
South Tyrolean social services and institutional practitioners. The research
developed within three specific ways. In the first phase, I analysed docu-
mentation describing the work of the women’s shelter, which detailed
the experiences of ten migrant women who had sought assistance. At the
same time, I re-entered the safe house as a night-service operator and
undertook participant observation. In the second phase of the research, I
involved some anti-violence operators and members of the DoRi associ-
ation in a shared reflection and analysis of their own practices, and then
involved eight migrant women who lived in the safe house by interviewing
them twice about the support that they had received. The ethnographic
76 M. DELLA ROCCA
analysis of my research was based on the triangulation of three different

perspectives: the ethnographic outcomes generated by my analysis of the
ten cases and by my participant observation; the operators’ reflections on
their advocacy practices; and the perspective of the interviewed women on
the support that they received from DoRi and from local social services
and institutions.
An Engaged Feminist Perspective and Its Lexicon

During my time working in the women’s shelter, I witnessed the
emotional distress of the women, and I shared with my former colleagues
the frustrations generated by our difficulties in responding to situa-
tions experienced by migrant women. In trying to find solutions, my
ex-colleagues and I were consistently confronted with an institutional
vacuum. This vacuum highlighted the contradictions of the local welfare
system, which on the one hand portrays itself as able to support every
single abused woman but on the other does not extend this support
equally to all the women who need it. This awareness represented de
facto the starting point of my research.
I witnessed the injustice of the migrant women’s condition, and I must ask
myself whether and to what extent our practices reproduces the women’s
vulnerability, even though in a more subtle and humanitarian way. I feel
angry toward the structural violence that affects them and toward the
extent of its dynamics, its origins and its consequences, [….], which appears
to me impossible to solve (From my fieldnotes ).
The experience described by these words was at the same time profes-
sional and emotional, and shaped the research’s goal and methodology,
which aimed to transform inequalities. I decided to apply a perspective
that would aim to overcome a (supposedly) neutral and detached obser-
vation, and to embrace an explicit committed and ‘oppositional point of
view’ (Lyon-Callo 2008, 156). This led me to an engaged ethnography
that focused on problematizing the taken for granted of consolidated
practices, and on rethinking these by transforming the ethnographic
outcomes in ethnographic action (Schensul and LeCompte 2016). The
public orientation of my ethnography was explicitly feminist, given its
focus on violence against women and on promoting the empowerment
of migrant women who are trying to escape from violence. This required
me to understand the migrant women’s vulnerability through an intersec-

tional perspective, one that inherently considers the women’s encounters
with many forms of racist and classist discrimination. The intersection
between these different but interconnected axes of oppression (Farmer
2003) determines the women’s social vulnerability to different forms of
violence, institutional and interpersonal, and within both their context of
origin and their host country.
The feminist stance of my research adheres to the principles that guide
DoRi’s work, to which I constantly refer in my analysis. This stance lent a
specific lexicon to the written text of my Ph.D. thesis, which reflects the
women’s shelter work and policy, and makes the text not only accessible to
anthropologists and academics, but more importantly to the operators of
women’s shelters and other services and institutions at local and national
levels that undertake daily work on gender-based violence.
Examples of this lexicon follow here. The first is ‘Donne in situazione
di violenza’, which literally means ‘women who find themselves in a situ-
ation of violence’. Anti-violence operators use this expression instead of
the word victim, which confers a passive role to the woman and denies
her agency. By using the expression donne in situazione di violenza, the
anti-violence operators stress the structural dimension of gender-based
violence. Moreover, by using this specific expression, I did not merely
reproduce the operators’ emic lexicon, but promoted it politically. In the
same way, I adopted another expression, that is, relazione di accoglienza,
which is difficult to translate from the Italian. It does not refer to a mere
‘reception/support relationship’, which represents its literal translation,
but to a way of advocating for the women and in ways that imply warmth,
welcoming, listening, trusting, equality, empathy and valorization. The
use of this lexicon enabled DoRi’s operators to be aware of the need to
redefine these concepts through an intersectional perspective that would
better reflect the migrant women’s experiences and refer to the structural
barriers that affect them specifically.
I applied the same perspective to another concept, empowerment.
The Italian women’s shelters operators use another word for defining
women’s empowerment, autodeterminazione (self-determination), which
has its origins in the Italian feminist movement. However, I decided
to use the word empowerment because of its wider comprehension by
other agents, such as social services, institutions and governmental and
non-governmental organizations. At the same time, and by analysing this
78 M. DELLA ROCCA
concept through the critical lenses of both anthropology and intersec-

tionality, its use forces the text’s readers to reinterpret the concept of
empowerment by distancing it from its mainstream understanding, that
is, a Western-neoliberal perspective (Cornwall and Anyidoho 2010), and
by integrating new elements that refer to migration processes and related
forms of marginalization. The processes of empowerment should take
into account the structural barriers (legal, economic, institutional and
linguistic)6 that affect migrant-origin women in Italy, and specifically in
South Tyrol.
The use of a specific lexicon also included those formed within anthro-
pological disciplines. By applying concepts that emanate from within
anthropological analysis, I aimed at promoting among the anti-violence
operators alternative verbalizations of the specific experiences that concern
domestic violence. An example of this was the use of the word agency for
describing a possible attitude of the women in response to psychological
abuse. Domestic violence entails a psychological control by the abuser,
who tends to manipulate the woman in order to reinforce his power over
her. This implies that the perpetrator often uses a form of brainwashing
as a means to control a woman, making her feel guilty, useless and worth-
less. In order to survive, many women respond to this behaviour by
adapting themselves to the expectations of their abuser. They hope that
this will prevent them from experiencing violence, notwithstanding the
fact that nothing works effectively against violence because it is mostly
unpredictable. The abuser understands that this is the precise means
to keep the woman in check. Women are profoundly affected by this
behaviour. Sometimes they end up internalizing this ‘manipulative’ atti-
tude and reproducing it in all their formal and informal relationships,
including their relationships with anti-violence operators. For example,
they accommodate their behaviours and opinions according to those of
their interlocutors, or they lie if they fear being blamed for something.
Sometimes the women even reproduce the abuser’s manipulation. All
these represent the women’s survival strategies in the face of the psycho-
logical violence from which they suffered. The women’s shelters operators
are obviously aware of these dynamics, and they do not judge the women
for their behaviour. However, they often use the same word, manipo-
lazione (manipulation), to refer to this, although in Italian women’s
shelters the word describes the psychological brainwashing used against
the woman by the abuser. Their aim is of course to underline the rela-
tionship of these attitudes with the abuser’s acts. However, to talk about
‘women’s manipulation’ risks blaming the women themselves. I there-

fore proposed to use the word agency instead of manipulation, because
it focuses on the women’s strategies to survive the abuse, and because it
lends a more positive, effective and empowering definition of those strate-
gies. In the same way, the use of the Bourdieusian concept of habitus
(Bourdieu 1977) to describe the professional patterns behind the prac-
tices of anti-violence operators, makes clear to them their embodiment, as
professionals, of the institutional and cultural frameworks in which they
work. This highlighted their limits in acting against these, but also the
political role of their own agency in affecting the status quo towards
greater social justice for migrant-origin women.
The Self-Reflexive Approach

My multi-positioning in this research project, that is as a feminist, former
operator and researcher, influenced the research process and the related
written analysis. By re-entering the women’s shelter as an anthropologist,
I necessarily had to redefine my role in the shelter. My first question was
to ask myself how to undertake a critical investigation of the operators’
practices and avoid making them feel judged. As a former operator, I
could understand how challenging my presence would be for them, given
they would be exposed to a critical investigation undertaken by a former
colleague. Being aware of the operators’ vulnerability, I decided that a
good response to this challenge would be to apply a research method
that made myself vulnerable to their critical analysis before commencing
my own analysis of their work. I undertook an analysis of my previous
work at the shelter, aiming to generate a critical investigation of my
own work practices. This involved an autoethnographic analysis of the
documentation that I had produced during my work at the shelter, and
which referred to my work with ten migrant women. In making myself
vulnerable, ‘a different set of problems and predicaments arise which
would never surface in response to [a] more detached […] [approach]’
(Behar 1996, 29). In The Vulnerable Observer. Anthropology that Breaks
your Heart, Ruth Behar underlines what it implies for an anthropol-
ogist to be vulnerable to ethnographic analysis and writing, and for
the ethnographers themselves. She mostly refers to self-revelation in the
anthropological writing, which is not what I did in my research. However,
Behar points out specific aspects of the ethnographer’s vulnerability,
which precisely describes my work:
80 M. DELLA ROCCA
That doesn’t require a full-length autobiography, but it does require a keen

understanding of what aspects of the self are the most important filters
through which one perceives the world and, more particularly, the topic
being studied. […] Vulnerability doesn’t mean that anything personal goes.
The exposure of the self who is also a spectator has to take us somewhere
we couldn’t otherwise get to. It has to be essential to the argument, not
a decorative flourish, not exposure for its own sake. (Behar 1996, 26).
By engaging myself in this process, my experience as an anti-violence

operator became the ‘epistemological and ontological nexus of the
research process’ (Peterson 2015, 228). This methodology clarified that
my research had nothing to do with judging the operators’ practices, but
underlined instead how these are interrelated with the social and insti-
tutional context in which they (we) work. Hence, I identified how I had
reproduced myself within the axes of structural violence affecting migrant-
origin women, and this analysis enabled a shared reflection. The process
involved a group of three operators, and two members of the DoRi asso-
ciation, which I named GRD, that is, Gruppo Ricerca DoRi (DoRi’s
Research Group). We formed this group precisely for the purposes of
the research, and we met six times for periods of two to three hours. This
self-reflexive analysis of my work promoted a new openness with the oper-
ators, leading them to reflect critically on their own practices and then to
the deconstruction of their own system of meanings.
A further step in the research process was to undertake participant
observation within the safe house. At that time, it would have been inap-
propriate for me to re-enter the house as either an anti-violence operator
or as a researcher. In view of this, I asked my former colleagues if it
was possible for me to re-enter the safe house as a night-service oper-
ator, which implies fewer days of work per month and a much lower
level of tasks and responsibilities. Given that I had worked as a shelter
operator before commencing my research, I took it for granted that the
anti-violence operators would agree to my returning as a night worker.
However, my assumption was wrong. In my field diary I noted my
frustration when the operators told me that my request would be eval-
uated according to DoRi’s formal procedures, that is, after discussing
my request with the professional team and considering whether my
engagement in the night-service was appropriate or not. I was extremely
disappointed and felt insecure and disoriented. I felt that I was no longer
part of their professional environment and that I was now an outsider, to
be treated like anyone else making the same request. I experienced a sense
of displacement, what Mascarenhas-Keyes defines as a ‘schizophrenia
between the “native self” and the “professional self”’ (Mascarenhas-Keyes
1987, 180) that is, between my previous identity as a DoRi operator and
my new identity as anthropologist.
Although I am researching at home and not in an-other space, in an-

other country, I feel that my immersion in the field became invasive. I
am elsewhere at my home, experiencing the tension between being inside
and outside together. But, being at home, this elsewhere doesn’t allow me
to define its boundaries, and requires time and energy from my daily life,
making me feel in a condition of apnoea, which challenges me personally,
the ways I perceive myself and in my everyday life. (From my fieldnotes )
I then realized that the operators were justified in their need to consider
some relevant concerns related to their work. They are responsible for the
privacy of the women who they support, and for the trusting relationship
that they build with them. My request made explicit the operators’ ethical
commitment to the women, as well as their commitment to the local
institutions that require them to respect specific bureaucratic procedures
concerning the privacy and safety of the women and their children who
are hosted in the safe house. I took for granted my own ethical commit-
ment to the women, which reflects my internalization of the specific role
of an anti-violence operator, a role I had previously held. By changing my
role, I had to negotiate my new tasks within the research field and all of
us (the operators and I) had to engage in building a new trusting relation-
ship between each other, and ‘to deal with the difficult task of rendering
unfamiliar what in our former professional relationship had been famil-
iar’ (Della Rocca 2019, 52). Starting from this assumption, I decided to
better clarify my ethical commitment as an anthropologist towards my
interlocutors, and I explained each step of the research, its motivation, its
possible effects on the interlocutors and on me, and how I would manage
all of these factors (Della Rocca 2019).
When I did finally commence my work in the night-service, I felt somewhat

confused, but recognized that it was necessary for me to perceive the safe
house in a different light:
Today, it is the first time I re-enter the safe house as night-operator
after six months since I worked in the antiviolence centre, and I am very
happy to do it. I feel this place as part mine. I am confident in it, I
82 M. DELLA ROCCA
move consciously, because I have the “power” to act that way, due to my
professional know-how, that, however, I must re-define as a night-service
operator. Because this role implies another degree of authority, toward this
space, the women, my ex colleagues and the other night-operators. And, at
the same time, I am here as a researcher, a role that helps this re-definition
but that implies distancing myself in order to reflect critically on my acts.
I systematically observed my attempts to internalize a different way to

stay in the house that implied not intervening in the women’s situations.
I reflected on my internalized ways to define the women’s stories, placing
the stories in categories that for me were spontaneous and reflected the
work of the shelter. In particular, I became aware of my habit of focusing
on specific aspects of the women’s stories that are clearly related to
their encounters with domestic violence, and how I frame these within
the professional categories that enable anti-violence operators to build
supportive practices. However, and unavoidably, this means that other
dimensions of the women’s lives are left out, including those that would
lend a more holistic understanding of their existences, and consequently a
better comprehension of the women’s perspective on how violence affects
them and ways to build their own empowerment.7 I realized that I had
to deliberately deconstruct my professional expertise as an anti-violence
operator. I gave constant attention to this matter throughout the entire
research project.
The Participatory Stance of the Research

After analysing each of the ten cases, I shared with some operators and
members of the DoRi the contents of an article I had intended to submit
to an academic journal. In the article, I had reported the outcomes of
the initial phase of the research, where I had undertaken my first analysis
of the reproduction of structural violence in DoRi’s practices. The oper-
ators expressed their fears about its publication, claiming that I had not
adequately reported the complexity of their work, and that this would
likely lead to a misinterpretation of their practices. They felt scared and
exposed, and we then discussed and deliberated on these apprehensions
for many hours. Finally, and in order to consolidate my trust relation-
ship with them, I decided not to submit the paper. Some of the operators
were actually surprised by this decision, and expressed the fear that this
could damage my role as a researcher. This then led us to reflect on the
power of our own positioning—mine as the researcher who owns the data,
and theirs as operators who had the power to either grant or deny access
to DoRi’s data. We all became aware of the need for constant dialogue,
a dialogue that should consider not only our new and old professional
relationships, but also our friendships. Anthropologist Stella Mascarenhas-
Keyes underlines that conflict situations within the field can be successfully
integrated into the research’s methodology (Mascarenhas-Keyes 1987,
189). However, in the case of a ‘native’ ethnographer, the relationship
with the interlocutors represents a formidable challenge because it usually
begins before the research and then continues after it. In these cases, the
interlocutors’ feedback becomes much more relevant for the researcher
because it directly affects her personal sphere. Taking into account this
challenging positioning, I proposed that the operators engage with me
in a collaborative process. I proposed that I would discuss with them the
contents of my Ph.D. thesis, and would include their points of view in
the final written text. This was agreed to and my final text reflected not
only my own analysis of the shelter’s practices, but also the voices of the
DoRi’s operators concerning their own practices, as well as their own
agency towards the local institutions. I shared with them each chapter of
my thesis, which was then discussed systematically in six further meet-
ings. The operators’ points of view were progressively integrated within
the text. I also paid great attention to the perspective of the interviewed
women: after the two first interviews, I met each woman a third time,
reading them the extracts of the previous interviews, which I had reported
in the text, and describing to them the outcomes of the research. Some
women added new elements that I inserted in the final version of the
text. This process attempted to reflect the women’s shelter’s ‘internal
polyphony’ (Sorgoni 2011, 27), which involved the operators, the women
who turn to them, and the context in which their relationships take place.
An example of this is found in the discussion about the case of Zoe,
a highly traumatized woman whom I supported, and who lived with
her daughters in the safe house for two months. During this time, she
manifested several difficulties in taking care of her children, who all
presented persistent health problems. For this reason, the operator’s team,
in agreement with the social services, decided to organize Zoe’s accom-
modation in a shelter house for single mothers. In the text, I describe
Zoe’s disagreement with the decision to relocate, a move that would have
distanced her from the social network that she had built in the previous
two months. She finally accepted the relocation, but only because she
84 M. DELLA ROCCA
felt she had no other choice. I stressed that this contradicted DoRi’s
principles, and I highlighted the power that the operators exerted over
the woman. In the text, I also reported the operators’ opinions on this
case. One of them in particular underlined how this decision aimed at
ensuring the well-being of Zoe’s daughters, who were seriously affected
by their precarious health situations. At the same time, she emphasized,
it represented Zoe’s opportunity to reinforce her role as a mother. In
response to this claim, I reported the words of an interviewed woman
who sometimes felt overwhelmed by the pressure exerted over her by
the operators. She explained that the latter disagreed with her accommo-
dating way to respond to the behaviour of her former husband, which
the operators evaluated as too risky for her and her children. The woman
claimed that she could understand the operators’ requirement to protect
her and her children, however she perceived this pressure as an obliga-
tion, which for the women who experienced violence, she said, represents
a reproduction of the abuser’s violence. Finally, I reported the opinions
of two other DoRi members, who underlined that it is often implicit in
advocacy work that power can be perceived as being ‘over’ the women
in order to ensure their long-term empowerment, even when the women
may not have agreed initially, but, the operators claimed, the women often
later agree that it was required at the time. The women stressed, however,
that sometimes the actions by operators are often contrary to the feminist
theoretical principles that are supposed to guide the work of the shelter.
The collaborative stance of the project implied further engagement of
the anti-violence operators in the process of the research. I suggested
that they write a specific chapter in the thesis and other paragraphs that
would describe the shelter’s policies, guidelines and the nature of its work.
This specific way of collaboration was designed to ensure a balance in
the power relationship between the operators and me by allowing them
to represent their own work and to use the lexicon that they use for
describing this work. As Lassiter suggested in 2005:
[….]collaborative reading and editing (especially that which pushes toward

co-interpretation) is what ultimately makes an ethnography collaborative.
When taken seriously and applied systematically rather than bureau-
cratically, any one or a combination of these strategies leads us from
the mere representation of dialogue to its actual engagement, from
one-dimensional to multidimensional collaboration, and from a clichéd
collaborative ethnography to a more deliberate and explicit collaborative
ethnography that more immediately engages the publics with which we

work. (Lassiter 2005, 96)
Notwithstanding our co-writing effort, and based on two reasons, we

decided not to engage in the co-writing of each chapter of the Ph.D.
thesis. Firstly, this would have required a significant investment of time by
the operators, and the risk that they would be unable to give full commit-
ment to their daily work. Secondly, we decided to use the thesis chapters,
which I was progressively writing, as the basis for our collective reflection
on the different perspectives that emerged from the ethnographic anal-
ysis reported in the text. Although I held more authority than the DoRi’s
members concerning the final content of text—apparently contradicting
the feminist approach that aims to overcome any form of hierarchical
power—we (the DoRi’s members and I) were conscious of the different
roles that we played within the research process. This had been one
of the most relevant topics of the discussions that we had held before
starting our suite of meetings, where we had asked ourselves who would
have authority about what. If there were issues related to anonymity
and the exposure of the women’s shelter services, they would be subject
to the approval of DoRi’s members, and the contents concerning the
ethnographic analysis would be controlled by me but subject to discus-
sion with the research partners (the DoRis’ members and the women
whom I interviewed8 ). This effort consolidated our shared contribution
to the research. The members of the GRD (DoRi’s Research Group) did
not become ethnographers themselves, notwithstanding the fact that the
collaborative process was based on our common experience (theirs and
mine) as operators and as activists of DoRi. The condition for sharing was
both the goal of the research and its feminist stance. At the same time,
they did become authors of the text, but only in regards to the description
of the operators’ work at the women’s shelter, and in the definition of the
feminist principles that guide the DoRi’s political activities. Furthermore,
they participated in the drafting of the entire text by sharing reflections
on each of its chapters. This built a rich interaction among the GRD’s
members, who responded according to their own experiences and posi-
tionings, many of which were diverse. This interaction set a new way of
reflecting on specific issues, including, although indirectly, the perspec-
tives of a number of the migrant-origin women they supported. Since
the goal of the research had been to identify new practices in supporting
migrant-origin women, the GRD’s members committed themselves to
86 M. DELLA ROCCA
building a common point of view that then proceeded to inform the

construction of a set of concrete work proposals. In fact, the Ph.D. thesis
concludes by suggesting specific practices that aim to improve DoRi’s
support practices, as well as those of other Italian women’s shelters.
During the collaborative process, they did not act as anthropologists but
instead as anti-violence operators and activists who used the anthropo-
logical analysis and methodology, which I had offered them during the
collaborative process, to integrate new perspectives into their own work
and political struggles.
Towards Further Engagement

My previous professional experience in DoRi had required me to reflect
on my former habitus (Bourdieu 1977) as an anti-violence operator, so I
undertook a deconstruction of this role and shared this process with some
members of DoRi. It was this process that led the research into a collab-
orative process, and which made explicit the polyphonic dimensions of
the women’s shelter that involved the anti-violence operators, the women
who turn to them, the local services and institutions, and the analysis
which highlighted the power relationships inherent in the fieldwork. As a
former operator, ethnographer and an activist, my own positioning in the
field was highly relevant for my Ph.D. research, and forced me to put into
question its influence on the ethnographic analysis and on its representa-
tion. In order to respond to this, I attempted to make explicit the voice
of each participant (the DoRi’s Research Group, the interviewed women
and me). With this objective in mind, I attempted to represent in the text
my constant dialogue with my interlocutors.
By undertaking this process, I also considered the limits of my cultural
proximity within the field. First, I reflected on the possible risk of over-
looking some critical aspects concerning the operators’ practices, given
that I would have previously internalized these practices during my four-
year work experience in DoRi. In fact, and although I had attempted
to deconstruct my identity as an anti-violence operator, I was constantly
confronted with the taken for granted of my former professional habitus.
An example was my reaction to the difficulties that continued to confront
many of the women. Although I avoided intervening in certain cases,
I had to deal with my habit of advocating on their behalf in response
to their problems. At the same time, some of the interviewed women
asked me for help concerning specific issues related to their psycho-

logical, social or legal empowerment. Another limit was the potential
reluctance of the interviewed women in criticizing operators, who de
facto were my ex-colleagues. One of them, in fact, claimed that some
women would never report criticisms concerning the anti-violence oper-
ators, due precisely to my personal ties with them. Nevertheless, my
specific expertise as a former DoRi operator conferred me with specific
knowledge that would otherwise have required a long-term observation,
as well as an in-depth study of the feminist perspective on gender-based
violence and the principles underpinning the women’s shelters advocacy
work. This know-how was particularly significant for my ability to manage
the emotional distress connected to the experiences of domestic violence,
and it allowed me to face the narratives of the women while avoiding
the risk of their re-traumatization. One of them in particular underlined
how easy it was to talk with me about issues that other social operators
could not understand, many of which have been used to judge women,
especially immigrant women. This specific expertise also gave me access
to the emic perspective of the operators, and to their lexicon, thereby
ensuring my ability to develop a profound understanding of the field and
to use concepts that made my ethnographic text an effective instrument
for the anti-violence operators to apply. In saying this, I refer not only
to the operators of DoRi, but also to operators of other Italian women’s
shelters. This was in fact an explicit wish of DoRi’s members when they
realized that the representation of their experiences potentially echoed
the experiences of many other Italian anti-violence operators. Our discus-
sions around the use of a pseudonym specifically highlighted this aspect.
In fact, being known as a former operator of DoRi, the real identity of the
women’s shelter could be easily disclosed. Thus, the use of a pseudonym
did not respond to the need for anonymity, but reflected instead the
usefulness of representing experiences that the operators could potentially
share with other Italian anti-violence operators. The use of DoRi’s real
name would have focused attention on the specific situation of DoRI,
whereas members preferred to emphasize the commonality experiences
shared by other anti-violence operators.
Aiming to give voice to the migrant-origin women, I engaged myself
in a consideration of their specific vulnerability to violence. This mirrored
the critical feminist approach of many academic disciplines and of femi-
nist ethnography itself, which have played an important role in feminist
research to date. One of the most controversial concerns has been the
88 M. DELLA ROCCA
tension between the universalistic interpretation of women’s oppression

and the risk of cultural relativism. The anthropologist’s effort to high-
light the emic interpretation and conceptualization of the phenomenon
aims at overcoming its own ethnocentric understandings. This approach
directly contributed to the construction of a cultural relativism that some-
times prevented anthropologists from recognizing injustice, suffering and
discrimination against women (Wies and Haldane 2011; Plesset 2006).
Towards the end of the 1960s and into the 1970s, the second wave of
feminism empowered many ethnographers, mostly women, to unveil the
patriarchal norms inherent in anthropological patterns of investigation.
This led anthropologists to acknowledge that gender inequalities were
embedded within many contexts under investigation, as well as within
the anthropological discipline itself, and paved the way to represent the
gendered domains within the field (Visweswaran 1994, 19). In their
edited book, Women, Culture, and Society (1974), Rosaldo and Lamphere
recognized that oppression of women was a global issue, whereas the
contributions edited by Reiter in the text Toward an Anthropology of
Women (1975) paid more attention to cultural, social and class differ-
ences. Both texts underlined the patriarchal prejudice that made men the
privileged interlocutors of ethnographic investigations, rendering women
mostly invisible or the bearers of specific ‘particularities’ subjected to the
dominant male perspective (Busoni 2000, 113–19). In 2001, the Hand-
book of Ethnography edited by Atkinson et al., included the contribution
of Beverly Skeggs, who described the historical development of feminist
ethnography during the 1980s and the 1990s. Skeggs underlined how
the social experience of being a woman represented the starting point of
feminist research (Skeggs 2001, 432–33). This perspective mirrors in fact
the principles of second wave feminism, which fought to subvert the patri-
archal domination of women’s bodies, sexuality and identity, a subversion
that must be necessarily done by women. Such an approach aims at
re-defining women’s subjectivity within the different social domains.
However, many scholars and activists criticized feminist analysis for being
merely based on gender belonging, thereby obscuring other forms of
oppression. This statement put under question mainstream feminists for
considering only the perspective of Western, white and bourgeois women,
and for marginalizing the experiences of black, migrant or indigenous
women. Within the anthropological critique, Lila Abu-Lughod claimed
that discrimination against black women or migrant women in Western
countries is not only sexist but also racist and classist (Abu-Lughod 2005).
She claimed that even feminist anthropologists tend to reproduce the

structural inequalities embedded within the Western-centred perspective.
It becomes clear in the ways they represent non-Western women, whose
experiences are often essentialized. To avoid the risk of reification, Abu-
Lughod suggests undertaking an ‘ethnography of the particular’, which,
‘by focusing closely on particular individuals and their changing rela-
tionships, […], subvert the most problematic connotations of culture:
homogeneity, coherence, and timelessness’ (Abu-Lughod 2005, 476).
As a feminist researcher who has embraced the ethnographic critical
and postcolonial perspective on gender, and on feminism itself, I prob-
lematized the complexity of my positioning within the research. This
requires referencing to the “halfie” position treated by Lila Abu-Lughod
herself in her text “Writing against Culture” (2005): “The problem with
studying one’s own society is alleged to be the problem of gaining
enough distance, […] [given] for halfies, the Other is in certain ways
the self” (Abu-Lughod 2005, 468). Due to my proximity to the DoRi
anti-violence operators, the problem of distancing them—in order to
deconstruct my taken for granted—was the problem of distancing myself
from part of my identity by othering it, that is by othering the experi-
ences of an anti-violence operator as I had been a few months earlier.
At the same time, my research concerned the experiences of migrant-
origin women, who, as migrants, represent the emblem of the Others
who live within the contexts of the Western anthropologists themselves.
In addition, as women migrants, they are often otherized by Western
feminists, that is, they are subjected to a process of culturalization as
explained above. The multiple structures of power, which mark my posi-
tioning, thus become explicit. This required me to engage in an in-depth
analysis of this positioning within the specific net of the relations in
which I was entangled: an effort that anthropologists—independently of
their being outsiders or insiders—must undertake as subjects who move
‘within a larger political-historical complex’ (Abu-Lughod 2005, 468).
With this objective in mind, I explicitly underlined the political goal of
my research and the challenges related to me as a feminist anthropologist.
By focusing part of my analysis on my figure as ethnographer, I stressed
the role played by this in influencing the public-focused, reflexive and
participatory stances of my ethnography. The written production aimed
at reflecting these stances, rendering the text a concrete tool for a critical
auto-reflection by the women’s shelters operators and for the potential
90 M. DELLA ROCCA
application of this on their concrete work. This effort led to trans-

lating the outcomes of the ethnographic analysis into concrete actions
that are capable of transforming the advocacy practices towards migrant-
origin women. In the final phase of my Ph.D. project, the GRD (DoRi’s
Research Group) and I outlined a set of measures that concerned specific
practical tools for the advocacy work and for policies which should be
integrated into the activities of the DoRi’s Association. Although these
actions refer to the specific South Tyrolean context, the research partic-
ipants and I were aware of their potential application in many other
social and institutional spaces. This was enabled through the adoption
of a specific lexicon that reflected those of the Italian women’s shel-
ters, a lexicon that also echoed the reciprocal contamination between
my anthropological perspective and those of the anti-violence opera-
tors. This process allowed the deconstruction of the taken for granted
of the subjects who were involved. Consequently, it enabled recognition
of the discrepancies among the different perspectives at stake, opening
alternative understandings within their own paradigms.
I took this engagement a step further in a subsequent research project,
again based in South Tyrol, which aimed at an intercultural understanding
of violence against women and women’s empowerment.9 It has produced
a text that outlines specific suggestions concerning advocacy work with
abused women who belong to the so-called first and second genera-
tion of migrants in South Tyrol. The target was again the operators of
women’s shelters, the social services and the institutions that deal with
gender-based violence. By interviewing migrant-origin women about key
concepts concerning gender issues, violence against women and women’s
empowerment, the aim of the research was to report the voices of women
of different belongings and generations in order to deconstruct stereo-
types and also to identify alternative perspectives. This project required
considerable effort, including the review of an extensive ethnographic
corpus of data in some fundamental concepts, finding out effective ways
to interpret the migrant-origin experiences of domestic violence and
then promoting prevention without homogenizing the women’s points
of view. The text demands constant negotiation between the anthro-
pological imperative of a thick description of the phenomenon and the
perspective of social operators who need practical tools and a specific
lexicon. My former experience in intervening in the women’s process
of empowerment, and my understanding of DoRi’s experiences as a
women’s shelter and its political struggles as a feminist association, was
extremely useful when attempting to achieve a balance between these

different, and sometimes opposing stances. The text reports the women’s
point of view, stressing the fundamental commonalities among them while
at the same time providing specific ways for them to interpret their expe-
riences. The document also highlights the risks of feminist ethnocentrism
by reporting some discrepancies between the perspective of the women’s
shelters and the migrant-origin women’s points of view, including the
women’s perspectives themselves, in order to unveil their subjectivity and
demonstrate why divergent views are relevant if their attempts to support
them are to be effective.
A further example of this effort is my current participation on an insti-
tutional ‘working table’ convened by the executives of the Autonomous
Province of Bolzano that focuses on supporting female asylum seekers
who have experienced gender-based violence. One of the goals of the
working table is the production of an online document that will be avail-
able to operators of South Tyrolean social services and will contain specific
definitions of different forms of gender-based violence. In attempting to
describe so-called honour-based violence, I started asking myself how to
define it in a way that could overcome its common understanding, which
tends to be subjected to a process of culturalization.10 At the same time,
the definition of honour-based violence must be accessible to operators
who are not anthropologists, and who generally recognize this form of
violence within the frame of international agencies that are mainly focused
on the human rights perspective.11 Researchers who deal with this specific
form of violence face the same difficulties in defining so-called honour-
based violence without obscuring their specific dynamics, and at the same
time overcoming any risk of stigmatization (Mojab 2004; Sen 2005;
Cavenaghi 2013). This still represents a very important debate, and is one
which feminist anthropologists should pursue by representing the partic-
ular declination of the different forms of gender-based violence within
different social, economic and institutional contexts and pursuing, at the
same time, the exposure of the multilayered dimensions of power and the
need to go beyond the borders of current academic thinking. This will
require anthropologists to reconsider and renegotiate their writing styles
and lexicons. This, from my point of view, does not imply mortifying the
complexity of the phenomenon under study, but instead implies the need
to create networks and tools that allow public-focused ethnographies to
better pursue their public-oriented objectives.
92 M. DELLA ROCCA
Notes
1. DoRi is a pseudonym of the association that was chosen by their members
and is an acronym of Donne-Rifugio (Women-Refuge).
2. The Social Services of the Municipality of Bolzano, as well as those of
South Tyrol at all, contracts various services to NGOs through a public
competition. The anti-violence centre of Bolzano is one of these organi-
zations. Since its inception, DoRi has had to participate in a tender every
five to six years.
3. Bolzano is the main town and the administrative centre of South Tyrol,
which in the second half of the twentieth century achieved a specific
autonomy from the Italian Government regarding a set of administrative
issues.
4. In 2013, the Italian Internal Ministry enacted a security decree that
provides a humanitarian residence permit for undocumented women who
press charges for domestic violence. This decree is commonly known
as 18-bis Article. This law simplifies some cases, but does little to
address the vulnerability of undocumented migrant women. In fact, it
does not fulfil the requirements of the Istanbul Convention (Council of
Europe Convention on preventing and combating violence against women
and domestic violence). This convention recommends guaranteeing the
migrant women’s access to a residence permit, which makes them legally
independent from their abusers. The 2018 immigration-security decree,
which was proposed by the Interior Minister Matteo Salvini, worsened
the rights of migrant-origin women by abolishing precisely the permit
for humanitarian reasons that the women receive according to the 18-bis
article. This permit has been converted in a residence permit for so-called
‘special cases’, which addresses different forms of specific vulnerabilities
without ensuring the migrant-women access to a long-term empowerment
process.
5. The structural violence to which I refer implies legal, linguistic, economic
and institutional barriers that intersect the dynamics of interpersonal
violence exerted by the husband or a member (mostly male) of the family
of origin. The analysis of this intersection required a specific theoretical
frame. The model of the mosaic of violence by anthropologist Shannon
Speed offered an useful tool to unveil the mutually constitution of the
axes of oppression and violence that affect migrant, black or indigenous
women within a political order, which is at the same time patriarchal,
neocolonial and neoliberal (Speed 2014, 2016).
6. The legal barriers concern the women’s difficulties in obtaining an
autonomous residence permit, because many of them hold a residence
permit for family reasons, which is connected directly to the permit of
their husbands. By depending legally on him, many women are prevented
from seeking support in case of violence, because they fear deportation.

The economic barriers mostly refers to the women’s obstacles in accessing
the labour market. Racism, linguistic difficulties and the isolation gener-
ated by domestic violence often hinder entering the job market relegating
many migrant-origin women to informal and precarious work. For women
who migrated following their violent husbands, to learn the local South
Tyrolean languages becomes a great challenge, because they are particu-
larly isolated and traumatized. These language barriers prevent the women
from seeking institutional support, from building informal social networks
and from finding a job that makes them economically independent. In
addition, South Tyrol has three official languages: Italian, German and
Ladin. Although the latter is less important for seeking a job or building
meaningful relationships with locals, the knowledge of the other two
languages, Italian and German, is often required for getting a stable job.
Finally, institutional barriers mostly refers to the South Tyrolean bureau-
cratic system, which hinders access to a set of welfare benefits for all those
who are not South Tyroleans or do not permanently live in South Tyrol
from minimum two or five years (depending on the benefit). Institutional
barriers also concern the dismissive behaviours of institutional operators
(police officers, social workers and court ‘staff’), who often behave in
paternalistic or even racist forms towards migrant people who live in South
Tyrol. Besides, many of them still respond to domestic violence according
to a set of stereotypes. This attitude make the institutions far from being
a safe place for migrant-origin women who escape violence.
7. In my Ph.D. thesis, I precisely underlined the relevance of experiencing,
as anthropologist, a greater access to other aspects of the women’s lives,
which were mostly precluded to me before, when I worked as anti-
violence operator. In fact, the trusting relationship that I was required
to build with my interlocutors as a researcher implies meeting the
women at their homes and talking about daily issues that concerned
my life and theirs. This entails building informal encounters, which are
mostly excluded from the professional relationship that the same women
interwove with me before at the women’s shelter.
8. I met with the eight migrant-origin women whom I interviewed four
times. I met the women the first time when I explained them the whole
process of the research and its objectives. The second and the third
times, I interviewed them. Finally, I met with all of them a fourth time
during the last phase of the research. In this meeting, I explain them
the research’s outcomes and compared one more time the perspective
that emerged from the ethnographic analysis with those of the women
94 M. DELLA ROCCA
who I interviewed. My attempt was to verify with the eight migrant-

origin women themselves to what extent they felt their experiences were
adequately represented in the ethnographic text.
9. Under Dorothy Zinn’s supervision, I worked on this study from March
2018 to June 2020. The project was funded by a grant from the Central
Research Commission at the Free University of Bozen-Bolzano.
10. This reflection concerns the use and the conceptualization of the word
honour, which tends to reduce the so-called honour-based violence to a
cultural issue, failing to explain it as the expression of a patriarchal social
order.
11. Recently, Dorothy Zinn and I published an article that reports anthropol-
ogists’ critical analysis of the use of a specific lexicon by some international
declarations against women’s discrimination and gender-based violence.
These declarations focus on a human rights perspective, but reveal the
remnants of a colonial interpretations of specific practices and behaviours
of non-Western people (Della Rocca and Zinn 2019).
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Can There Be Feminist Anthropology
in Turkey?: Histories, Continuities,
and (Dis)Connections of Gender and Genre
Hande Birkalan-Gedik
Introduction
‘Can there be feminist ethnography in Turkey?’ In this paper, I take
my readers to a terra incognita—to unmapped geography of feminist
ethnography in Turkey. This question has a firm relevance at a time
when feminist ethnographers have already discussed several aspects of
feminist ethnographic praxis and the role of gender and genre in the
field and writing. I will begin to first argue that, in fact, there has been
feminist ethnography in Turkey, which found resistance in anthropology
and developed chiefly in sociology, communication, and media studies,
as these disciplines increasingly rely on ethnographic methods, which
were once thought to have been the signature domain of anthropology.
Second, I pose that in this constellation, most of the emergent feminist
ethnographies avow their methodologies as feminist but do not comply
with their claims fully. Other cases only allude to the general literature
H. Birkalan-Gedik (B)
Institut für Kulturanthropologie und Europäische Ethnologie, Johann Wolfgang
Goethe Universität, Frankfurt am Main, Germany
e-mail: birkalan-gedik@em.uni-frankfurt.de

Switzerland AG 2021
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-71726-1_5
100 H. BIRKALAN-GEDIK
on feminist ethnography, falling short of contextualising generic issues at

large, vis à vis, in their own work. In the end, feminist ethnographies both
within and outside anthropology bypass an occasion to set themselves
with a dialogue on textual, genre-related issues to feminist ethnographic
examples. Here, I am framing my viewpoints particularly in the context of
Anglo-American social and cultural anthropology traditions—as I received
my training in the US alongside folklore studies. I will therefore be
speaking from the Anglo-American school of anthropology as an impor-
tant location, one that has guided me through my understanding of
feminist ethnography. Third, I will demonstrate that feminist ethnog-
raphy in Turkey can be located at the creative tension between ‘strong
feminist activism’, an impetus that came from women’s movements, and
‘weak feminist textuality’, a textual feature that ethnographies seem to
suffer in their writing. Certainly, there is a conundrum as to why, despite
strong feminist activism, anthropology in Turkey bypassed producing fully
feminist ethnographies, and other disciplines partly achieved this task. I
will examine this issue when I discuss the emergence of anthropology
in Turkey and its relation to state formation and nationalism, whereby
I will consider how far feminist thought and action impacted ethno-
graphic studies in the country. As I present critical accounts of both
anthropology and feminist ethnography, I explore reasons for the lack of
ethnographic feminist writing and propose strategies on how to overcome
this ineptitude.
At the outset, I take feminist ethnography to encompass three interre-
lated planes: First, I am interested in the relation of feminist ethnography
to feminist epistemology, which concerns feminist ways of knowing and
expressing this knowledge both in the field and in the text. Here, I find
‘experience’-based knowledge, as opposed to that of an assumedly ‘objec-
tive’ one, to guide my ethnographic understanding. Second, I observe
that anthropology in Turkey, for the most part, refrained from exploring
socio-cultural, ethnic, and gender-based differences or structural inequal-
ities in the country (Birkalan-Gedik 2005). It insisted on an assumed
‘sameness’ in the name of so-called national culture, thus failing to extend
an analysis through which differences were disclosed in ethnographic
texts. By no means do I suggest that ‘otherness’ is reconcilable, yet
my anthropological vision has been framed by awareness for distinction,
whereby I remain attuned to such differences as they reveal themselves
in everyday life situations and fieldwork. I strive to reflect on them in
my text in a critical manner. Third, I search for feminist textuality, which
CAN THERE BE FEMINIST ANTHROPOLOGY IN TURKEY? … 101
would interpret the lives and experiences of women and men through a
lens of feminist analysis. I try to combine these elements sensibly to speak
to my vision of feminist ethnography (Birkalan-Gedik 2009).
I begin by presenting my own journey of feminist ethnography, hoping
to reveal my positionality on fieldwork and in writing. After exam-
ining the development of anthropology in Turkey, which emerged as a
nationalist, masculinist, and positivist science, I discuss the emergence of
feminist ethnographic voices since the 1980s and point out certain work
exemplary of feminist fieldwork methodologies. The precursory feminists
conducted noteworthy ethnographic examples; however, their writings
do not reveal any kind of feminist textual features, thus falling short of
offering examples of feminist ethnography.
Having said that, I should underline that I do not possess a ready
formula for feminist textuality, although I believe self-reflexive writing to
be the essential base of feminist writing, whereby ethnographic experi-
ence and epistemology can be made more transparent. Furthermore, it
can be achieved in various ways. I personally try to achieve it, among
others, through deploying diverse writing strategies. For example, I let
the words of my informants speak on their own. I present their words
often in an intersubjective dialogue with my own and with greater theo-
retical viewpoints to create a polyphonic text. Certainly, I do not suggest
that the narrative with my informants eliminates the problem of textual
authority or solves the problem of voice. But it offers alternative author-
ship. My aim is not to simplify these issues, but to complicate them, as
my keen sensitivity to explore novel possibilities forms a great part of my
feminist ethnographic endeavour.
The remaining portion of the paper will discuss the tensions between
feminism and anthropology around the presupposition that, especially
since the 1980s, feminists in Turkey operated on diversity, despite differ-
ences among women, while anthropology insisted on sameness—on an
assumed socio-cultural homogeneity of the groups it studied. As a result,
these two different fields took two different roads with parting aims, never
merging. I will then ask, is it because of these divergent trajectories of
feminism and anthropology that the Turkish example presents another
‘awkward’ relation, to borrow the term from Marilyn Strathern (1987)?
Or can we take feminist ethnography in Turkey as a diverse manifestation
of feminist ethnography in the US or in the UK?
A Brief Segue: My Story

as a Feminist Ethnographer
My journey with feminist ethnography began when I was a graduate
student at Indiana University getting ready to go into the field. My
fieldwork took place between 1996 and 1999, in intervals, resulting in
a submission of my manuscript to the Graduate School in 1999 as my
dissertation, where I focused on village migrants’ experiences of home-
making and storytelling in a gecekondu 1 neighbourhood in Istanbul. In
my work, I aimed to show the agency of the village migrants in their
storytelling and homemaking activities in a great metropolis.
I penned my text at a time when the writing culture debate was still
fresh (Clifford and Marcus 1986), and to which feminist anthropologists
strongly reacted. Some of the feminist anthropologists underlined the
valuable textual contributions of women anthropologists in the 1950s, or
even those in the 1920s, or of anthropologist’s wives (Abu-Lughod 1986,
1993; Behar and Gordon 1995). Influenced by the feminist receptions of
and their contributions to ethnographic writing, I declared my writing
feminist. Lila Abu-Lughod’s conceptualisation of feminist ethnography
impacted me immensely, as I became keenly attuned to the ethnographic
enterprise and textual innovation (Birkalan 1999, 15). In particular, her
Writing Women’s Worlds (1993) and Veiled Sentiments (1986), in which
she tackled issues of gender and genre, deepened my understanding of
feminist ethnography, as I saw how it can be practiced. Abu-Lughod
identified a feminist ethnographer as:
a woman fieldworker who does not deny that she is a woman and is
attentive to gender in her own treatment, in her own actions, and in
the interactions of people in the community she is writing about. In
coming to understand their situation, she is also coming to understand her
own through a process of specifying the similarities and the differences.
(Abu-Lughod 1990, 25–26)
Bothered by the white, elitist, and condescending male representations

that prevailed in the discourses on gecekondu, I was writing against
these representations of village migrants which treated them as ‘weak’
subjects—not as active agents who constantly negotiated their being in
the gecekondus. My informants welcomed me to their worlds and their
words guided me as my primary sources in my text. I wanted to develop
an appropriate style with my field experience, exploring the possibilities

of feminist textuality, which I framed as non-distanced, intersubjective,
sincere, and emotional for representing the lives of women, children, and
men alike.
Ruth Behar’s ethnographic style also influenced my practice of feminist
writing. I was painstakingly thinking about deeper textual sensibilities:
on the one hand, about my audiences and the translatability of my field
experience to words, and on the other, about how to succeed in my role
as a transmitter and translator of my informants’ words, which rightfully
demanded an audience. Furthermore, my quandaries about crafting an
ethnographic text as a non-native speaker of English multiplied, when I
worked on my own translatability. In my writing I wanted:
[…] to bring to life the meaning of my role as a woman in the field,

how I explored the issues of home, placemaking, storytelling, ceremonies,
marriage, kinship, migration, death and illness, and what these things mean
to me and to other women. I hoped that my work will offer another way
of presenting a feminist ethnography. (Birkalan 1999, 16)
Back then, as a female doctoral candidate and as a budding feminist

ethnographer, I became attuned to the current anthropological debates
about writing culture, feminist positionality, and self-reflexivity in the field
and in text. These perspectives enabled me to critically reflect upon an
important lag in the Turkish ethnographies on gecekondus. More than
most, I engaged myself with ‘differences’ as they related to the multi-
plicity of women’s experiences. I worked with women in the gecekondu,
who came from different ethnoreligious backgrounds such as Kurdish,
Azeri, and Turkish as well as Alevi and Sunni. These differences revealed
the varieties in the community on the one hand, and on the other, some
of these terms also marked the unspoken differences between the ‘Self’
and the ‘Other’, between the researcher and her informants.2
Intellectual exchanges on these matters with my seniors—I should
particularly mention Michael Jackson here—on intersubjectivity and the
value of experience in anthropology enlightened my vision of ethnography
and offered renewed perspectives for my research and writing. The issues
I dealt with were intricate and personal, which my friends in the field
openly shared with me, especially when I returned to the field after my
father’s death. While still needing to be in the field, this experience made
me realise that my own emotional involvement impacted getting into the
emotional lives of the people with whom I study. I crafted a text that
dealt with not only how my informants thought about the world, but also
how they felt the world around them as well. Besides, I witnessed how
death—so painful that it is—can be a connective ground to talk about
emotions—both of mine and of my informants, as the theme triggered
narratives of migration, departure, and farewell. I aimed to frame my
experience next to the theoretical insights provided, again, by anthropolo-
gists who declared themselves feminists: Lila Abu-Lughod (1986, 1993),
Ruth Behar (1996), and Catherine Lutz (Lutz and Abu-Lughod 1990).
A self-reflexive stance took priority in my own feminist claims, as I
aimed to show how I strived to cross borders with my informants and
reflected on them both in the field and in my writing. I became a partici-
pant and an observer on different occasions, tailoring my positionality as
insider and outsider and as a ‘halfie’—a sister, a daughter, and yabancı,
the outsider, or foreigner, as Tamam, my main informant put it (Birkalan
2000). The word yabancı described my ‘otherness’ and thus ‘differences’
with respect to the group with whom I was studying. I reflected many
times on ‘my’ culture versus ‘your’ culture. Among other things, I came
from an urban, middle-class background with a university degree. Most
of my informants, on the other hand, originated from the village and
semi-literate but were extremely talented in telling stories. Listening to
their birth-control or child-rearing methods, what to cook for supper,
or discussing with them which detergent brand cleans well, stood out as
exceptional moments of both similarities and differences as women. I was
realising my ethnographic endeavours with the hope to speak from and
contribute to gendered textuality with distinctness and charm (Birkalan
2001). At one level, I declared to write in an experiential mood, where
I desired to dwell on the field issues in a self-reflexive manner. On the
other, I refrained from objectifying or homogenising discourses I found
in Turkish examples on the gecekondu, and I used field experience as a
guiding principle. Notwithstanding, I presented conversational dialogues
with my informants to balance out the problem of textual authority,
honouring their experiences and feelings. Last but not least, I laboured to
weave a more poetic text, as opposed to an academic, male-canonised one
which posed as scientific and insisted on certain principles, for example,
that women-centred analysis is too personal, emotional, or biased.
I searched to find my way in my gendered textuality, though a disser-
tation may not be the best place to experiment. I sensed that writing
became an eminent challenge for me, as I debated several formal issues
with my dissertation committee. Nonetheless, I wanted to vividly convey

the agency in the gecekondu in Esat Paşa through the richness of indi-
vidual experiences that I witnessed and myself encountered. I maintained
a keen interest in creating such a text that would mirror my experience,
which I partially fulfilled. My dissertation, unfortunately, did not become
a book, which I always regretted. In the end, I designed experimental
texts and published them in Turkish, as a firm believer in giving back
our end products to the communities we work with (Birkalan 2000a, b,
2001).
Landing my first job in Istanbul, I happily started working as a
founding member of the M.A. and Ph.D. Programme in an Anthropology
Department at a private university. I tried implementing courses on femi-
nist ethnography among the handful of courses I taught every semester.
I achieved this only in part, because the department chair concluded that
there were courses that were more important. Nonetheless, she conceded
that I could teach feminist ethnography ‘as a subsection’ in my method-
ology course. Finally, in 2004, I was able to realise my dream of teaching
about feminist ethnography for anthropology graduates and undergrad-
uates, as I searched for opportunities to continue research. I navigated
through my will and the necessities of academia, mostly because the
university I worked with never granted research leaves or funding.
In the attempt to negotiate time for ethnographic research and writing,
I have been to a variety of places: through several stays between 2000 and
2002, primarily in intervals, I did ethnographic research mostly with the
elderly inhabitants of the island of Imbros (Gökçeada) in the Aegean.
A large number of the Imbrians left the island in the 1960s and have
settled in Greece, Europe, America, and Australia. My fieldwork also had a
part in Athens, when I visited the Imbrian Association and had interviews
with its members. I carefully listened to the heart-breaking stories of my
informants on departure, migration, and nostalgia.
In the hot and dry summers, Imbrians, old and young, grouped them-
selves on the island and danced in festivity. But winters became cold and
tricky. Once I got stuck on the island for days. Boats could not dock
passengers to and from the mainland because of a heavy thunderstorm.
In these days, I witnessed the grievance of the elderly community more
closely, who remained only a handful in their homeland. For most of
them, our ‘Otherness’ revealed itself around ‘Turkish’ versus ‘Imbrian’—
terms they used covertly to point to the political unrest since the 1960s,
when Imbrians started to migrate from the island. Although I did not
express my identity as particularly ‘Turkish’, I remember in the first year,

one of my informants told me that she thought I was a spy, ‘because
their migration from the island did not interest any Turks’. I responded
telling her that the local authorities also said something like that to me
because of the same reason: ‘no interest in the Imbrians from the Turkish
side. Why are you interested?’. Both assumptions stood in stark contrast
and were far from reality. The reality for me was that throughout time I
saw my elderly informants passing away, the ones who shared their stories
over Turkish coffee—μšτ ρίo, coffee with medium sugar. As much as I
wanted to publish my research as a full book, I could not get to it. My
research ended up in a few conference papers (Birkalan 2002, 2003),
academic presentations, and articles where I dealt with several intersub-
jective stories of the field and people focusing on the idea of ‘otherness’
(Birkalan-Gedik 2013a, 2010). I have been, and still am, entertaining the
idea of writing an ethnographic novel (Jackson 1986), where I would
draw from memory, poetry, fiction (precisely, that of Ruth Behar 2001),
and, of course, from my ethnographic experience.
Through my work on Alevi women minstrels, I personally witnessed
the feminist strategies of the female artists in highly male-dominated
contexts. Interestingly, these strategies represented but one model for
feminist writing and performance (Birkalan-Gedik 2008, 2013b) due
to their innovative techniques, for example, subverting their way to
minstrelsy, which is known to be a male domain of artistic practice;
or, again, subverting the poetic language of the poems, whereby female
minstrels navigated through male-centred epistemic worlds. I continued
to employ intersectional feminist methodologies to understand Kurdish-
Alevi women’s everyday lives and their experiences within their religious-
transnational communities in eastern Anatolia, Istanbul, and Germany
(Gedik et al. 2020; Gedik and Birkalan-Gedik 2016; Birkalan-Gedik
2013b). The power that women interlaced in their loss and suffering,
which became a Leitmotif in their narratives, struck me more than
anything else.
In another instance of fieldwork, themes of loss and sorrow connected
me to Sevguli in a Kurdish-Alevi village in Varto, in eastern Anatolia,
which is both the hometown and the ethnographic site of my husband. I
accompanied my husband Erdoğan, who is a sociologist, during his field-
work in 2005. Our visit to Varto coincided at a time soon after our loss
of our Lorin, our first daughter, who so sadly and so unexpectedly died
during my pregnancy, just three days shy of my giving birth to her.
Sevguli knew my husband since his childhood. Erdoğan had intro-

duced me to Sevguli before. Now, we met again shortly after losing
our first daughter and she witnessed our sad story and deep sorrow.
So she paid us a condolence visit at the house of my husband’s sister,
which became our warp and woof during my husband’s fieldwork. Sevguli
discerned my role more than an accompanying wife, as I previously
recorded life stories of village women. I could not yet get to hers. When
she visited us, she said that she noticed my silence and pensiveness. No
doubt, she tried to console me, as she said that she wanted to chat with
me cenî bi cenî, ‘woman to woman’. She told her story in Zazaki, a
Kurdish dialect, and in Turkish. But because she was far better versed
in Zazaki than Turkish, my husband became a facilitator for our commu-
nication, helping me and navigating his different roles and positions in
his own fieldwork.
I had been contemplating my deliverance to sorrow for so long and
talking might have done me well. At that time, she said that she was
‘around her 70s’, and like many women of her generation in the region,
she did not know her exact age. She has given birth four times, to four
living children who were taken away from her one by one. When she
turned twelve, her father forced her to marry a man, who was more than
forty years old, for one cow that the groom gave in lieu of her bride price.
It became the ticket for Sevguli’s family to rid themselves of misery and
poverty. When she turned thirteen, she lost her husband. Sevguli, a girl
child, was first made into a bride, and then, into a widow.
She went back to living with her family, who was far from being
affluent. Again, her father forced her to marry another man. Sevguli
became a kuma, the second wife, of a much older husband whose wife
could not bear any children. Sevguli, unsure of her age, was very sure
about the loss and agony that sprung out of her motherhood. She became
the biological mother of four children who were, literally, ripped from her
breast after she fed them.
‘What a fate’, I had thought at that time. But, was it really fate? I
listened to Sevguli’s story of lost motherhood which she told gently and
patiently, underlining in each episode that she was made to be deprived
of living her motherhood socially and emotionally. After years spent grap-
pling with how to write about it, we finally analysed this truly fascinating
but equally painful story at length and discussed it in the framework
of fieldwork contexts, narrativity, and feminist epistemology (Gedik and
Birkalan-Gedik 2014).
Yes, once there was motherhood, and once there was not…
This time, experiencing ‘lost motherhood’ connected me to Sevguli
as a ground to talk about our experience as one woman to another,
despite our ethnic, cultural, and social differences. But also, this expe-
rience became a great challenge for me, so I reflected on it in the best
possible way in my text that would ethnographically make sense for our
readers. Both Erdoğan and I thought of the text we co-(l)laborated and
co-authored as a productive and fulfilling feminist practice.
For now, I conclude my narrative on select instances of practising both
feminist ethnography and writing. In particular, I should underline that
I began experimenting with ideas to develop new writing styles—alterna-
tives to academic writing, for instance, writing in a more personalised
way and trying out the possibility of a more poetic autoethnography,
one that clearly goes beyond ‘self-reflexivity’. I should also underline
that my position in discussing, problematising, and evaluating the state
of feminist ethnography in Turkey also has been through several versions
(Birkalan-Gedik 2009; Birkalan 1999, 2000a, b). I wanted to put my
own experience vis-à-vis the ways in which anthropologists and feminists
in Turkey perceive ‘feminist ethnography’. When I wrote on feminism
and anthropology in Turkey in 2009—possibly the first piece on the
topic, I realised that only a handful of anthropologists in Turkey, if that,
were interested in mapping the terrain across these fields. Certainly, since
then, the number of practitioners of feminist ethnography in Turkey has
increased as the definitions, discourses, and practices of feminist ethnog-
raphy have changed, and feminism in Turkey has crystallised in various
unique ways.
The Development of Anthropology in Turkey

In my introduction, I argued that feminist ethnography in Turkey found
resistance in anthropology, and perhaps because of this resistance, it devel-
oped with a strong ‘accent’ on feminist activism. The discord between
feminism and anthropology in the Turkish context likens to what Marilyn
Strathern has written more than thirty years ago, underlining that anthro-
pology resisted feminism, and therefore feminist anthropology remained
as a sub-discipline within anthropology rather than being able to create
a paradigm shift (Strathern 1987). The Turkish case presents another
awkward situation that should be inspected, about how anthropology
in Turkey appeared historically, but also about how anthropology and

feminism handled the idea of ‘differences’.
Today social and cultural anthropology in Turkey is the ‘smallest of
the small disciplines’ in social sciences and has a rich history that both
illuminates and complicates the division between ‘imperial’ and ‘national’
traditions. The emergence of anthropology in Turkey dates to the 1850s.
This period coincides with the decline of the Ottoman Empire and the
birth of the Turkish Republic, when several anthropological concepts and
theories from Europe—such as social Darwinism, evolutionism, and mate-
rialism—were skillfully adapted to the Turkish case. The idea of ‘race’
aligned with a plural, cosmopolitan understanding, meaning the biodiver-
sity of different peoples, which meant nations, ethnic groups, and tribes
(Birkalan-Gedik 2019).
Anthropology took a radical turn from a multicultural, cosmopolitan
vision to a local, national turn at the turn of the twentieth century.
With the Young Turk Revolution in 1908, discourses on nationalism
affected later developments in the new nation-state and anthropology
(Birkalan-Gedik 2019). Physical anthropology was professionalised in
1925 at Istanbul University under the Faculty of Medicine as Türkiye
Antropoloji Tetkikat Merkezi (Centre of Anthropological Research of
Turkey) upon the order of the founder of the Turkish Republic, Mustafa
Kemal Atatürk. This type of commissioning and institutionalising of
anthropology functioned as a flagship of Turkish nation-building; anthro-
pologists at the time actively contributed to this through the Turkish
History Thesis, positing that the Alpine race came from Central Asian
and Anatolian populations. Likewise, the Sun-Language Theory argued
that world languages stemmed from a ‘proto-Turkish’, and it promoted
Turkish ethnonationalism (Birkalan-Gedik 2018, 58; Kieser 2006, 110).
Later named as the Türk Antropoloji Enstitüsü (Turkish Anthropo-
logical Institute), where the cultural branch has emerged, anthropology
became utilised more than a pure disciplinary endeavour (Birkalan 2018,
41). By the end of the 1940s, however, the racial paradigm started its
demise in anthropology (Aydın 2000; Birkalan-Gedik 2018, 2019). The
nationalist twist in anthropology continued and positioned the ‘Turk-
ish’ nation as a superior ‘unity’ to other ethnic groups in the country,
whose cultural differences were erased. Keeping its nationalistic focus, the
emergent cultural anthropology, then named as Etnoloji, combined the
evolutionist, nationalist, and modernist paradigms and created a complex
and dynamic non-Western anthropological tradition. Within this tradi-

tion, it promoted discourses of ‘sameness’ and ‘unity’ of the new-born
nation-state in its disciplinary constellations. The ‘Other’ of Turkish
ethnographies indicated villagers, as opposed to so-called exotic culture in
faraway places as seen in colonial anthropologies (Birkalan-Gedik 2005,
74). Especially in the 1940s and 1950s, using research perspectives from
British-structuralism, anthropology’s choice of a native ‘Other’ suited the
aims of the newly founded Republic of Turkey: it orchestrated societal
and cultural change through Kemalist reforms and assumed the peoples,
groups, and locales of anthropology in Turkey to be homogeneous. This
perspective also shaped anthropology’s ‘objects’ in various distinct ways:
homogenising ethnoreligious groups and secularising, modernising, and
westernising a Muslim society.
The above-mentioned discourses partly refer to the ways in which I
use the term ‘difference’. However, when I use the term ‘differences’—of
race, class, or sexual orientation—I do not mean them as mere contexts,
but the very data to shape our field experiences and textual represen-
tations. They can surface in several aspects of ethnographic fieldwork
and refer to a whole range of diverse or distinctive issues between the
researcher and her informants. But differences can also exist among the
people—in the cultures we study. To be more specific for the Turkish
context: I am thinking about various possible representations of gender,
class, and ethnicity, which remained uncritical and underexplored in the
‘national’ ethnographies in Turkey roughly until the end of the 1980s.
These differences fluctuated in the tension between ‘truth’ and ‘taboo’.
The official state discourse shaped what kind of ethnographies could be
conducted. Ethnic differences were minimised: after all, there were no
Kurds in the country, there were ‘mountain Turks’. Furthermore, certain
ethnographies presented the Turkish village in such a way that their repre-
sentation of a ‘culture’ became either homogenous, neat, or unified at
best. At worst, their representations fell into the trap of ‘othering’ making
differences based on ethnicity and gender invisible or non-existent. Specif-
ically, they situated representations of women through certain images
attributed to or imposed on them (Arat 2000).
The effects of a bloody military coup on 12 September 1980 left
immeasurable traumas on individuals in Turkey. The putschist generals
killed many thinkers, activists—mostly people from the Kurdish and
Turkish Left—or put them in jail after systematic torture. The coup also
became an effective leverage to suppress academic freedom. As a result,
the ethnographic topics that were ‘allowed to be studied’ within the

state’s official ideology were minimised, as the state tightened its claims
on the ‘truth’ and ‘taboo’.
Now, keeping the political transformations in the 1980s in mind, let
us go back to the issue of women: the emergence of the women’s move-
ment in Turkey that started around the same time that Western ideas
made their way into the Ottoman Empire. Şirin Tekeli underlines that
women activists had achieved their fundamental rights, such as the aboli-
tion of polygamy and repudiation in the Ottoman Empire (Tekeli 1986,
180). This idea stood in stark contrast with the commonly held view that
women in Turkey gained their freedom thanks to Atatürk. It referred to
a common but inaccurate assumption, which feminists challenged in the
1980s, arguing that it was a result of the result of more than fifty years
of activism by Ottoman women (for instance in English, see Çakır 1994;
Durakbaşa and İlyasoğlu 2001). Along these lines, certain scholars iden-
tify the women’s movement in the 1980s as a ‘new women’s movement’
(Tekeli 2010) as it took a radically activist turn, developed critically, and
overtly promoted a feminist agenda in the public sphere. The relation-
ship of feminism and feminist ethnography to activism has been discussed
widely among scholars in the North American school (Devault 1999;
Naples 2003). For the Turkish case, the development of feminism and
activism in the 1980s can be seen as a great impetus that led to the
establishment of women’s studies at the Turkish universities. Further-
more, feminism in this period embraced differences among women, as it
contributed to the so-called democratisation in the 1980s after the mili-
tary coup (Arat 1994). In this era, terms such as Islamic feminism made
their way to the feminist literature, but Kurdish women again remained
unrepresented, as they were considered at the limits of Turkish feminism.
In short, feminists wrote about ‘differences’, but as women, but ‘writing
differently as a woman’ did not take place.
Until the 1980s, anthropologists followed the ideological conventions
set by the Turkish state and eliminated ethnic and gendered differences
for a long time in fieldwork (Birkalan-Gedik 2005a, b). Only by the
1990s, the ethnographic gaze gravitated towards the nuanced gendered
individuals and was able to include—to a limited degree—women coming
from different ethnic backgrounds as well.
In light of this quick survey, I would argue that feminism resisted
against the official discourse to which ethnographic studies obeyed. I
will elaborate on feminist involvement in ethnography in the following
section more in detail. For now, let me say this: while feminism’s activist
component enabled a more relatively flexible attitude towards studying
differences among women, anthropology in Turkey insisted on ‘sameness’
and turned to study the groups, themes, and themes which seem either
to be less permissible or likely to be funded (Özmen 2000; Birkalan-
Gedik 2005b). Ethnographies, emerging as early as the 1940s and often
written in the form of monographs, reveal the ideological framework of
the Turkish state.
The nationalistic enterprise of anthropology also meant a patriarchal
view on the Turkish society, a lens which determined the approaches
taken towards ‘Turkish’ women (as opposed to women in Turkey).
More importantly, this perspective created a discourse on ‘the Turkish
woman’ which is rooted in the patriarchal and masculinist vision of the
Turkish state. Within the social and cultural branches of anthropology, a
‘woman’ component was added to the ethnographic studies, but it was
envisioned within the discourses of Turco-centrism, nationalism, mili-
tarism, and modernism (Birkalan-Gedik 2005b). Anthropology helped
reinforce images of women under Kemalism, the founding principles of
the Turkish Republic. As Jenny White observes, the roles made available
to women under Kemalist nationalism were either the modern, virtuous
asexual woman who was a product of education; mothers of martyrs;
or the entirely Westernised woman who was immoral and loose (White
2013, 156). And anthropology served the state to provide ‘ethnographic
evidence’ on Turkish women, although the images of Turkish women
have also centred around conflicting stereotypes (Arat 2000).
With an important disciplinary lag, anthropologists in Turkey only in
the past few decades have begun to criticise methodological issues and
delve into the postmodernist criticisms of traditional ethnography. The
‘writing culture’ debate, which reached an apogee in the 1990s, arrived
almost twenty years later in Turkey and was not adequately discussed.
Only at the beginning of the 2000s, did anthropologists in Turkey present
essays on the history of anthropology focusing critically on its national-
istic, masculinist, and objectivist character, the contemporary practices of
ethnography (Aydın 2000; Özmen 2000; Atay 2000), discussing forms
and contexts of writing (Gedik and Birkalan-Gedik 2016; Birkalan 2000a,
b, 2001), and experimenting with different ways of ethnography and
writing (Atay 1996).
In the past decade or so, readers of anthropological oeuvres encoun-
tered reflexive ethnographies of the new generation of sociologists and
media and communication studies scholars. Using ethnographic methods,

they started to openly articulate feminist ethnography, yet kept a typical
focus on fieldwork experiences and practices more than writing strategies.
They focused on different components of fieldwork and self-reflexivity
(Zırh 2017; Harmanşah and Nahya 2016); while some gravitated towards
feminist methodology, they ended up reporting on articles in English
(Pala, n.d; Ünlü 2019; Tuncer 2015). A recent collection (Bartu and
Özbay 2018), has a lengthy section on feminist ethnography (Bora
2018), which is very reminiscent of my article (Birkalan-Gedik 2009),
but without a single mention of it. These texts contribute to the discus-
sions on ethnographic writing, mostly because of their reflective character
in fieldwork, but clearly, not all reflexive texts are feminist.
Now, in terms of feminist writing, which could create another type
of ‘difference’, we need to revisit the contexts of anthropological prac-
tice in Turkey. Besides anthropology being a nationalistic discipline, I
can offer another reason for resistance to feminist textuality in social
sciences in general and in anthropology in Turkey in particular, which
might derive from the perception of anthropology as being positivistic,
scientific, and objective. These features permeated the earlier ethnogra-
phies and formed mainstream anthropology with strict borders both on
ethnographic methodology and textuality, which fashioned itself for the
most part after British structural-functionalism.
Besides, male anthropologists in Turkey coming from the older gener-
ation found the discussions on anthropology and literature to be intel-
lectually unproductive. At best, they considered them as a distraction
from their ‘scientific’ work and excluded those who thought, taught, and
wrote otherwise. At the second National Congress of Anthropology in
Turkey in 2004, a well-known male anthropologist called my approach,
which I identified feminist, as unscientific, underlining that ‘there is one
method, and that is the scientific method’. I do not tell this anecdote
in passing, but to underline that these scholars taught anthropology at
universities and communicated a ‘scientific’ notion of anthropology to
their students. I interpreted this as a part of his insistence on ‘truth’, a
fundamental distinguishing factor between fiction and creative writing,
but also between experience and reality.
Anthropological writing in Turkey, therefore, is seen as scientific
penning with strict rules. A presupposed ‘masculine imagination’ deter-
mines the formats of theses and dissertations as well as academic articles
and books, which hinders feminist anthropologists from finding a voice
of their own. The ‘masculine imagination’ argues that writing other than
that which follows academic norms evokes the idea of ‘fiction’ as invented
truth, while anthropology should present accounts of ‘real’ people, places,
and events. Anthropology and writing in North American settings prove
that this binary opposition is eroding, but many anthropologists in Turkey
still consider other forms of writing as a creative act that belongs to
literature, not to ethnography. For example, unlike literature, textual
experimentations such as using allegory, parody, or metaphors are resisted
as much as a self-reflective, experimental, collaborative methodology is
seen to be detrimental to the scientific quality of the discipline. Possible
experimentations, such as textual subversions of gender—for example
writing from a ‘she-centred’ perspective—are either not welcomed or
considered as improper or non-academic. The Turkish language does not
have gender but gender subversions are well-known, for example, in the
Ottoman court literature, particularly in the case of the 17th century
court-poet Nedim (Silay 1994). However, many think that anthropology
should not be mistaken for poetry or a novel, where the author can experi-
ment. Anthropologists have not yet thoroughly criticised the androcentric
bias and male canonising in academia and academic writing, and they
have not yet exhausted the relationship between text, textuality, and other
generic differences in writing as feminists (such as subversion of cultural
and linguistic codes). It seems that uncovering the silent, hidden, partial
feminist writing in anthropology is like looking for a needle in a haystack,
going through several texts and trying to make sense of them from a
feminist perspective. I find this situation a bit curious.
On the other hand, feminists at the literature and history depart-
ments previously discussed feminist writing both at length and in detail
in various examples from British, American, and Turkish literary oeuvres.
Turkish, English, and American literature scholars produced a growing
amount of literature on écriture féminine (Çakır 2006) and traced
women’s literary sensibilities that emerged in the late-Ottoman Empire.
Feminist historians have already tackled the issue of ‘writing as a woman’
(Berktay 1991). They diagnosed that historiographic writing in Turkey
was male-oriented, which muted women (Durakbaşa and İlyasoğlu 2001;
Çakır 1994), looking for times and places in history that women’s pres-
ence mattered (Yaraman 2003). I do not mean to suggest that the
developments in oral history and literature did not affect anthropology at
all, but the feminist impact from outside anthropology remained minimal
and only influenced the small number of women anthropologists who had
contacts with feminist historians and sociologists publishing in Turkish

and translating original works into Turkish. But I would argue that
their criticisms were understood within the limits of tolerating ‘differ-
ence’. Although anthropological studies on Kurdish women are now
‘permitted’, they are expected to remain within the contours of official
ideology.
Feminist Activism and Feminist Encounters with Ethnography

in Turkey: 1980s–2000s
I have underlined that feminist ethnography found resistance in anthro-
pology in Turkey but developed with a strong ‘accent’ on feminist
activism, taking the role of an interdisciplinary facilitator and creating
partially feminist texts. My usage of the term ‘accent’, first, empha-
sises feminism’s counterpart, activism, which became the core feature
of feminist ethnography in Turkey, just as it also played a central role
in feminist social sciences in the North American settings (Lamphere
2016; Craven and Davis 2013). The activist spirit motivated feminists
in Turkey, influencing both the topics and the theories they chose to
study. They also took more critical positions and underlined three urgent
issues: women’s agency, women’s power, and women’s bodies. Moreover,
among other things, they addressed social inequalities, domestic violence,
women’s uprootedness, and de-territorialisation, and they carried these
issues to academic discussions. The notion of an accent implies a second,
metaphorical sense, as I refer to doing feminist ethnographic work with
‘difference’. In that case, I mean ‘accent’ in the sense that one might
speak a language with an accent. Therefore, feminist ethnography in
Turkey presents itself with a Turkish accent, which is both a distinction
and a challenge for the future of feminist ethnography in Turkey.
Feminism in Turkey developed far more critically than anthropology
after the 1980s (Birkalan-Gedik 2009). Feminist social scientists—among
these, anthropologists—conceptualised and practised feminist possibilities
in ethnographic fieldwork. They underlined the lack of representative
studies on women and aimed at providing a ‘woman’s perspective’ in
their research. For example, Türk Toplumunda Kadın (Women in Turkish
Society) (Abadan-Unat et al. 1979), a pioneering interdisciplinary collec-
tion, spoke to such interests and concerns with women’s roles and
identities in politics, society, and culture. As a precursory text that exam-
ined women’s issues, it stood in stark contrast with the malestream
ethnographies in Turkey, which mainly consulted male informants and

turned to women when males were absent, arguing that they were repre-
senting the ‘culture’. The book was published in German in 1985 under
the Die Frau in der türkischen Gesellschaft (Women in Turkish Society)
and had another edition in 1993.
In 1990, almost a decade later, 1980 ler Türkiye’sinde Kadın Bakış
Açısından Kadınlar (Women in Turkey in the 1980s from Women’s
Perspective) (Tekeli 1990a) appeared; it was a seminal feminist foray,
published in different editions (1990, 1993, 1995, 2015). The collection
aimed to challenge the androcentric field research in social sciences and
women’s representation in history, presenting the work of twenty women
anthropologists, sociologists, political scientists, literary critics, and histo-
rians. They concentrated on women’s history, women’s labour, women’s
ways of resistance in public and private spheres. I take this book as a
feminist manifesto in social research as the contributing authors became
influential figures in women and gender studies in the years to follow or
continued to work on gender ethnographically in their own disciplinary
settings. Some of them veered towards teaching new generations of grad-
uate and undergraduate students, as feminist thought in Turkey started
to be diversified and institutionalised through study programmes at the
universities in the 1990s. Celebrating a thirty-year history today, they
continue researching women and producing policy and knowledge on
women (Sancar 2008). Subsequently, the book appeared with the title
Women in Turkish Society, a title that does not do justice to what the
authors intended to achieve in Turkish (Tekeli 1990b); and in German as
Aufstand im Haus der Frauen: Frauenforschung aus der Türkei (1991)
was prepared by Ayla Neusel, Şirin Tekeli, and Meral Akkent. This title
refers to an uprising in the houses of women and simultaneously signals
women’s reaction to everyday life that relates to both the private and the
public.
Furthermore, scholars who have been working in feminist qualita-
tive sociology have defined and problematised feminist research, analysis,
and epistemology (Y. Ecevit 2010; M. Ecevit 2010), but have not yet
discussed feminist textuality. Their work has successfully made its way into
the mainstream textbooks on sociology and has been widely received at
numerous feminist conferences. For example, one of my feminist hero-
ines, Yıldız Ecevit complained that (2010, 49) the knowledge about
women in social sciences was produced by way of ‘adding and stirring’
women into mainstream research. She meant that the research was done
in the classical malestream framework but ‘touched upon’ women when

they thought it was necessary or when they could find male informants.
Moreover, she also underlined that while certain studies placed women
in their focus, they were not necessarily feminist. Here she differentiated
works which she identified as ‘sociology on women’ and ‘feminist sociol-
ogy’, and considered the work on women truly feminist when researchers
openly claim a women’s perspective.
Yıldız Ecevit taught many years at the Middle East Technical Univer-
sity, a founding member of the Gender and Women’s Studies Depart-
ment. She once painted me a picture of academic and activist feminism
with a metaphor of ‘bridge’. The Turkish term for a bridge is köprü,
and this is how Ecevit envisioned the role of gender studies—setting up
bridges with real-life concerns for women:
[...] the valuable feminist knowledge and experience that activist women
gained through feminist politics are not sufficiently reflected in academic
women’s studies. In order to eliminate this disconnection, it is vital
to strengthen the relationship between feminist information producers
(theory/concept) and feminist policymakers (action-activism). (Y. Ecevit
2010, 50, my translation)
This need for a köprü may explain why there is ‘strong’ activism in femi-
nism, partly coming from outside the academia. Years-long engagement
in feminist activism indeed paved the way to the establishment of women
and gender studies and degree programmes in Turkey, which took insti-
tutional forms in the 1990s. And since then, their scholars have led
important activities: for example, enabling translations and publications
of original articles that have dealt with feminist theory and ethnographic
feminisms. This period also witnessed translated articles about feminist
ethnography and praxis, women’s history writing, and brief moments
of questioning unequal power relations in the field (Çakır and Akgökçe
2001). In my view, the development of gender studies in Turkey can
provide more resources and opportunities for feminist ethnography in the
field and text. If one considers the development of feminist anthropology
in the US, which emerged when no gender studies departments and
programmes were in the making (Behar 1990, ix–xii), the Turkish case of
feminist ethnography presents a beneficial circumstance. Under an insti-
tutional roof, feminist research has provided social science scholars with
a chance to reflect upon and criticise mainstream research and writing

strategies.
I take women and gender studies departments as important centres
to radiate discussions on feminist ethnography, whereby feminist ethno-
graphic writing can be examined. Yet one cannot find courses on the
topic in these constellations.3 Scholars who write in academia do not
question the academic norms of writing, whereby institutionalisation
can be simultaneously an advantage and disadvantage. Seminars meet-
ings, conferences, and even feminist writing residencies—possibly with
literary scholars—and considering collaborative publications, can provide
a prolific ground where women with similar feminist interests can come
together and learn from each other.
Feminist ethnographers can bring new genres to ethnographies or
strengthen their voices of women anthropologists as writers. But they can
also work in a collaborative, dialogic manner with their informants and
reflect that collaboration in their texts. The multi-textual and multivocal
texts, for instance, can include ‘biographical, historical, and literary essays,
fiction, autobiography, theatre, poetry, life stories, travelogues, social crit-
icism, fieldwork accounts, and blended texts of various kinds’, as Ruth
Behar exhorted in her introduction (1995, 7), more than 25 years ago.
Post-2000s: Feminist Activism, Feminist Publishing, and Feminist

Ethnography
Feminist activism in Turkey, especially as it developed since the 1980s,
has played a crucial role in social sciences, as feminists have unfailingly
dealt with real-world concerns and carried them to their academic work.
More importantly, in the past decade or so, feminist activism has become
more visible in the public eye, as feminist reactions to the AKP (Adalet
ve Kalkınma Partisi/Justice and Development Party) government’s polit-
ical oppression in Turkey accelerated.4 Feminist activists have resisted the
government’s policies on gender. Among others, they were keen to crit-
icise the pronatal policies of the AKP government: in particular, they
criticised Turkish President Erdoğan’s encouragement for women to have
at least three children in 2008 and his claims that abortion is equivalent
to killing in 2011. As feminists sharply criticised policies and discourses
and identified them as ‘anti-feminist’, they became a target of the govern-
ment’s witch-hunting. Today, many feminist activists are no longer able
to live and work in the country because of the recent threats to freedom
of speech.
Feminist activism in Turkey in the 2000s substantiated itself through
feminist networking and feminist publishing, which were already in place
since the 1990s. Activist women organised themselves around ‘action
platforms’, initiatives which worked, for example, towards ameliorating
the legislation in Turkey by demanding the change of Civil Code (2001),
Penal Code (2004), and Constitution (2017). Women’s cooperatives
became both compatible formats and sites of feminist activism since the
2000s, as they signify the essential pillars of feminist struggle.5 Feminists
led several campaigns in the 2000s, such as the twentieth anniversary of
Solidarity for Against Domestic Violence in Turkey (2007) as a nation-
wide campaign (Özkan-Kerestecioğlu 2016). Feminists supported the
candidacy of a woman who was a sex-worker in the national elections
(Sosyal Feminist Kolektif 2007).
By the 2000s, both academic and activist feminists criticised and
challenged the official, mythical discourse on women (particularly on
motherhood) and effectively mapped out areas in which women have
power. Domestic work has been one of the most important agenda items,
followed by women’s participation and their representation in politics.
Furthermore, feminists demanded equal treatment of women’s position
in the family with more life-work balance. Ethnic feminist demands,
especially those of the Kurdish feminists, became more visible in public.
Kurdish women, despite the extreme state oppression on them, perse-
vered to remain in everyday life and politics. The Gezi Protests of 2013
marked a decisive turn in the history of feminism and feminist activism
in Turkey, whereby several women come out and protested abortion
bans implemented by the Turkish state. One more time, women were
in the streets, parks, and were ‘everywhere’. Finally, the presence of
feminist reactions can be also evidenced in the feminist petition, that is
nearing 1.000.000 signatures, protesting the withdrawal of Turkey from
the Istanbul Convention in early 2021.
From the above assessment I suppose that the downplaying of femi-
nist ethnography has been due to the fact that feminists had to prioritise
gender issues—the ‘field’ had personal and political importance to create
change. While feminists have raised their voices in the streets, they are
yet to write their words in the texts. Feminist publishing became more
visible, as Güldünya and Ayizi Publishing houses printed books on and
by women, although these books did not necessarily strive for a femi-
nist writing style.6 Some print journals, such as Amargi Feminist Teori ve
Politika (Amargi Feminist Theory and Politics); Feminist Politika (Femi-
nist Politics), and Kültür ve Siyasette Feminist Yaklaşımlar (Feminist
Approaches in Culture and Politics), brought together opinion pieces and
essays on feminist ethnography. They also translated articles that were
originally written in English, to Turkish on ethnographic issues feminist
deemed urgent.
Furthermore, some respected open-access social science journals,
keen on peer-review, as a form of collaborative writing presented
their readers with feminist consciousness and a feminist mission. The
Fe Dergi (Feminist Eleştiri/Feminist Criticism), published by Ankara
University KASAUM-Kadın Sorunları Araştırma ve Uygulama Merkezi
(Women’s Studies Centre) and Moment Dergi (Hacettepe University
Cultural Studies Journal), published by the Department of Communica-
tion at Hacettepe University, disseminated young scholars’ ethnographic
reflections digitally, thus impacting scholarly exchange. Although these
journals publish articles that treat gender and fieldwork critically, they
do not dwell on issues of ethnographic writing. By the 2010s, several
online feminist publications and feminist internet sites with differen-
tiating viewpoints appeared. The 5 Harfliler/5 Lettered (2012)7 and
Reçel Blog /Blog Marmalade (2014) presented different issues on women
employing distinctive, feminist textualities and offered alternatives for a
feminist language and feminist writing strategies.
The translations of feminist texts from Western languages into Turkish
had a critical turn since the 1980s, whereby oeuvres indispensable for
a feminist library became available in Turkish. These texts expanded to
include examples of feminist research methods in the 1990s. For instance,
Farklı Feminizmler Açısıdan Kadın Araştırmalarında Yöntem (Method
in Women’s Studies from Different Feminist Perspectives, 1995), framed
its aim and scope in a twofold—to offer significant articles on method-
ological and theoretical discussions on women’s social research and
to present their materials that are informed by such perspectives in
Turkey. The editors and contributors of the volume came from oral
history, anthropology, and literature who wanted to provide their research
experience-based discussions on feminist methodologies. Articles in trans-
lation included pieces from sociology, history, literature, Middle Eastern
Studies, and Black and Third World Feminism. The Turkish examples, for
instance, considered feminist oral history in a case study that dealt with
feminist research. Another one presented a discussion on women anthro-

pologists doing fieldwork with women, but again, there was no mention
of feminist ethnographic writing.
Besides translations, ‘reports’ on feminist ethnographic praxis have
contributed to the growing corpus of feminist ethnography, which has
grown precipitously in the last decades. From time to time, the content
of these publications comes closer to translations, where an author
summarises original articles but seldomly dwells on her position, and
therefore is not able to move beyond the ‘she said’ kind of reporting.
While these reporting articles may contribute to a wider feminist litera-
ture, I am critical of this reporting form, because they neglect to present
what is going on among scholars in Turkey. The fact that they turn their
faces to other feminist tales, to the histories of other feminists, gives the
impression that the authors are contributing to a discussion on femi-
nist ethnography and feminist writing but repeating some information
which was produced in the context of ‘other’ anthropologies and not
duly connecting them to the Turkish case.
Some recent ethnographic examples claim to be feminist but cannot
further illustrate their claims. In İmkansız Medeniyet TOKİ/Aktaş
Mahallesi Örneğinde Feminist Bir Etnografi,8 Burcu Hatiboğlu-Eren
focuses on the everyday experiences of lower-income women at the
outskirts of the Turkish capital in the face of the Turkish government’s
urban transformation (2017). Hatiboğlu-Eren initially wrote this text for
her doctoral degree in social work. It was based on her ethnographic field-
work in Aktaş, a pseudonym she used for the neighbourhood in Ankara.
Although she claims her work as ‘feminist ethnography’ and identifies her
positionality as a ‘feminist ethnographer’ and refers to Dorothy Smith
once (2006), she does so only very briefly and it is difficult to find traces
in the text to support her claims (Hatiboğlu-Eren 2017, 15–17). On the
other hand, a few exciting textual features deserve a further, in-depth
illustration. First, the author presents stories on the feelings, ideas, and
thoughts of women on how urban transformation affected their lives,
arguably by offering the words of her informants. However, there are
many instances in which her voice of assertions drowns out the words of
her informants. I take these cases to illustrate the researcher’s position on
textual hierarchies. Where should a feminist ethnographer position herself
in the text?
I have been concerned with this question in my work as well. I had

to give many thoughts as to how to present the words of my infor-
mants in the text. As I primarily overcome ‘textual authority’ in my
writing, I presented the words and worlds of my informants as they
are, set in a dialogue rather than placing them in my text hierarchi-
cally. I wonder if we can find another way to talk about voice differently
without undermining the agency of the people with whom we study.
Can we offer another alternative textual positioning when we present
the unheard voices simply speak for themselves, instead of us, ethnog-
raphers speaking for the potentially vulnerable groups? Hatiboğlu-Eren
experiments with other aspects of her ethnographic narrative and she
writes her ethnography in an informal manner, which strikes us as a
textual novelty. Customarily, academics in Turkey write in ‘factitively’,
which allows the often male author to speak with an endowed authority.
Therefore, presenting her ethnographic narrative in present continuous
as opposed to factitive challenges the male canonised academic writing,
as she brings a more colloquial, everyday usage for the language. Yet,
even this novelty cannot justify considering her to be fully feminist, as
she misses self-reflexivity, a foundational base for feminist textuality, as I
mentioned above.
Çiğdem Yasemin Ünlü, who completed her degree in communication
studies with her work with tailors in Bursa, discusses feminist method-
ology about her field experiences, claiming herself as a ‘feminist’ (Ünlü
2019). She investigates women’s experiences in a tailor shop, as an
example of a semi-public sphere, in Bursa, the fourth largest city in
Turkey. Her ethnographic text has various references to methodological
issues both within anthropology and feminist research which stand out. I
find her writing to be self-reflexive about field methodologies; however,
she does not look for something unique in terms of her writing genre.
Recently, several authors have published highly engaging books on
challenging topics, dealing with disturbing themes that were not exam-
ined by anthropologists. A journalist, Sibel Hürtaş (2014) gives a first-
hand account of women who were put in jail because they killed their
husbands. She describes the experiences of these women with one word:
‘silence’. They were silent when they had to endure their suffering,
which came to their husband exercising domestic violence on them, or
who sexually abused them or their children. The author vividly describes
women’s experiences, based on their own words, which got under my
skin when I read them. Very moving and challenging descriptions visu-
alise the very idea of the ‘straw that broke the camel’s back’. The women’s
reactions describe how they could not take it anymore, as they radically
reacted to a seemingly ‘normalised’ action. The women themselves ended
their suffering, their years-long endurance to various forms of violence
and abuse by killing their husbands. Hürtaş does something courageous
in her writing by letting the women speak through their own words.
Taking the role of an interlocutor, she illuminates the cultural background
of embeddedness of private issues such as patriarchy, masculinity, and
violence.
Conclusion
Today, feminist ethnography in Turkey has a strong foothold in femi-
nist politics but suffers from weak feminist textuality. The strength comes
from feminist activism, which emerged as early as the 1980s, maintained
connections with the feminist academia in the 1990s. In the 2000s, femi-
nists engaged themselves with social and political issues and presented
their unique ways of feminist organising and criticism. Anthropology, on
the other hand, resisted the impetus of feminism as a part of its insistence
on ‘sameness’ (reading it as national unity and purity)—furthering its
historical baggage in ethnographies, which influenced weak ethnographic
textuality.
Malestream research in Turkey argued that feminist scholarship does
not present the so-called ‘proper’ or ‘scientific’ knowledge, as it is too
‘political or subjective’; and eventually began to discourage ‘novelistic’
writing. For a long time, claims to ‘objectivity’ have been the greatest
yardsticks to measure anthropology as a science. As a result, anthro-
pology—which developed ideologically, within the official state discourse
in Turkey, excluded feminist studies, and called them ‘unscientific’ or
‘unnecessary’.
Today, examples of feminist ethnography go beyond anthropology, as
ethnography became a shared methodology for other disciplines—soci-
ology, communication, and media studies, and yielded feminist ethno-
graphic examples. However, these examples still suffer from feminist
writing strategies at large. Thus, this partial engagement with feminist
ethnography both as a method and as text became a challenging issue.
Conversely, and perhaps to the dismay of the readers, while feminist
conviction is in place, feminist ethnography in Turkey did not tackle femi-

nist ethnographic writing, whereby producing weak feminist textuality.
Shall we take this weak textuality as a drawback, perhaps as a missing
component, or an unconventional, yet downplayed feature of feminist
ethnography? Shall we take this as camouflage, because ‘strong activist’
and ‘weak feminist textual’ ethnographies can be interpreted as strategies
to remain ‘alive’ within academia? In the light of the intellectually rich
and fascinating history both of feminism and anthropology in Turkey,
how can we envision a future of feminist ethnographic writing?
I look at feminism as a transdisciplinary endeavour to transform
anthropology. Feminist theory, method, and writing can offer fresh
perspectives, for example, as they question the inherent but taken for
granted power relations in a society. They can extend the analysis to a
wide range of groups, with more democratically informed perspectives
on gendered individuals and ethnic groups (Birkalan-Gedik 2009, 291).
While I believe that feminist research can offer a vast territory to anthro-
pology, we need to think about how feminist researchers can facilitate
encounters between feminism, ethnography, and anthropology and how
they challenge the borders of these related fields. The young generation
of ethnographers in Turkey, coming from various disciplines, are already
producing critical perspectives on feminist texts and tackling issues such
as self-reflexivity and self-positioning within the larger contours of ethno-
graphic methods. I believe that this methodological scrutiny should also
be reflected in the text so that the weak feminist textuality can be reme-
died. When methodological and textual concerns are put in a dialogue,
one can see a bright future for feminist textual experimentation in the
Turkish case. As much there is a lot to learn and reflect on from Anglo-
American cases; similarly, the rich history of feminism and anthropology
in Turkey is an abundant source of feminist ethnography and it can offer
useful insights for other anthropological traditions which underline the
importance of women in the field and the text.
Notes
1. The term gecekondu means ‘built overnight’ and refers to houses which
village migrants built since the 1950s, on the outskirts of the big cities in
Turkey. For a long time, the definition of a gecekondu evoked the quality of
the homes that the fresh migrants made and mostly emphasised the cheap
material and the illegality of the homes more than how migrants pass the
time in their actual everyday life. In literature, one can also find references
on gecekondus that would remind of favellas of Brazil, bidonvilles of Africa,
or slums of Northern America, however, compositions and structures of
the gecekondus have changed dramatically throughout time, proving to
be hopeful and vibrant forms of human habitation, not some forms of
temporary living arrangement in decline.
2. I should note the following books which influenced my approach: Gendered
Fields: Women, Men, and Ethnography (1993, edited by Diane Bell, Pat
Caplan, and Wazir Jahan Karim). Now a classic, Women in the Field:
Anthropological Experiences (1970, edited by Peggy Golde), and Arab
Women in the Field: Studying Your Own Society (Soraya Altorki and Camillia
Fawzi El-Solh, eds.) spoke deeply to my interests in fieldwork and writing.
3. To my best knowledge, my course on feminist anthropology/ethnography
in 2002–2003 at the Yeditepe University Anthropology Department was
the first attempt to offer a course on the topic. Unfortunately, I was unable
to open the course because it could not reach the minimum number of
students. But luckily, the following year, I implemented the first course on
feminist ethnography and taught it at the undergraduate and graduate level
at a Turkish university until 2013.
4. Here I am referring in particular to the Gezi Protests that started on 28
May 2013. Looking back, I can see that Gezi was only the beginning of the
protests against the state’s mishandling and oppression of various groups.
At Gezi, several feminists, LGBT and eco-activists came together.
5. Women’s cooperatives are creative and effective ways of feminist organ-
ising, developing since the 2000s, which also relied on the work
of feminist scholars. The Amargi Kadın Kooperatifi/Amargi Woman’s
Cooperative is the first one, established in 2001. Successively, Filmmor
Kadın Kooperatifi/Filmmor Woman’s Cooperative in 2003, Sosyalist Femi-
nist Kolektif/ Socialist Feminist Collective in 2008; Kadın Cinayetlerine
İsyandayız/We are Protesting Femicides in 2009.
6. Opened in 2010, the Ayizi Publishing, was closed in 2019. Güldünya
publishing takes its name from a young woman who became a victim of an
honour-crime by her family.
7. The Turkish word for woman is kadın, which is comprised of five letters.
5 Harfliler/5 Lettered hints ‘woman’ in Turkish creatively.
8. The very long title of the Ph.D. thesis, without a reference to feminist
ethnography, roughly translates the title of the book, except that the thesis
does not display the term ‘feminist ethnography’.
References
Abadan-Unat, Nermin, Deniz Kandiyoti, Mübeccel B. Kıray, eds. 1979. Türk
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Uncertainty, Failure and Reciprocal
Ethnography
Paloma Gay y Blasco
Ethnographic writing is always collaborative: it is rooted in knowledge-

making relations in the field and also conversations in the academy. Yet
the ethnographic genre is also deeply individualistic, its aesthetics, politics
and generic conventions working together to enshrine the ethnographer’s
persona as insightful interpreter of an alien world, guide into hidden
terrains and weaver of theoretical filigree. Think Malinowski, at once
shaman and scientist. And as academics jostling for advancement within
a highly competitive field, we build our careers on the distinctiveness of
our individual contributions.
This emphasis on the ethnographer’s genius does more than mask the
role of field interlocutors as co-producers of anthropological knowledge:
it prevents us from probing the nature, extent and limits of their contribu-
tion. It also directs our sight towards the finished product—the assertive,
well-rounded analysis—and away from the necessary uncertainties and
ambiguities. Fuelled by institutional processes of review and critique,
P. Gay y Blasco (B)

Department of Social Anthropology, University of
St Andrews, St Andrews, Scotland
e-mail: pgyb@st-andrews.ac.uk

Switzerland AG 2021
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-71726-1_6
134 P. GAY Y BLASCO
the stress on the theoretical contribution of the individual ethnographer

makes hesitations and failures invisible, and so limits our capacity to know
our task fully.
My aim here is to push in the opposite direction, away from these twin
silences. I want to reflect on the entanglements that accompany the inher-
ently collaborative process of making knowledge through ethnography.
And I want to examine some of the ambiguities, uncertainties and fail-
ures that unavoidably shape these collaborations and their results. Lastly,
I want to throw light on the institutional frameworks that enable but also
constrain our task. I do it by reflecting on the radical experiment that I
carried out with my friend Liria Hernández, on the ten-year process of
trying, and in many ways failing, to write together a reciprocal life story.
This is a book where Liria and myself—former informant and anthropol-
ogist—describe and analyse each other and each other’s worlds (Gay y
Blasco and Hernández 2020).
Liria and I met in 1992, when we were both 23 and I lived in her
home during my fieldwork in a state-built ghetto in Madrid where 400
Gitano (Spanish Romani) families had recently been resettled. Liria had
grown up in a very deprived area of Madrid, had left school without
finishing her primary education, and had married an older relative aged
sixteen. When we met, she had two children and worked selling textiles in
open-air markets. I was a Paya (non-Gitana) student from a middle-class
family, and I was half-way through my doctoral studies at the University of
Cambridge in the UK. In our book we look back on our intertwined lives:
each of us writes about herself and the other, about our pasts and presents,
and about the Gitano and Payo people who surround us, including our
two families. We take as our departure point Liria’s elopement from her
community in 2009 and my decision to support her then and over the
coming years against the wishes of her relatives. They were my friends
and long-term informants and repeatedly asked me to help them bring
her back.
Our book had a peculiar genesis. When Liria eloped, I tried to find
ways to help her economically. As a just-literate Gitana woman who had
lived her whole life within the embrace of her community, who had always
earned a living precariously amongst other Gitanos, she had no way to
earn money and scant capacity to survive in the city. My head of depart-
ment allowed me to use part of my yearly research budget to pay Liria to
write down her life story even though I was not working on Gitano issues
at the time and did not intend to do anything with what she wrote. Yet
UNCERTAINTY, FAILURE AND RECIPROCAL ETHNOGRAPHY 135
once Liria started writing she would not stop. On a large school note-
book, in capitals with very idiosyncratic spelling, she poured out her pain,
her grief for the children she had left behind, her love for her new partner
and her hopes for a new life. The strength and honesty of her work
moved me deeply, and I proposed that we do a book about it together.
I imagined this as a straightforward anthropological life story, one where
I would analyse Liria’s life and worldview, treating her writing and her
verbal accounts as data. But Liria was a writer and a storyteller, and I
happened to be a key character in her tale. Encouraged by my colleague
Nigel Rapport and by my students, we decided to try to write recipro-
cally, each describing herself, the other and the very diverse people who
surround us.
We had no model to follow and it was often very difficult to know
which path to take. I had never read a book like the one we decided to
try to write: one where control was fully shared by two authors with such
different experiences of anthropology, where the anthropologist’s life was
opened up to the scrutiny of the former informant, and where the lives
of a Gitana and a Paya were examined together. It took us a long time to
work out how to write, together and individually, and how to bring our
two voices together. I was frequently certain that we were going to fail.
Writing Friendship is in some ways ‘about gender’ in the sense that it
explores our lives as two Spanish women from radically contrasting back-
grounds, both born in Madrid in 1969. The book takes as its starting
point Liria’s elopement, so it is about sexual transgression and its punish-
ment amongst Gitanos in Madrid. It is also about my role in her escape
and how, as a friend and an anthropologist, I tried to find my moral
compass when confronted with a gendered morality that demanded that
Liria be harshly castigated. Trying to tease how we came to make our
choices, Liria and I look back also on our very different childhoods and
on the decades of our friendship, the years when we changed from young
to middle-aged women, when she was a Gitana wife and mother and I a
Paya scholar within British academia.
From the start, a key purpose of our book was to make visible Liria’s
voice, to place it in equal dialogue with mine and to do this by working
together, sharing the planning, interviewing, writing up and editing.
For many years she had been my informant and her views and inter-
pretations had influenced my own. We now wanted to challenge the
still-entrenched notion that anthropological knowledge is the result of the
flair and insight of the individual ethnographer. Specifically, I wanted to
136 P. GAY Y BLASCO
test what would happen to ethnography as a genre, and to anthropology

as a way of knowing and representing the world, if the contribution of
informants was problematised and foregrounded. I was interested in the
adjustments to the ethnographic genre that anthropologists may have to
make in order to incorporate informants and non-professional collabo-
rators into the textual conversations of academic anthropology. Was this
possible at all? What complications would ensue? I wanted to extend the
general preoccupations of collaborative anthropology—openness, accessi-
bility, egalitarian working practices1 —in the specific direction of reciprocal
ethnographic writing.2
In the process of writing our book we had to devise our own genre.
Our reciprocal aims meant that the standard ethnographic format, and the
standard life story format, did not work. The end result did not fit into
any model, within or outside anthropology. It was an awkward patchwork
of dialogues, interviews, reminiscences, personal reflections and letters.
In some ways the manuscript read like a memoir, a personal account of
the past as seen from the present, but it was also very much a depiction
of a world, an attempt at deciphering the interplay between our indi-
vidual circumstances and the broader social and cultural flows that run
through them. Often our complicity came strongly to the foreground in
what we wrote and how we wrote it, but at other times it was the clashes
and negotiations that seemed most urgent. Throughout, we asked what
anthropology is and can be for each of us, and we also reflected directly
on the limits of our experiment, the many ways we did not manage to
deliver what we set out to do.
Throughout the time it took us to write our book, its legitimacy as an
anthropological project was questioned by many around us. Colleagues,
publishers, line managers and seminar audiences doubted whether this
book was anthropological, ethnographic, scholarly. At the very end of
the process, long after a contract was signed with Palgrave, the academic
nature of the manuscript was questioned by the anonymous reviewer who
was asked to provide or refuse final approval. Like others before her, the
reviewer was troubled by the fact that we did not use references or quota-
tions and did not discuss theoretical debates to which Liria could not have
unmediated access. This was a result of our decision to write as accessible
to her as possible: Liria left school aged 11 and, although she can read and
write, does so laboriously. She lacks the very extensive training necessary
to decipher anthropological texts.
The reviewer argued that, by not discussing how our book related to
earlier academic works, I had chosen to place the burden of contextu-
alising our text on our readers, disregarding the scholarly community
within which I exist and presenting myself as writing in isolation. Instead,
I should have entered into an explicit dialogue with earlier authors.
Crucially, the reviewer stated that our deliberate lack of direct engage-
ment with other scholarly texts effectively meant that our book, whilst a
good memoir, should not be read or evaluated as a scholarly text.
The points that the reviewer made are intriguing and important, and
attempting to address them made me understand my own task and its
complexities better. Yet they also made me ask myself, why should the
boundaries of academic writing need to be policed, and in this partic-
ular way?3 Answers to this question will embody understandings about
what kind of task anthropology is and should be, about the relationship
between local and anthropological forms of knowledge, and about who
is and is not an anthropologist. These answers can be powerful in their
practical effects. They have the potential to enable or disable particular
forms of inscription and dissemination, to include or exclude different
interlocutors and to strengthen or weaken the walls around our knowl-
edge and scholarly debates (cf. Rios and Sands 2000, 27; Abu-Lughod
2006; Tsao 2011).
Crucially, this question is far from new. It has a history, a genealogy,
roots. It has been asked repeatedly since the nineteenth century, and of
many different individuals and groups. I am particularly interested in the
fact that it has been asked of a highly diverse cluster of women who
wrote what were perceived to be womanly texts and did so from within
the periphery of scholarship.4 Positioned very differently within academic
and wider social hierarchies, these women collaborated in various ways
with anthropologists who were working to establish their own individual
voices and careers, to carve their own places within the panorama of
anthropology and to build the discipline as a theoretically driven form of
scholarly knowledge (cf. Lamphere 2004; Gambrell 1997; Behar 1993).
Some of these were ethnic minority women who came to anthropology
from strongly marginalised communities, much like Liria.5 Others were
white and well off socially and economically, but they remained defined
by their ties to these scholars as assistants and wives.6 Obvious names
will come to mind: Ella Cara Deloria, Jovita González and Zora Neale
Hurston, but also Edith Turner, Marion Benedict, Marianne Alverson
and even Elsie Clewes Parsons. And there must be others who are less
138 P. GAY Y BLASCO
well known because the anthropologists they assisted or collaborated

with never reached the notoriety of Franz Boas, Ruth Benedict or Victor
Turner.
The reciprocal anthropology that Liria and I attempted echoes aspects
of the highly heterogeneous body of work that these women produced:
some of them worked collaboratively or wrote polyphonic texts; most
constructed their own genres; others moved well beyond reflexivity to
open themselves to the scrutiny of their subjects. As Cotera explains of
Deloria, Hurston and González, they ‘elaborated new ways of knowing
and of telling at the interstices of politics, cultural production and
disciplinary knowledge’ (Cotera 2010, 231). Their lives and their work—
‘(t)oo literary to be considered authoritative ethnographic texts and too
wedded to ethnographic realism to conform to the aesthetic norms of
literary modernism’ (Cotera 2010, 16)—embodied contradictions which
throw light, not just on our own collaboration, but on anthropology and
ethnography more broadly.7
There are obvious similarities between Liria’s precarious and complex
position as author and the positions of some of these women, and our
relationship too mirrors the relationships they had with their patrons,
employers and husbands. But their work speaks to me also for other
reasons. These women grappled with uncertainty, failure and ambiguity
in their attempts to write anthropology, as well as with the instability and
unreliability of their knowledge, as we did when attempting to turn our
dialogue into an egalitarian yet scholarly text. Steeped in the anthropolog-
ical desire to access and communicate the other’s point of view, their work
also ‘called into question the possibility of rendering that other perspec-
tive in any singular, monolithic way’ (Gambrell 1997, 10), even to render
it at all—once again an awareness that our writing shares with theirs. They
looked for ways to deal anthropologically with their existential engage-
ments, with the deep drives and conflicts that moulded their lives, and
their attempts, like our own, were often fraught and problematic.8 It is
with these concerns in mind that they looked on anthropology, and it is
through these concerns that they reflect the discipline back to itself.
So I could examine the question of what makes a text scholarly in order
to trace some of the processes of exclusion and inclusion that have shaped
the history of our discipline, as biographers and analysts of these women’s
work have done. Instead, I want to look to my experience of writing with
Liria in the light of their work to ask the questions I would have liked
to reviewer to ask: What does a reciprocal experiment like ours reveal
about anthropology? What tensions, capabilities and constraints become

visible when we attempt reciprocal work and take it as far as it will go,
and when we fail at it? What does reciprocal work show us about our
discipline that our habitual ways of working, and their attached systems
of value, more readily hide? And by our discipline I mean both the global,
unequal, hierarchical institution and its products, our texts. Note that my
aim is not to construct a contrived homogeneity between the lives and
work of these women and our own, but rather to deploy some of their
writing to bring into sharper focus the distinctive character of our own
project and of its contexts.9
Uncertainty
The work that Liria and I did together revolved around our friendship
and our dialogue. We wrote not just collaboratively, like others had done
before us,10 but pushing reciprocity as far as we could. We looked at
each other, defined each other and so we also received back images and
stories about ourselves that we didn’t always understand, agree with or
like. As we started to try to find explanations for the events and the world
around us, our dialogue began to deliver not just two but often multiple
interpretations, contrasting, complementing, often conflicting. Liria and
I sometimes disagreed with each other but we were also often uncer-
tain ourselves, and this uncertainty was nourished by the process of deep
personal introspection that reciprocal writing demanded. It was as if we
had become longsighted: the more intensely we peered at events and at
the people around us, the more we brought them up close, the more their
blurriness was magnified.
This instability was deeply disquieting for me and I did not welcome
it. Partly this was a result of my habitual expectations because in previous
projects I had always tried to create cohesive, convincing arguments,
believing that this is what makes good anthropology. The conventions of
scholarly writing demand that we fix our insights: even if the knowledge
we have of events and people is partial and evanescent, even if these qual-
ities are the very subject of our study, our analysis still has to appear firm,
persuasive, coherent. The reciprocal aims of my work with Liria compli-
cated this solidification process and so I felt that I was not getting it
right.
140 P. GAY Y BLASCO
On a personal level, some of the events we were trying to interpret

were inherently opaque and painful—for example, Liria’s precipitous deci-
sion to elope, leaving her young children on the spur of the moment, and
my childhood abuse by a trusted family friend. These events are central
to who we are and their destabilisation unsettled both of us deeply, not
just as anthropologists but as human beings.
I also became increasingly aware that the story we wanted to tell would
bother intensely many of the people we were talking about—Liria’s family,
my own. For many years I had written about Gitanos with little regard
about what they might think. I did not address them but other anthro-
pologists. Now I started to question the right that Liria and I had to write
a text that might be seen, by some at least, to demonise her community.
I knew that ours was just one version of what had happened and doubted
whether this version deserved telling over any other.
The fact that we were recounting our stories to each other in order to
write them down, to publish them in an academic context, demanded a
coherence that was impossible to deliver. It seemed to me that claiming
authority, assuming the agency to know and represent, would have to
betray or ignore this deeply felt experience of groundlessness. And I
had no idea how to turn this instability into an anthropological argu-
ment. I was reminded of the work of one of my Ph.D. students, Daniela
Castellanos (2015). Talking about envy in the village of Aguabuena in
the Colombian Andes, she describes anxious villagers spying each other
through slits in the walls of their adobe houses, seeing only fragments
of the world, each limited to what can be ascertained from a particular
punto, a spot in space and in the social fabric, each unable to grasp a
fuller picture and to dominate their environment.
Attempting to understand what to do with this experience, it was
difficult to find guidance within my discipline. Anthropologists do study
uncertainty as a key aspect of the experience of their subjects; there is
even talk of ‘the anthropology of uncertainty’ (Samimian-Darash and
Rabinow 2015, 2). And I found useful work on uncertainty as condition
central to the encounter with the other (Jackson 2012, 2017). But it was
much harder to find uncertainty that was allowed to remain, that did not
work as an obstacle to be overcome on the path to authority—unresolved
uncertainty as condition of human existence and therefore as anthropo-
logical method.11 Most often uncertainty appears in ethnographic writing
as part of our subjects’ experiences, not our own. Anthropologists do pose
puzzles and conundrums for their readers but, as in a TV whodunnit, they
do their damn best to solve them, heroes of their own intellectual adven-
ture. This textual strategy is central to ethnography and is essential to the
conjuring of authority and the creation of singular authorial persona (Gay
y Blasco and Wardle 2020).
My experience with Liria made me realise how readily, in previous
work, I had brushed ambiguity aside as I built arguments that fitted
as well as I could make them the stylistic requirements of journals and
reviewers. I wondered what steps we have to take, what contortions of the
mind and the soul we have to undergo, to reach these places of certainty
from which we scholars purport to speak to each other. I compared the
rough, circular, meandering drafts that Liria and I were generating to
the polished monographs that I admired, and felt that I had to find an
argument, resolve the contradictions, move forward, and so move myself
forward too, stop feeling so anxious about it, so worried and conflicted,
get a grip, get a handle on our book and myself, make a contribution.
Marion Benedict describes experiencing a similar confrontation with
uncertainty when gathering information for her husband Burton in the
Seychelles in the 1970s: the facts that she was collecting ‘tended to slide
away’ as she realised informants lied (Benedict and Benedict 1982, 3).
And she too contributed to this unreliability. ‘Upon what grounds did I
decide what was true and what false? Sheerly on intuition… Yet it was on
this illogical basis that I believed, remembered and recorded some things
in my notebook, and disbelieved, forgot, and did not record other things.
The process of fictionalizing had begun’ (1982, 4). Unable to ascertain
truth, she jumps in at the deep end: fiction becomes her particular path
towards arriving at the ‘felt life’ that objectivity could not deliver (1982,
6). Then her subjective, invented-but-true account is published alongside
the supposedly objective, scholarly one of her husband´s, bringing the
unstable character of both into sharp focus.
For Ella Deloria on the other hand, uncertainty was generated not by
a lack but by a surplus of knowledge, the result of her complex posi-
tion as a Lakota collaborating with white anthropologists in the early
decades of the twentieth century. Deloria wrote to Ruth Benedict, ‘I
simply cannot write it as a real investigator, hitting the high spots and
drawing conclusions. There is too much I know… I tell one thing – and
fearing it will be misunderstood, I tell something else on the other side,
and so it goes’ (Deloria in Gambrell 1997, 130). Gambrell finds parallels
between the dilemmas that Deloria and Zora Neale Hurston faced in this
regard. Both authors implicitly questioned ‘the unexamined presumption
142 P. GAY Y BLASCO
of mastery that informed so many ethnographic studies from the same

period’ (Gambrell 1997, 130).12
In my work with Liria, I gradually moved from struggling to construct
unequivocal interpretations to trying to convey the impossibility of
finding a solid ground. I went every Thursday to my local Zen group
and heard people talk about the need to accept uncertainty as essential to
life. Very gradually, revealing the ways Liria and I talked past each other
and failed to grasp the significance of people and events became central
to my writing method. Now our disagreements and our ignorance, which
had felt so intractable to start with, started to appear more fertile.
It would be easy to pretend that I found comfort in this strategy, that
all was well. It was not. The shift was fruitful in that it gave me a struc-
ture and a frame within which to place the opacity of our discussions—I
could continue working every day at my desk—but writing still felt deeply
disquieting. This ongoing discomfort was revealing: I learnt how counter-
intuitive it is for me to ‘write provisionally’ Cohen (1992, 347)13 —indeed
to accept that I know and live provisionally—and how I resist the precari-
ousness of my interpretations in bodily ways. Working with Liria I became
intimate with this precariousness and began to envision making space for
it in my anthropology.
Today, I believe that the opacity that I tried to grapple with when
writing with Liria is useful. Reciprocal work like the one we attempted
forces anthropologists to confront the partiality and precariousness of our
own perspectives in ways that ordinary anthropological work does not. It
reminds anthropologists of something that we know well about our disci-
pline: its grounding in evanescent subjectivity. And here I am encouraged
by Nigel Rapport’s statement that,
any words we use about human life—whether as livers of a life or

observers—are markers of hope rather than claims to certitude. They
more display our ignorance, perhaps, than our knowledge. They more
register our uncertainty and our anxiety than our confidence—or should
be deemed to. They mark our life-journeys, the words we put to frequent
use being a kind of horizon, speaking to the issues we are currently having
to deal with and hoping to get beyond. (2015, 190)
Uncertainty itself is one of these words. Nigel asks, ‘What is a satisfactory

(provisional) conceptualization?’ (ibid.). My answer would be, one that
makes its provisional nature visible.
Certainty
Whilst I was so preoccupied with uncertainty and so worried about the
imminent failure of our book, Liria’s concerns were very different. Our
inability to pin down events, interpretations and responsibilities took
second place to a much more pressing necessity: to convey to readers
her overwhelming certainty that God oversaw and guided all—our two
lives and our project. For Liria the final purpose of our book was to make
the goodness of God visible and so the possibility that we might fail never
grabbed her.
To ensure that our readers would come closer to God, Liria wanted
a chapter dedicated to explaining in detail his benevolent role in our
lives. I was unsettled by this prospect: what would our audience say—
my colleagues, my students, other anthropologists—if we used our book
to preach to them? At times this disjuncture between our orientations felt
like an intractable problem. In fact it is nothing special: all anthropolo-
gists and informants face similar situations. The question is what to do
about them, how to deal with them methodologically. Anthropologists
most often take the approach endorsed by the reviewer of our manuscript
in her comments. They address each other and treat their informants’
perspectives as data. They sidestep the necessity, demanded by our recip-
rocal approach, to allow informants to choose the terms on which to
speak to anthropological audiences.14
This necessity is present, albeit implicitly, in the work of some of the
women who I mentioned above, and they dealt with it in diverse ways.
The ‘much-observed absence of interpretation and analysis in Hurston’s
ethnographies’, for example, has been read as a result of her decision
to ‘let her subjects speak for themselves’ (Jacobs 1997, 336). For Edith
Turner it was a matter of engaging the spiritual, those dimensions of expe-
rience that seemed to overlap with those of her informants and that she
also tried to grasp through analysis.15 Maybe closer to our own strategy
are Elsie Clewes Parsons’s essays on Pueblo mothers (1991), published
in Man between 1915 and 1924, the years when Malinowski was doing
fieldwork and writing Argonauts. Whilst he was honing his persona as
scientific authority, interpreter of Trobriand life for the Western world,
Parsons was developing a polyphonic method where the knowledge of
her interlocutors stood on a par with her own.16 Instead of exemplary
informants and an all-knowing ethnographer, we find named locals and
an anthropologist finding her feet, sometimes with surety but often with
144 P. GAY Y BLASCO
hesitation. And, rather than one seamless narrative of discovery and anal-
ysis, Parsons gives us an assortment of voices around a theme, of which
hers is one, a precarious one at that. There is a degree of mutuality here
but also what Tsing (2005, 246) went on to call ‘friction’.17
As to Liria and me, from one perspective our two orientations (Evan-
gelism and anthropology) purported to encompass or absorb the other.
As a Christian, Liria looked on our anthropological venture as a manifes-
tation of God’s will. As an anthropologist, I looked at Liria’s Evangelism
as one set of beliefs amongst so many, another element of her life to
be questioned and interpreted. Yet Liria saw no contradiction between
these different standpoints, and she saw herself as a feminist,18 an Evan-
gelical, an anthropologist, a friend and an informant. She conceptualised
anthropology as a moral enterprise, one that can deliver better relations
between human beings, as demonstrated by our friendship’s capacity to,
as she says, ‘break down boundaries’. She was very keen that our book
would be accessible to women who had experienced ostracism from their
communities just like she had, and she believed that God’s purpose was
that our book would help them in their plight.
I would like our book to be understood not only by anthropologists, but

also other people who don’t have that quality of understanding that way
of writing. I am very interested in the support and the opinion of anthro-
pologists, but I would like them to grasp why I also want other people
to read our book, in particular women who have gone through situations
similar to mine, who have seen themselves cornered, not knowing what
to do, because nobody held out a hand to them. I hope that reading this
will give them hope, and it will help them face up to their circumstances,
because no matter how difficult it seems, or even if they come from families
with very harsh customs, it is always possible to fight to achieve a future.
If we write our book only with anthropological words, other people
who have gone through situations like mine will not be able to understand
it. Even though we know that in principle this book is for anthropologists
and students, we also want regular people like me to be able to understand
it. (Gay y Blasco and Hernández 2020, 19)
Liria’s anthropology is unfettered by what may be considered correct,

acceptable or analytically sophisticated by the discipline. This anthro-
pology is grounded in her own life experiences, her common sense and
her resilient positive personality. Take her response to the same reviewer,
who argued also that we had neglected to explore the inequalities between
us. In our book Liria interviews me about my childhood abuse and speaks
very frankly about her sorrow at my experience. The reviewer had found
the fact that Liria interviewed me, and that we compared our two lives,
very worrying. They argued that our approach took the reciprocal method
far too far and, crucially, that it downplayed the very real power differ-
entials between the two of us so that our suffering and experiences were
presented as equal. This, the reviewer stated, was simply false.
My appalled, automatic response was to comb our book, looking for
places where the hierarchies and power differentials between Liria and
myself could be made even clearer, and to ask Liria to do the same.
Unlike me, Liria refused to take the comments of the reviewer at face
value. When I tried to push her to write additional paragraphs about
these inequalities, she wrote about how she had supported me whilst
I was doing fieldwork—opening her house to me, guiding me, feeding
me—and how I helped her many years later when she eloped from her
family.
Paloma as much as me, we won’t stop talking about so many things that we
have in common, and it is true that they exist. But we cannot leave aside
other areas of our lives where inequalities stalked us. In some occasions,
like at the start, when we started to get to know each other, I found it
strange that although she was twenty-three years old and was becoming
independent from her wealthy family through her fieldwork project, she
nonetheless depended on a Gitano family to be able to achieve it. The
thing is that, no matter how much money her family or Paloma might
have, at that time it wasn’t much help to them. And this precisely has
been the first sign that made me believe that this was God’s plan acting in
her life and in mine.
So of course we have been in unequal conditions. But this never broke
the bonds that also united us. What I am trying to explain may seem
confusing but in reality to start with Paloma needed me and I opened to
her my life and my heart, but later on she would return it to me with
the greatest gratitude. And this is what has made us different from others:
no matter how high up each one might be, depending on the occasion,
we knew how to hold each other’s hands without looking anywhere else,
without caring about the alien gaze of those who surrounded us.19
Liria stressed our shifting reliance on each other at different times in

our lives. She refused to see inequality as unidirectional, monolithic or
static, and placed more emphasis on the God-directed ability to provide
146 P. GAY Y BLASCO
emotional support than on economic or social capital. Her faith in our

love for each other surprised, moved and at times embarrassed me—it
seemed so out of place in a monograph—and I tried and failed to get
her to tone down some of her more enthusiastic statements. I worried
that she was downplaying the impact of our inequalities out of a desire to
sustain our friendship and wondered whether she was being fully honest.
At the same time, I was also reminded of my obligation to take her stance
seriously precisely in order to confront the power differentials of which
the reviewer had spoken.
Whilst the reviewer and I were concerned with revealing the hierar-
chies and inequalities that separated us, Liria wanted to emphasise the
humanity we share with each other and with the people around us, a
humanity grounded in the inevitability of suffering and the desire to reach
for a good life. Talking about the Madrid friends whose lives we examined
together—middle- and working-class Payos, Gitanos, Latin-Americans
and North-Africans—she says:
Their stories were not very different deep down, and each in its own
way had its dark and painful side, and this side united us all somehow—
Gitanos, Payos, Latin American or immigrants, each one with their customs
or ethnicities… When we listen to their stories, we realise that they have
suffered many difficulties in their lives. We are not the only ones who have
suffered, and I feel sorry for them and I identify with their suffering. In
some ways, what they tell is not that different from my own life. Each
one of us in their own way, we have all known how to persevere, we have
looked for something to hold onto, one thing or another—God, the love
of friends, the warmth of the family… We don’t know what the future
holds for us, because our situation changes constantly and is always uncer-
tain and outside our control. It’s a constant struggle to overcome. It is an
internal struggle against your fears and external against the world. (Gay y
Blasco and Hernández 2020, 135)
This shared humanity, Liria argued, is essential also to the reciprocal

project and to anthropology:
It seems very important to me also to be able to see the life of the anthro-
pologist. If you do not open up to your informant, you cannot truly know
your informant. If I tell you all about myself, and I only see you with
your armour on, your happy life with a husband, and work, and children,
your life too will remain silent. There will not be authentic communica-
tion because of the fear that anthropologists have to reveal their suffering
to their informants and to the world. (Gay y Blasco and Hernández 2020,
157)20
Liria’s humanistic and passionate outlook is far from unique. Cotera talks
about the ethnographic novels written by Ella Deloria, Zora Hurston and
Jovita González as ‘allegories for a kind of passionate praxis that could
not be imagined in the ethnographic milieu in which (they) worked, a
praxis centred on intimate encounters across difference in the interest of
social transformation’ (Cotera 2010, 231). In their novels and ethnogra-
phies, much like in the texts written by Edith Turner,21 Marion Benedict
or Marianne Alverson, these authors foregrounded what the discipline
had pushed to the edges: they ‘turn(ed) from regimes of description that
centre on disconnection, objectivity and distance, and embrace(d) modes
of telling founded on connection, subjectivity, and intimacy’ (Cotera
2010, 225). Unaware of the work of these or any other anthropologists,
confronting tremendous hardship in her everyday life, Liria accessed her
innate awareness of the potential of human connections to initiate positive
change, wrote about it eloquently, and willed anthropology to listen.
Working with Liria and accompanying her over so many difficult years,
I had to open up to a co-author who knew how to speak to academia
only from her heart. I began to imagine the vulnerability that Edith
Turner described as ‘anthropology of a different kind’22 and to wonder
what my own different anthropology might look like. And I had to try
to engage this passionate praxis without allowing our work to become
simplistic or unidimensional, abandoning my analytical rigour, becoming
politically naïve or losing sight of the nuances and concrete effects of our
disparities. The task, already formulated by Virginia Domínguez (2000,
368), was to begin to learn ‘how to incorporate and acknowledge love
in one’s intellectual life, indeed in one’s writing, and how to incorporate
and acknowledge love in one’s politics’.
Failure
At the start of my work with Liria, still full of naivety and enthusiasm,
I was excited in particular about two dimensions of our project: the fact
that I was opening my life to her scrutiny, and our decision to work in
an egalitarian manner, sharing the writing, the editing and control over
148 P. GAY Y BLASCO
the structure and argument of our book. Liria did investigate my life and
write about it: in this we did meet our goals. Working in the egalitarian
manner we had imagined, directing together with the production of our
text, turned out to be a different matter. We faced practical circumstances
that we had not envisioned, and these constrained our reciprocal aims.
I was paid to work on the book: my job included time for research and
I dedicated it to our project. Liria was not, and she had to earn a living.
Year after year over a decade, I used up the fund my university gave me
to attend conferences or do fieldwork to pay Liria for the time she spent
on the book, but we never had enough to enable her to put in nearly
the hours that I did. Moreover, aware of her lack of knowledge of written
anthropology, she expected me to take the lead when deciding the layout,
content and direction of our book, and I confess that this was my impulse
too.
As a result, during much of the time that we worked together Liria’s
primary role was as purveyor of handwritten texts and recordings, and
of course as interlocutor in our conversations and mutual interviews. As
well as writing my own texts, I was project manager, transcriber, trans-
lator, editor and organiser, choosing which of her and my own materials
to include and what the overall argumentative thrust of each chapter
would be. I constructed Liria’s sections by choosing and editing texts
that she had written and weaving them with statements that she had made
during our taped conversations. Liria looked over everything I produced,
requesting changes to her work and to mine, but throughout most of the
book I built the structure and tempo of her sections myself.
We did spend some weeks each year writing side by side and it was then
that came closest to our ideals: I became a facilitator that provided Liria
with information about anthropology and its aesthetics and norms, and
we worked together to figure how to tell our story. As Liria grew more
at ease with computers, Skype and Whatsapp it became easier to work
like this at a distance. This happened particularly in the last year. Until
then, we repeatedly drifted back to the division of labour that caused
me such unease. From one perspective, we were making the best of our
distinct strengths and capabilities, working creatively within the limits of
our circumstances. From another, we were retaking the very positions
that we had tried to avoid, as scholar and subject, anthropologist and
informant.
One of the questions here is whether our aims were ever achievable,
and what this may say about anthropology, the ethnographic genre23 and
collaboration. But there is a concomitant issue: the fact that both autho-
rial voices were, in a way, my creation.24 Editing and translating Liria’s
work I tried to be as faithful as possible to what I thought were her writing
style, verbal pace and mannerisms; to what I believed to be her interests,
passions, objectives and ways of being in the world. Yet it did also seem
to me that Liria’s voice, as it appears in our book, was my construct, that
both she and I were characters in a work of fiction that I was producing.25
This was magnified by the fact that Liria does not speak English so that
ultimate responsibility for the published version of our text rested with
me. And, although we did not quote other authors, I could see that in
my editing, translating and organising of our writings I was still addressing
anthropological debates that bypassed Liria. I was consuming our friend-
ship and our stories once again, just as I am doing now, ‘antropófaga’
as much as ‘antropóloga’ as Rappaport (2005, 84) states. The problems
that all anthropologists face—how to bridge the distance between life and
text—acquired added urgency because of our reciprocal goals.
Once again, Liria saw things rather differently, describing me as the
tool that God had given her ‘so that with Paloma’s help I would be able
to speak up and witness’. She explained,
So it was Paloma who God chose. He put her in my path, to be my tool,

and He did it so that together we would talk about the oppression that
we women suffer and explain that what he wants is that we will not be
oppressed but that we should have the same freedom as any man, and that
there should be equality for all.
Paloma does not believe in God, but He placed her where I would find
her. God has used her because she has access to that world of anthropology,
and in this way we can do the book together, and other people will see
that God is in my life and in hers. Even though she never has managed
to understand it, from the beginning He chose her because she can reach
many places that are beyond my reach as a Gitana woman. She is like the
platform that God has given me so that I can speak to a bigger audience.
(Gay y Blasco and Hernández 2020, 146–47)
I was not convinced, and came to think of and experience our work as a
failure. And I do not mean failure in a positive way, as an obstacle to be
overcome on the way to eventual success. I mean ongoing failure, painful
and frightening. I believed that we had failed because Liria could only
access or speak to anthropology through my mediation,26 because we
struggled to achieve any semblance of coherence or certainty, and because
150 P. GAY Y BLASCO
our accessible writing was only sometimes recognised as academic yet the
story we were telling was too anthropological for a popular audience.
I am aware that I brought to our book earlier complexes and fears.
But I also believe that what I experienced as failure was the embodied
sense of working in a space where meeting so many conflicting expec-
tations was impossible, at the boundaries of scholarship. Failure is how
I, with my history, feel the unresolvable contradictions that run through
both our project and our discipline. And of course Liria faced her own
conflicts: she wanted to witness to God’s action yet be listened to by
sceptical anthropologists; she believed that I was her tool but felt that
she had to defer to me as expert; and she was excited at working as an
anthropologist but frustrated at the opacity of anthropology and of the
university systems which excluded her in so many ways. And I read about
these other women working at the edges of anthropology and see them
caught also in unresolvable tensions—some lived with greater ease, others
with more angst and struggle.
Gardner, discussing the difficulties that Ella Deloria faced when writing
her books, trying and not managing to get them published, explains that
‘however she attempted to organize her ethnological manuscript, it kept
escaping the boundaries set by scientific “objectivity.” Hers was a conver-
sational anthropology (which)… disrupted the lineal scientific narrative
expected of her’ (Gardner 2009, xi). Enmeshed in the contradictory
demands of scholarship and of her position as Lakota ‘insider’, Deloria
wrote to Ruth Benedict in 1947:
Ruth, it’s just awful!... I made a hundred false starts, and I can’t tell you
how many times I’ve torn up my Ms and begun again… It is so distressing
to find it so hard to do this writing in any detached professional manner!
It reads like a chummy book on writing rather than like a study… I try
to keep out of it, but I am too much in it, and I know too many angles.
(Deloria in Gardner 2009, xvii–xviii)
Deloria suffered greatly. She was haunted by the conflict between her obli-
gations to her relatives and her commitment to academic anthropology,
and she agonised also about her lack of theoretical finesse. She attempted
to resolve these paradoxes by writing Waterlily (Deloria 1988a), an
ethnographic fiction that was only published many years after her death.
Yet the novel itself generated its own entanglements for Deloria: the need
‘to devise an accessible style for an… uniformed audience; her determina-
tion to present her people in the best light; and her deference to Benedict,
whom she entrusted to pull the manuscript together and then to find a
publisher’ (Gardner 2009, xvi).
Deloria’s anguish finds echoes in Edith Turner’s writing. Turner
describes returning to the UK and eventually starting to write up her
African experiences, ‘one hundred single-spaced pages in pencil, on
extra-long paper’ (Turner 2005, 84):
My “Kajima” piece consisted of just the ‘living moment’ material. Such a

style was not used in anthropological writing at the time, so the purpose
of writing the piece was for me alone, confirming in me—anchoring firmly
in me—the understanding that the living moment is precious. It was my
basic understanding that this was the basic stuff of anthropology. I did not
mind that there was no audience for my tales. I felt the method was a
natural fact. (Turner ibid.)
In spite of the confidence with which she makes this statement, Turner
also describes entering into a deep depression fuelled by her sense of alien-
ation from the academic world to which her husband had free access. ‘I
myself was a nothing’, she states (Turner 2005, 85; cf Engelke 2002).
These women found paths through these entanglements by devising
their own genres, cultivating their singular from-within-the-edge voices,
meeting only partially the conventions of ethnography and transferring
anthropological approaches to other narrative arenas. Turner’s work was
recognised and she became a key figure in humanistic anthropology.
Deloria wasn’t to nearly the same extent during her lifetime, and she
failed to publish much of her work. As for Liria and me, we carried on
and stitched our patchwork. My compromise was to make our failure to
work in a fully egalitarian manner, and my worries about authorship, voice
and control as obvious as I could to our readers. Whilst Liria described
her God-given confidence in our book and friendship, I talked about the
accommodations we had to make in order to continue working. Each
of our voices conveys its own totalising drive but, because they are set
together, they are revealed as puntos, locations from which each of us
approaches each other and the world (cf. Castellanos 2015).
152 P. GAY Y BLASCO
So What?
Writing about uncertainty, about Liria’s passionate anthropology and
about failure, I know that these issues have already been taken apart by
many other scholars. Take dialogue: by the 1980s, when some writers
were proposing ‘cooperatively evolved’ text as the solution to the ills that
faced anthropology (Tyler 1987, 202), praising the benefits of ‘mutual
dialogic production’ (Tyler 1986, 126), others were countering that
dialogue has so much potential to become complacent, to hide so many
inequalities, and that dialogic ethnography in its many forms is inherently
hierarchical and colonial (Visweswaran 1994, 80).
And take failure. Already almost twenty years ago, Lather argued that
the best an ethnographic text can do is become the ‘site of the failures
of representation’ and that textual experiments ‘are not so much about
solving the crisis of representation as about troubling the very claims
to represent’ (Lather 2001, 201). Drawing on Visweswaran (1994) and
Haraway (1997), Lather (ibid.) talked about ‘good enough ethnography’
and about anthropology as ‘modest witness’ but went on to acknowledge
that this tactic easily reintroduces ‘a sense of mastery through the very
defence of risky failures. As methodological stances, reflexive gestures,
partial understanding, bewilderment, and getting lost are rhetorical posi-
tions that tend to confound refutation, and fragmentation of texts hardly
avoids imposing one’s interpretation of a fragmented worldview’ (Lather
2001, 217).
These warnings can rightly be applied to my work with Liria and to this
article. Remember what I said just above: ‘Each of our voices conveys its
own totalising drive but, because they are set together, they are simultane-
ously revealed as puntos, locations from which each of us approaches each
other and the world’. Once again I subsumed Liria’s perspective into my
own and my statement encapsulates much of what is problematic about
our collaboration.
So, in spite of the pull of my training, I have no wish to present my
work with Liria as a fix. We don’t move the discipline forward. What we
do is precisely what the reviewer disliked: show rather than tell, conveying
to the best of our abilities the lumpy texture of our particular anthropo-
logical encounter. Together in our book, and on my own here, we try to
communicate what it was like, for us, to try to address in practical ways
the angst of our discipline over its elitism, its isolation and its hierarchies
(Eriksen 2006; Moskowitz 2015). Because Liria and I did take seriously
the debates about the failure of reflexivity and the limits of collaboration,
and we took what seemed to us the next logical step: we attempted to
reverse the gaze, opening our friendship and our lives to scrutiny.
If nothing else, experiments like ours are good to think with, to criticise
and improve upon—this is why they are so necessary. Our compromises
and failures make viscerally clear some of the key dilemmas that face
anthropology today, in 2020, at a time when openness, accountability,
impact, but also metrics of academic value like the British Research Excel-
lence Framework press on anthropologists so strongly. Who do we write
for? Why? How are we to think of our interlocutors, our informants? What
should their role be in our discipline and our lives? These are questions
that, every single day, we already answer through our routine choices,
from fieldwork to writing, from reviewing an article to examining a thesis
or marking an undergraduate paper. Reciprocal work, failures included,
brings these questions to the surface.
This is also the reason why I am interested in the projects attempted
by these very diverse, assorted women writing from the edges of anthro-
pology. Their experiments and the fates of these experiments too make
visible the tensions, hierarchies, expectations and compromises that are
in our blood as a discipline. Their many different, positioned, singular,
sometimes anguished writings reflect back to anthropology the very
processes and systems of value that we take completely for granted—us,
who are so good at seeing through, localising and positioning the total-
ising systems of value of those we study. These women saw through. They
urge us to ask ourselves about our choices and our future.
I am encouraged to think that, in the balance between theoretical
argument and experiential exploration of life and anthropology, these
women found their voices within the second. It was in this narrative
arena that they confronted their constraints with greatest creativity and
that they moved with greatest freedom. These women knew that theo-
retical insights can propel a text without being its explicit focus and they
knew that accessible, unconventional ways of narrating experience may be
an effective method of anthropological enquiry, particularly if we want to
‘write faithfully to life, to its ambiguity, uncertainty, and existential risk’
(Pandian and McLean 2017, 5).27
These women’s writings evidence the fact that the anthropological
imagination is larger and more powerful than a debate amongst special-
ists—something that I have learnt working with Liria. Most importantly,
the obstacles that many of these women faced finding recognition for
154 P. GAY Y BLASCO
their work reveal also our power as audiences and not just as writers
or researchers.28 These obstacles remind us of the responsibility that we
have as readers, teachers, reviewers and evaluators to nurture openness,
risk-taking and creativity in our discipline.
Notes
1. See for example Curran (2013), Holmes and Marcus (2008), Lassiter
(2001, 2008), Majnep and Bulmer (1977), Rappaport (2005, 2007), Rios
and Sands (2000).
2. Lawless (1993) used the term ‘reciprocal ethnography’ to describe the
process through which ethnographers incorporate their informants’ crit-
ical perspectives into the evolving text. Her own work includes extensive
use of this strategy but, unlike in my work with Liria, she as ethnographer
remains in control of the text, there is no co-authorship, and her collab-
orators’ statements and texts are used as data for Lawless to interpret.
She describes this kind of reciprocal ethnography as an improvement on
postmodern reflexivity because it extends the ‘multi-layered, polyphonic
dimension of dialogue and exchange’ beyond fieldwork to the writing-up
stage (1993, 60).
3. See Brenneis (2016) for a discussion of metrics and their impact on
the assessment of value in anthropological writing. By contrast Gottlieb
(2016, 99) argues that in anthropology nowadays, ‘editors advise new
authors: “More stories, less theory.”’ In the same volume, Hardtmann
et al. (2016, 202) describe in passing the possibility of writing without or
with few references in cooperations between activists and academics.
4. Gambrell (1997) uses the term ‘insider/outsider’ to convey the complex
position of two of these women, Ella Cara Deloria and Zora Neale
Hurston, vis-à-vis academia.
5. It is important to emphasise the particularly precarious position that Liria
occupies vis-à-vis many of these women. For example, whilst both Ella
Cara Deloria and Zora Neale Hurston had a higher education, Liria did
not finish her primary schooling.
6. For a revealing instance of this process see Shanklin (1989), a review of
Marianne Alverson’s and Edith Turner’s books. Shanklin explains how
Edith Turner ‘had the advantage of being married to Victor Turner,
who was one of the best ethnographers of this or any generation of
anthropologists’ (1989, 146).
7. These contradictions were obviously not just intellectual, but rooted
in systems of inequality which marginalised these women in multiple
ways. Of Hurston, Jacobs states: ‘Trained by Boas in anthropological
theory and methods, a part of the literary milieu of the Harlem Renais-
sance and debates about its modernist qualifications, exposed to popular
discourses of the primitive, and immersed in African-American folk culture
by personal history and profession, Hurston was situated in a conflictual
vortex of hierarchical discourses involving race, artistry, and cultural
attainment’ (1997, 335). See also Gambrell (1997, 99ff.).
8. For example, in Speaking of Indians, Deloria attempted to explain to white
Americans the lives of her own Native American people, placing herself as
a cultural mediator (1988b).
9. Here I am interested in Cotera’s approach to comparison in her anal-
ysis of the lives of Ella Cara Deloria, Zora Neale Hurston and Jovita
González. Drawing on the work of Gloria Anzaldúa and Chéla Sandoval,
she talks about the need to ‘embrace a form of “divergent thinking” that
can reveal the ways in which similarities inhabit difference’ (2010, 9).
Her approach involves ‘placing difference at the centre of the comparative
project’ (2010, 7) in such a way that ‘we do not assimilate the experiences
of others into our own’ (2010, 10) but look for points of connection or
contrast that might throw light on the specificities of each trajectory and
situation.
10. See note 1 above.
11. Toulson (2014) does provide a useful example about how to convey the
tension between potential analyses of the same ethnographic events. And
for relevant discussions of the role of ambiguity in ethnographic writing
see the papers in Pandian and McLean (2017).
12. Gambrell talks of Deloria’s ‘resistance to closure’ and describes it as ‘such
an important philosophical premise’ in her work (1997, 183). This resis-
tance, however, ‘cannot be celebrated in wholly unambiguous ways, as
a triumph over or subversion of the positivistic tendencies of Boasian
method’ (ibid.) but also as a result of the conditions of the academic
world in which Deloria occupied such a marginal position.
13. See also Toulson (2014).
14. I am interested in the ways in which humanistic and literary ways of
writing ethnography may also work as smoke screens between the lived
experience of our informants and the reader. Jackson asks, ‘Surely it is
not too far-fetched to speak of ethnographic writing as a transitional
space or holding environment where the voices of one’s interlocutors
can be heard, and where the writer refuses to cast too long a shadow,
dominate the conversation or hog the limelight’ (Jackson 2017, 46), but
I think his statement continues to privilege the ethnographer over the
dialogue between the ethnographer and the informant. Collaborative and
in particular reciprocal work is an attempt at shifting the emphasis.
156 P. GAY Y BLASCO
15. See in particular her book, The Spirit and the Drum (1987). Turner talks
about how she and her husband developed the notion of communitas as
an experiential process of spiritual transformation (2005, 92–94).
16. This is described at length by Lamphere (2004, 131), Babcock (1991,
16) and Deacon (1992).
17. Parsons is careful to always signal the preliminary or momentary nature of
her accounts, as well as to remind readers of the fact that she is relaying
information given to her by her informants. She often presents contrasting
interpretations or accounts, and talks openly of her own uncertainty.
18. The following statement gives a flavour of Liria’s particular kind of
feminism:
Now that I am trying to finish writing the book I think about

many other people, mainly women, who have gone through diffi-
cult situations, just like me, people who have found walls all around
them, and who have seen that there is no way out. I think also that
there must be anthropologists who have found themselves in situa-
tions like these. The great effort that Paloma and I have made with
this book has been to fight for a world where there will be more
understanding towards women.
I do not mean to say that Gitana women must break with
their culture, or with who they are. I do not wish to be a revo-
lutionary who incites Gitana women, or women from any ethnicity,
to abandon their families to get on with their lives. Don’t misunder-
stand me: I am proud of being Gitana. But I do encourage women
not to allow themselves to be controlled by anybody. And I want
people in Spain to become aware of these issues so that we women
will not feel so neglected by society and by justice. (Gay y Blasco
and Hernández 2020, 157)
19. This statement is Liria’s draft in response to the reviewer’s comments. It

never made it into the book in this exact form but was split into smaller
sections and each moved to different places in two chapters.
20. Of her key informant Marion Benedict says, ‘I had to touch the quick
of her life as she touched the quick of mine… by becoming vulnerable
myself, which involved, among other things, telling her my secrets as she
had told me hers. It took my heart as well as my head, my intuition as
well as my logic, my whole personality’ (1985, 23).
21. Edith Turner asks, ‘(i)s the book, then, a novel, a memoir, or an anthro-
pological account? … I would like to call it advocacy anthropology in
the female style, that is, speaking on behalf of a culture as a lover or
a mother’ (2005, 10). Richman says of Edith Turner that her ‘take on
the anthropology of ritual has to do with perception and mimesis, as

opposed to cognition, objectivity, and detached observation’ (2003, 114),
and explains that Turner ‘attunes her work to the law of mystical participa-
tion’ (2003, 15) and that her ‘vivid prose shows us how symbols are felt,
perceived, and made known through the embodied imagination’ (2003,
115). In Speaking of Indians, Ela Cara Deloria states, ‘The vital concern
is not where a people came from, physically, but where they are going,
spiritually’ (1988b, 2).
22. As described by Richman (2003, 114).
23. I have explored the ways in which our project struggled against the
conventions of the ethnographic genre in Gay y Blasco (2017).
24. This of course is not a new problem. Anthropologist Bruce Albert, for
example, explains how the text of the book he co-wrote with Yanomami
shaman Davi Kopenawa, is told in the first person, in Davi Kopenawa’s
inspiring and memorable voice. Yet this first person encompasses a double
‘I’. The words in this text are truly the narrator’s own words, rendered as
faithfully as possible from a huge body of audio recordings. This narrator
had a limited experience, however, and so the ‘I’ in this narrative also
belongs somehow to me, his editorial alter ego. This book is thus a
‘written/spoken textual duet’ in which two people—the author of the
spoken words and the author of their written form—produced a text
working together as one’ (Kopenawa and Albert 2013, 445–46).
25. Anthropologists have explored the nature of fiction and its capacity to
deliver truth in many different ways. I am particularly interested in Nigel
Rapport’s elaboration of the concept of fictional-cum-vital truth.
26. The constraints we faced extended well beyond the text. When we tried
to find ways to enable Liria to attend the 2014 EASA conference on
Collaboration, we found it was impossible. My university would not pay
for her trip, and the EASA had not considered ways of facilitating the
attendance of local or indigenous collaborators. About a year before the
conference I got in touch with the organising committee to raise the
problem, and they suggested that I set up a round table to discuss the
issue—rather than thinking of practical ways to transform the institutional
set up.
27. See also Tsao (2011) for an extensive discussion of this issue.
28. Gandolfo and Ochoa argue that, as academics, ‘we are trained in ways of
reading that seek to destroy or undermine’ (2017, 187), and explore the
implications of this fact for ethnography.
158 P. GAY Y BLASCO
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Thin, Cruisy, Queer: Writing Through Affect
Omar Kasmani
Writing is an overture. Cruisy at best, it is a move seeking to land with

a reader. It is a flirtation even, on part of the author, thinly carried over
to a scene of reading. Yet neither as weak nor scanty, thin here denotes
writing’s capacity to imbue, carry and work through streams of affect,
emotional traffic, and queer excess. I propose that writing through affect
is not mere writing up of ethnographic data but cruising in queer zones
of inter-subjective knowing that open up during fieldwork or become
available in its wake through wispy registers of memory and intimacy.
Permeable, partial, personal—thin, cruisy, queer modes of writing, as
I elaborate, help trouble anthropological habits of form, content and
knowledge epistemes.
This rumination on ethnographic writing re/turns to Thin Attach-
ments (Kasmani 2019), a continuing body of work that pursues ideas of
public intimacy and brings personal memoir to bear on the material and
affective geography of Berlin.1 My tryst with thin is an inheritance that I
trace to Heather Love (2013) and Ann Armbrecht (2009). In method-
ological terms, I am interested in the tenuous ways in which affects carry
O. Kasmani (B)
Freie Universität, Berlin, Germany

Switzerland AG 2021
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-71726-1_7
164 O. KASMANI
over to scenes of reading. This, on the one hand, is about how might
we preserve in text, a heightened awareness for being ‘raw and exposed’,
as one is in the field, or specifically in places and situations ‘where one’s
nerve endings are bare’ (Armbrecht 2009, 204).2 On the other hand, it
considers how writing through affect can allow for shapes of reading to
emerge, which in Love’s terms of thin description (2013, 404), do not
entirely hinge or speculate on ‘interiority, meaning or depth’. In formal
terms, this work is a constellation of porous and non-linear fragments,
better conceived as scenes, written in the third-person masculine form—
not I but he.3 That such writing is (already) bodied by how and what he
(an anthropologist) engages in the field means that gender pervades the
text, not as an applied tool of analysis, rather as writing’s most ordinary
refrain. Its scenic genre serves to re/gather a range of felt and enfleshed
intimacies that fold up/in/out/along scenes, and which tie, at times only
tenuously so, otherwise disparate objects around the figure of the author.
Writing as I do, in the modality of autotheory, necessitates that the
text affords the ‘impropriety of the autobiographical gesture’ (Gordon
2008, 41). To the extent that such writing entails a creative reflection
on life arising from an empirical context, autotheory shares with ethno-
graphic fiction a readiness to deal with ‘emotions, affect and the untold’
(Ingridsdotter and Kallenberg 2018, 72). While both transgress genre
conventions and disciplinary boundaries, autotheory stops short of mixing
up facts with elements of fiction or fantasy (52). It is also distinct in
that autotheory allows us to integrate ‘autobiography and other explic-
itly subjective and embodied modes with discourses of philosophy and
theory’ (Fournier 2018, n.p.). That the genre is gaining renewed trac-
tion, particularly through the works of Maggie Nelson (2009, 2015) and
more recently, Julietta Singh (2018), should not take away from the fact
that such impulse has long been familiar to queer and intersectional femi-
nist writings. My own reasons to draw on the personal follow more closely
the imperatives of the Public Feelings Project (Berlant 1997; Cvetkovich
2012; Stewart 2007) by which I illustrate how ostensibly private feel-
ings continue to bear upon social and political formations of belonging in
Berlin. It ensures as much that feeling sticks and desire is not expunged
out of ethnography. This isn’t simply a memoir. To write the self, to
disclose by way of coming close, is to open up the private as public
archive, to offer oneself as scene and site of knowledge making. It also
doesn’t mean that anything personal goes. This isn’t naval-gazing either.
As Ruth Behar persuasively notes, ‘the exposure of the self who is also
THIN, CRUISY, QUEER: WRITING THROUGH AFFECT 165
a spectator has to take us somewhere’—a place in writing—‘we couldn’t

otherwise get to’ (1996, 14).
Journeying is indeed a compelling metaphor when it comes to writing.
This project, after all, is a result of radical alterations in my access to
Berlin, set into motion in 2016, the year I started research with Turkish-
German Sufis of my neighbourhood. The original scope of this project
was in fact limited to a mosque community and involved observing and
participating in a Sufi ritual of godly remembrance (Zikr).4 Soon enough,
the anthropologist’s fiction of the field would come undone as writing
grew out of the mosque and turned coterminous with the extending field
(Gibbs 2015). Studying migrant belonging in a city I was myself making
home in, also meant that trajectories of research and the researcher would
invariably collide and coalesce, make varying demands on my time and
energies, loves and other involvements. It is of little surprise that a lot
got blurred in the process since I was no longer able, possibly neither
willing, to observe the line one usually draws between home and field,
the work of life and fieldwork. In years since, I have come to believe
that this writing is predominantly borne of anxieties of and in the field.
What does it mean to research a postmigrant community in Berlin while
being a migrant myself? What does it mean to be privy to a very intimate
ritual that takes place behind closed doors? How do I make sure that
my scholarly disclosures do not give volume to the discourse on Paral-
lelgesellschaft —the lack of integration ascribed to migrant communities
in German public discourse—or do not serve for that matter a partic-
ular cultural appetite for quote–unquote, the place of Islam in Europe.
In more macro terms, what are the privileges that inhere in my cisgen-
dered and class-defined access to the city? What is the place of the queer
researcher in the homosociality of the mosque, better still, how might we
remedy, analytically speaking, the exclusion of non-male, non-believing
bodies in such religious gatherings? Or, how can we account for the
oblique ways in which the city infiltrates the mosque? In so long as ques-
tions lurk, these also attest that such writing is shaped as much by feeling
conflicted as it has nurtured in the numerous and now partly recalled
conversations around those conflicts, and which at the time I was having
with friends, colleagues, research-partners, lovers and strangers, be it at
work, in cafes, at the mosque, online or at times also in bed.
Writing, as I have come to experience and understand, is also longing
in so long as it performs the affective labour of belonging in a new
166 O. KASMANI
place, in between places or in place of another place. If to long, as Eliz-

abeth Freeman (2007, 299) describes is a growing bigger, to extend and
endure both in time and place, writing can be aching for one’s own histo-
ries to gather, stick and sediment in new places through the labour of
memory, a remembering-through-writing if you will, that what might feel
distant, possibly, dismembered. It should partly explain why this writing
is an unfixed and unfinished constellation. Its non-linear scenes, only
partially connected and moving between bedrooms, cafes, mosques, bars,
street-corners and parks, illustrate how postmigrant expressivity attests to
the numerous ‘worlds that intermingle’ in the city’s folds, ‘but whose
differences are never fully dissolved’ (Lim 2009, 133).5 Folding cultural
variance and abundance of the city into text without straightening or
burnishing its edges embraces a greater (cosmo-)political challenge of
the urban, which in Farias and Blok’s (2016, 5) words is ‘shaped not by
that which is absent, but rather by situations of radical co-presence; (…)
and where what unfolds is a conflictual politics of actual urban things’,
and might I add, values. To write in scenes is one way of working with
co-presence even if fragmented arrangements allow yet cannot entirely
predict echoes that might evolve or emerge between otherwise disparate
units of a constellation. Fragments invite queer forms of gathering while
reaffirming the view that objects are only brought into relation by the
scalar labours of the observer. Such gathering in the case at hand is not
in service of encompassing, neither capturing the city, but in Strathern’s
(2004) terms, is an exercise in partial connections that is here produced
by the writer’s deliberated act of foregrounding chosen objects, privi-
leging some configurations over certain others. It follows that thin, cruisy,
queer modes can involve an arrangement of texts and con/texts that are
contingently brought into an arena of correlation simply by virtue of their
place alongside one another. Beside is an interesting proposition for planar
relations, in Eve K. Sedgwick’s words, that ‘permits a spacious agnos-
ticism about several of the linear logics that enforce dualistic thinking’
and which, if we are also to think in terms of ethnographic form, resists
the fantasy of egalitarian relations but comprises nonetheless ‘a wide
range of desiring, identifying, representing, repelling, paralleling, differ-
entiating, rivaling, leaning, twisting, mimicking, withdrawing, attracting,
aggressing, warping’ (2003, 8). Envisioning such relations in text, what
the scenic genre or fragmented form in ethnography also makes possible
is the side-by-side occurrence of the narrational and the theoretical. Such
paralleling obviates, in scenes of reading, what Catherine Lutz (1995,
251) has identified as their gendered division and characterization—

theory as male writing (and might I add, straight) and the personal as
intrinsically feminine (and by such logic, queer). Moreover, interspersed
scenes allow for a kind of surface reading or readers’ planar movement
between the slowness of ethnographic passage and a slowing down that
comes with reading/making theory.6
Thin structures of text also allow for shared imaginations to prosper
as much as these enable partial meeting grounds for readers and listeners
to come in, make meaning with the ethnographer-as-writer, find coher-
ence—or not. Writing turns cruisy. By this I mean how the author and
reader linger, roam about, seek encounters in a defined field, whose possi-
bilities grow or shrink through contact, intelligibility and desire, and
where certain intimacies and meanings are invariably bound to unfold,
whether these align with our wants or not, become real or remain unful-
filled. Cruising is an interesting metaphor to think of queer-affective
writing: anyone who has cruised will know that it is a be/coming closer,
a constant seeking and striving that involves skills for spotting, moving,
eyeballing, approaching, receding, following, turning, touching or that it
bears forth an entire suite of affects ranging from hope to loss, doubt
to disappointment, between impulse and excitement, rivalry and release.
In provoking a comparison, I am, however, not suggesting that writing
through affect is a project-specific to gay experience or a desirous relation
between male objects. It is to illustrate rather that cruisy writing takes us
beyond capture or a holding to a loosely situated though targeted pursuit,
which is driven as much by the hope that one’s paths would cross as it is
acutely aware that certain moves might not land, that one’s overtures can
be rejected, advances unwelcomed—though none of its attendant failings
is an argument for not cruising, not writing.
Locating conceptual and political possibility in sites of possible loss
does not equal a celebration of precarity. To deal with uncertainty of the
worlds they parse, modes of ethnographic writing must flirt with sparse
intelligibilities and partial knowings of the field. Writing thin, cruisy or
queer is a tarrying with the knowledge that text always comes short of
what one witnesses, experiences or testifies to.7 If the promise of anthro-
pology, as the Paper Boat Collective (2017, 23) observes, ‘is to affirm
that actual, existing circumstances are always imbued with the possibility
of being otherwise’, the precise challenge of writing as I propose is to
venture ‘far from the deadness of the literal’, to find ‘a side angle’ onto
the real, in a sense, to allow the thin to emerge in the thick of affect
168 O. KASMANI
(Stewart 2017, 227).8 Viewed another way, such writing, even when
allowing layers of senses, emotions, affect and imagination to gather in
and permeate the text, does not yield a thickness nor certitude of inter-
pretation. To name ethnographic writing as ‘a seeing that doubts itself’
(Taussig 2011, 2) or to recognize that ‘fidelity to the real may consist
in acknowledging that it will always exceed the accounts we are able
to give of it’ (Paper Boat Collective 2017, 23), comes a tad closer to
a feeling that all good ethnography shares with fiction, including its
potential for emphatic identification.9 To compare, however, is not to
say that ethnographic knowledge is fictive and fabular or any less cred-
ible, rather by inhabiting the limits of what is possible to say in academic
terms, the ethnographer might also embrace value inscribed in other
forms of knowing and telling. Also, by emphasizing opportunities that lie
between observing and writing, I am not suggesting that writing always
comes after-the-fact but even when ethnographic writing is an attune-
ment (Gibbs 2015), it moves as much as it is removed, fails and falls
short, tarries or carries forth, saunters in and out of our minds and diaries,
arrives in the wake of things. Neither does this imply that writing is a mere
embellishment of an idea, in the sense that it is an afterthought, but rather
the very means through which thought comes to the world. The novelist
Garth Greenwell puts it rather succinctly, ‘It is not that I have a thought
and I’m finding a shape for it’, he says, ‘it really is that the shape the
sentence takes is productive of the thought’ (Ho 2020).
Whether writing is coterminous with the field, experienced as an
attunement, or arrives only in the wake of things, thin keeps temporal
possibilities of returning to a scene of affect open. Such permissiveness in
form allows a non-linear narrative to thrive in writing with little regard for
straight time. It eases a veering off from scene to scene, or cruises, more
critically, between times or places. To write the city as porous is to say that
it is not a fixed entity, neither entirely external to the self, a place out there
to which the researcher must go to observe, define or capture. It is rather
continuous, felt in the interface of inward and external modes, subjectively
and piecemeal, a gradually accruing geography of rhythms, rallies, refrains
and relations. It also follows that Berlin is both particular and expansive.
Places beyond it, and in this particular iteration, Bozen-Bolzano where
some of this writing was shared, discussed and advanced—saunter in and
out of an urban whose boundaries are never sharply drawn, whether
temporally or in spatial terms. It advances my position that the postmi-
grant city is not simply material context but a historically charged and
impressed upon breathing figure of affect, marked by influx and efflux to

lean on Jane Bennett (2020), and which just as much ‘thickens’ through
experiences of migration—as Aydemir and Rotas (2008, 7) have put it—as
it is in my view rendered thin by modes of feeling and acts of remem-
brance. This, I would hasten to add, is not an exclusive privileging of the
immaterial or the invisible. Felt archives of Berlin are like the city itself
evolving constellations—and always incomplete lest we enfold or restore
to such gatherings their affective extensions: spectral, non-corporeal and
differently material volumes, bodies and objects. Thin, in this regard,
can also be an approach to write the hauntological urban, full of ghosts,
memories, trauma. This isn’t specific to Sufi rituals of summoning histor-
ical saints in the contemporary; haunting, as we know, is not exclusively
a province of migration or religion. That cities are haunted and weighed
down by their own histories is nowhere more pronounced than in Berlin.
The material memory of its own ruination—25 million cubic metres of
rubble produced during World War II—is not erased but buried in the
city’s seven rubble hills, enfolded as it were in a geography designed for
forgetting (Anderson 2017). Infrastructure, demographics, architecture
of this once-divided city, no less the alarming rise of right-wing politics
or Berlin’s infamous Neo-Nazi edges, serve as concrete reminders that
not always what is hidden, is actually forgotten; that certain pasts are
never finished, overcome or done away with. Whether sticky or returning,
visible or otherwise, religious or not, materially present or simply recalled
to mind, thin allows for an abundance whereby minority and migrant
inheritances can endure in a diverse constellation without compromising
on the politics of their co-presence. So long as thin folds other places,
times and inheritances into the present, such writing bears epistemic and
political purpose: it brings us a tad closer to asking what might porosity
make possible in political and analytical terms especially if such thinness is
a critique made to work against enduring colonial and imperial separations
of space, time and bodies. The porous constitution of this text and order
of places and times it evokes, dilates or unsettles is a sharp reminder that
Berlin in this case, and by extension Europe, cannot only count as field-
sites or sites of fieldwork but these are—in Arondekar and Patel’s (2016)
critique, Area Impossible—homing devices to which salutary epistemolo-
gies are continually oriented. Thus, much more than a memoir, writing
a particular self in the city is also about how might we learn to extend
the archive or think queer with migrant aesthetics and religious affect.10
It indicates, more broadly speaking, the work’s critical awareness for the
170 O. KASMANI
epistemological assumptions and emphases through which we, that is to

say those who are framed by Euro-American histories, institutions, disci-
plines and frameworks, come to know theory, its objects, geography and
history.
Thin, cruisy, queer reveal how the politics of time, sex, migration
and religion in the city can be brought into a conversation not on
antagonistic terms but as dynamically entangled and critically coinci-
dent. The city, to put it one more time, is not a mere context for
research or a thing to capture but a thin, always-evading, breathing
ground of feeling, a porous geography of disparate times and momen-
tums, conflicting memories and motivations, the now and the not-yet,
the here and the also-here. In cruising the felt and intimate of the city,
in writing queer and thin, we turn to what lies beneath, beyond, behind
or exists beside, in-between and alongside, or that what impinges on life
obliquely, gently intrudes our view of the present through the corner of
our eye, refracting sounds, dreams, memories, trauma, histories. The post-
migrant city, like the migrant’s sense of time is compound, interrupted
at times, at times stretched, but almost always is the urban a more-
than-material constellation. Writing through affect means that writing
can breathe such abundance. So long as summoning other times, other
figures, other inheritances through writing is an aching for one’s own
histories to stick and sediment in our places of migration—a gathering
anew that what might feel distant, possibly, at risk of loss—it is also a
path to feeling futures.
Scenes of Daily Loves

Späti (Late-Night Shop)
There is a woman he sees almost every day. From where he usually sits
outside this café on the street where he lives, there is but just a line of
three potted plants that separate the café from the Späti, where she sits,
sipping tea. And just now as he is jotting down these lines, a man from
across this plant line reaches out to him. Hasan from Morocco intro-
duces himself and inquires a little bit about him too. ‘Ich komme aus
Pakistan’, he responds in German. In this moment, his eyes meet the
eyes of the woman but they do not exchange greetings. ‘They will kill
my father’, Hasan’s next words leave him stunned as he quotes Benazir
Bhutto out of the blue from a TV interview aired on the BBC sometime
in the late 1970s. Affected as he is, he immediately thinks about how a

mere sound bite was enough to recollect an entire history. Hasan raises
his hand towards his heart, shaking it to tell him how those words still stir
his emotions. He also tells him that he lives right above the Späti. Even
after he thinks the conversation is long finished, Hasan keeps interrupting
his daily ritual of writing, offering German cultural trivia like how to end
an email in German: MfG, he recommends from across the plants, Mit
freundlichen Grüßen!
Longing for Love, in Circles

A lyrically buoyant circle of men has come to a still. Chants and recita-
tions, odd screams and intermittent howls are no more. But the air is
pregnant with its resonances. There is a sense of nascent repose. Smells
of fragrant oils linger on, even if in less pungent forms as sweat softens
the contours of men’s bodies, mostly men in their twenties who until
moments ago were oscillating on their feet, singing hallowed praises,
swaying rhythmically left to right and back to left, their forearms locked
with one another. But no more. Tired, sweaty, overcome with feelings, the
men are now seated on the carpeted floor, gasping. The puff and pant of
heavy breathing is fairly audible; their bodies not upright like moments
ago but curled up such that their heads almost meet the ground. Forty
minutes of an intense ritual are over in a room in Neukölln, longer than
it is wide and oriented obliquely towards Mecca. A five-minute walk from
where he lives is a mosque. He goes there every week, where 25–30 men
gather around a sheikh, who leads them into Zikr, the Sufi performance
of mindful remembrance of Allah. In circles of godly remembrance, the
men are young and Turkish-German, sons of Gastarbeiters (guest-worker
migrants).11 When they sing and chant, laugh and cry, move and are
moved or simply fall to the ground, they remember and long with their
bodies. Some of these men tell him that there are other persons in the
circle, ones he cannot see. And that when, with their eyes shut, they sing
and chant praises of saints and holy men, holy men and saints appear,
intimacies take hold, even if only in passing.
172 O. KASMANI
The Potted Line

When Hasan asked him if he could join him at his table, the potted
divide felt a lot more real to him. Mixed as it is here in this neigh-
bourhood, dog-owning, breakfast eating, coffee drinking yukis, or ‘young
urban kreative internationals’ as The Guardian (Dykhoff 2011) once
described Berliners of Neukölln, hardly mingle with those that leisurely
hang outside Spätis, speaking Arabic, Turkish, Romanian and what not.
Yet certain intimacies were inevitable. For instance, on other days, when
looking out from this café, framed by its window front, he sees passers-
by, possibly his neighbours. Ones that are routinely caught in fleeting
passages: For example, this woman dressed in shalwar-kamiz dragging
a wheeled bag of groceries. Every time he sees her, he tries to quickly
piece together the finer details of the cursory scene like the length of
her kamiz or the precise cut of her garment, all cues that he thinks will
lead him to assess whether she might be Pakistani or Indian, possibly
even Bangladeshi. He is of the conviction that Pakistanis dress better but
that’s beside the point. These neighbours, he notes, never stop at cafes,
they hardly peek in. They just keep walking on.
Right across is another café, a tad fancier than this one, where the
coffee is 20 cents more expensive and candles in dark interiors peek out
of large windows, even during the day. Tables are hard to get, especially
outside even though, unlike a Parisian cafe, there isn’t much going on to
gaze upon. A Kinderwagen-pushing mother stops by to chat with a dog-
owner. A scene of likely white intimacy, he thinks. Breakfasts continue.
The light drizzle too. The leisure of cafes is palpably different from
leisures of a Späti, it suddenly dawns on him. He is immediately reminded
of his hatred for Zucchini cakes, which so often announce the hipster-ness
of cafes. There is one like that on the other street where the coffee costs
50 cents more, where Ashram-pants upend the outline of headscarves;
vegan sandwiches frown at kebabs of the Kiez (hood). Annoyed by the
thought, he returns to the scene that is now, back where cheese platters
and bread baskets stop at potted lines and so does the eclectic style of
mismatching furniture. But not always are potted lines legible, he thinks.
By night on the same street candle-lit bars glimmer unlike game-rooms
whose fluorescent glow outs them as men’s-only migrant spaces. He never
goes there.
Not I but He
Berlin conjures up his past like no other city does. He’s lived here for
ten years but the spectres that keep returning to it are from all over. So,
he decides to write them into his text making it porous, as porous as he
finds the city. No wonder, his writing saunters in and out of Berlin with
little outcry. Yet it also dwells. It dwells in Jetztzeit, a chewed-over, here-
and-now account of how places turn dense ever so slowly in the traffic of
dreams, memories, imaginations and anxieties. So, he seeks in his writings
the accumulated weight of these presents, just as much such writing ‘con-
stellates multiple histories that do not usually get told together’ (Yildiz
2017, 214). Eventually, he will come to see how he is implicated in the
passages he writes for what is the migrant’s act of writing the city if not
engaging with the city as a complicated home. But for now, when he
refers to himself in the third person—not I but he—he follows Kathleen
Stewart’s (2007) idea of gaining distance from one’s own subjectivity in
these scenes while recording at the same time the privileges and partic-
ularities that inhere in his class-specific, cisgendered ways of inhabiting
Berlin. The texts he writes are not about him though he is integral to
their compositions. In a way, these act like artist Nina Katchadourian’s
(2017) Lavatory Self-portraits in the Flemish Style, which are not selfies,
as she claims, but other portraits of the self.
In the Thick of It, Bare

For Heather Love, thinness of description involves ‘exhaustive, fine-
grained attention to phenomena’; close but not deep reading (2013,
404). His own interest in thin insists on what is there in a scene, rather
than what is not there. Curbing the urge for thick description is his
way to chip on the edifice of anthropological truth and make room (he
hopes) for other modes of thinking: modes that do not simply rest on the
been-there, seen-that-ness of the anthropologist; and thinking that is not
entirely in service of positivist coherence and certitude. Thin, he thinks,
lets us in into an already porous scene, it allows us to dwell in its passage
as much as it eases a veering off to other scenes. It describes what’s
going on as opposed to explicating what’s really going on. Thin attach-
ments it follows are attachments that don’t stick, that do not last. Yet
they bear a spectral depth; their charge lives on, returning, unfolding in
other forms, arresting us ever so tenuously. He is particularly seduced by
174 O. KASMANI
the endurance of intimacy, especially intimacy as a genre of futuring. He

believes intimacy (across its forms) is a way of extending into the world
in companionship be it through ritual, language, time or sex—pointing
us/orienting us to certain kinds of becomings, beings, temporalities, not
only in the moment it plays out but also how it impinges on us and the
world afterwards, takes various afterlives so to speak.12 And in this sense,
intimacy is always futural because it illuminates potentials and possibili-
ties, howsoever they are realized or even if they are unrealized, eventually
lost.
‘I’m so Exciting’ (Insert French Accent)

In Bluets, Maggie Nelson writes: ‘Fucking may in no way interfere with
the actual use of language’ (2009, 8). Yet he thinks of the cute Parisian
chemist who in the thickest of French accents kept saying to himself
‘I’m so exciting’ as they fucked. In that moment he had clearly held
himself back curbing the urge to correct his grammar. And even though
he must have reacted with some manner of smile, he had seriously delib-
erated whether or not to intervene in that exchange of passion and to tell
him that grammatically speaking he would have had to be excited, not
exciting. He had thought of the pros and cons of such an intervention.
He marvelled at his ability to be cerebral when it wasn’t really necessary;
to articulate a whole line of thought while having sex; of arriving at a deci-
sion, which he was meanwhile able to meditate upon; and equally at his
generosity to suffer while making room for other pleasures to take hold
in its stead. How strange that language could affect him to this extent,
he would wonder a few days later. To himself, he would then say with a
smile: ‘I’m so exciting’!
Marilyn in Third Person

‘You must be professor Strathern’ he addressed her almost from behind
while turning towards her on the street. In tracing her steps, metres to
the university entrance in Bolzano, he had already weighed the chances
if the woman walking ahead of him was in fact Marilyn Strathern. Why
else would they both, a woman of such stature and him a tiny body, be
heading the same way. It was the morning of the conference. When he
had introduced himself, she had retorted with the loveliest of glow in her
eyes, the kind one doesn’t expect but gets used to rather easily in her
presence. And in that very instance, she would tell him ‘I thought your
paper was rather extraordinary’! He knew that as the discussant to the
conference she would have had to read Thin Attachments, a most nerve-
wracking prospect he had nursed in days leading to this one. And just then
her words rather extraordinary enunciated in the most British of ways,
ringed with all shades of not knowing what this could actually mean: was
it extraordinarily strange or indulgent in unordinary proportions? It was
clearly his nervousness speaking. Soon enough, he would call her Marilyn,
like others did. They would also take a selfie. Though what would make
his day, is when on the next day, in reading her response to his paper, she
would refer to herself in the third person: Not I but she!
Furniture with Memories

He couldn’t have known why he wished to photograph the bed. It wasn’t
his own; it wasn’t his either. Perhaps it was the whiteness doubled by
that of his lover or its hotel-like anonymity that had struck something in
him. Its white sheets came with an Airbnb in Barcelona. Each morning
as they got out of it, he felt that in unmaking the bed through the night,
they had made it their own. Where does one look for traces of a brown
body amidst so much whiteness, he would wonder years later as he went
through the nine photographs on a train to Bolzano. Intimacy in this
constellation of images wasn’t an abstract idea but a concrete presence
pressing upon fabric, affect had a way of imprinting itself not just on
bodies: Some of it had found its way in that spot where the mattress
sagged just a wee bit, or in the crumpled sheets willowing with ghost-
like presence, in the disheveled feathers full of gossip inside pillows. He
wouldn’t have articulated what he was feeling in these exact terms just
then but he knew as much that what he captured in a photograph each
morning was all the same and yet not the same: creases, folds, volumes
of intimacy and sunlight that entered the room were all unique, ones he
then would himself out-crease, fold up, cover, flatten—making the bed
each morning so that it could return to its anonymous white self. This
wasn’t destined to be furniture without memories, Toni Morrison’s phrase
that Avery Gordon (2008, 4) repurposes to describe the effects of those
rituals, habits, structures, and behaviours whose history we do not ask
for, so ingrained in our ways of being that we never pause to question
their purpose. This, he reckoned, was furniture with memory, imprints he
176 O. KASMANI
knew he wanted to return to long after the queer folds of nine nights had
been straightened out, morning after morning, ready, almost waiting as if
for other bodies of colour to arrive, take cover in its engulfing whiteness.
Worlds of the ‘Unknown Crying Man’

As he walked through the door, he met him first in the mirror. Little did
he know he was walking into the silhouette of the Unknown Crying Man.
Affected as he was by the encounter, he couldn’t quite recall the exact
features of his face though he knew he had seen a face like his. After all,
it had flashed repeatedly across TV screens in 2001, when the Unknown
Crying Man was accused of practicing debauchery, of offending religion.
But there were 52 of them, caught. The Egyptian authorities had cracked
down on a boat of merrymakers on the Nile. At the trial, 52 faces hid
behind white tissue, covered in fear, in fact, the fear of being identified.
The Unknown Crying Man stood out because he was doubly arrested;
the camera’s eye had caught him crying.
He knew what crying felt like. He was familiar with etiquettes of
hiding. He had also twice tasted the fear of being identified. But this city
wasn’t Cairo, nor Karachi. And the year they met in the mirror, no longer
2001. Sixteen years on, he was a loosely defined flâneur in Berlin and he
was a melancholic dandy in Istanbul. So, on his second visit to Istanbul, he
tried looking for the Unknown Crying Man. Some knew where he lived
but none had seen him. If word on the street was anything to go by and
if one were to buy into the life that artist Mahmoud Khaled (2017) had
now imagined for him, the Unknown Crying Man was a recluse, confined
to his Bauhaus-inspired home in socially upwards Cihangir, surrounded
only by pictures of Giovanni Bragolin’s famous kitsch images of crying
children.
Only metres away from the home of the Unknown Crying Man, is an
abandoned park. There, just the previous night, resting on the edge of a
rock, he faced the Sea of Marmara. As he shared beers with Ahmet, he
had felt the weight of the city surging behind them. Yet Istanbul sprawled
to their left and to their right. From where they sat, they saw it in Asia;
they saw it in Europe. He was unfailingly bewitched by cities that afforded
vistas on to themselves, convinced as though of their own charms. Berlin,
he knew, had no such airs. He had often described it as a mendicant
among cities. That night, the view of Istanbul that he liked so much felt
so terribly burdensome. How does one turn away from a city as present
and self-aware as Istanbul, he would say to himself without uttering these

exact words. The rest of the time Ahmet and he would speak of a whole
assortment of things: of ghost-like fathers; of the intimacy of strangers;
their cocky preference for anthropology over sociology; of the nature of
divine; and of the divinely attracted. All this while, he feels a restlessness,
perhaps for the reason that he was once again gradually coming to terms
with multiple cities in one.
This neighbourhood of dandies in Istanbul from where the city could
admire itself in its own reflection was a far cry from the working-class
neighbourhood of the newly rising district of Esenyurt where he had met
the Sufis a few nights prior to this one. So far that it had taken him
two hours to reach. But when he did arrive, a metro-train and two bus
rides later, translator in hand, he found over 150 men chanting names of
Allah, reciting praises of saints, immersed in sonic atmospheres, like the
ones he had observed in Berlin. Here too men were known to cry but
for radically different fears. But they too like the Unknown Crying Man
were arrested, charged, moved to tears. It was both strange and peculiarly
familiar to him.
Thinking Through Thin

To bring memoir to bear on geography is to consider how time binds
the narration of one life to the many affective mappings of a city. In
pursuing the matter of Thin Attachments, he points to tentative mappings
as much as to shapes of relating intimately in the city that do not transact
in values of density or tightness; these are intimacies that dwell in their
infirmness and which even in their nursed, stretched out or temporally
drawn illuminations betray what is futural in the logic of be/longing; or
which flourish, at times only endure with little or no optimism in what
Berlant calls ‘intimacy’s long middle’ (Berlant and Edelman 2014, 22).
Thin is what survives in and of relating on a map without investing in the
stability or coherence of objects that comprise those relations (Berlant and
Edelman 2014, 30). It speculates less in objects that map than in affec-
tivities and affections that make up modes of relating to those objects,
whether those are acts of pursuing or disinvesting, the condition of being
drawn or desiring withdrawal.
178 O. KASMANI
It’s Not You

‘Why do they smell’? Just when they were about to part ways, a local
guy in Bolzano he had been on a date with, inquired about Pakistani
migrants in the city. He couldn’t believe his ears. As his face dropped,
the guy continued to dig further into the horror, and if he recalls well, in
these approximate words: ‘these Pakistani men, I don’t understand why
they don’t shower. It is one thing to not have soap in their country but
now they’re in Europe, we have soaps’! Just as he was gathering his wits,
meanwhile also deliberating whether he should give him a dressing down,
walk away in fury or patiently engage so as to address his racist and classist
views, he heard the words, ‘but of course you are different’. This, it’s not
you who I am talking about, is that very exceptionalism extended as if it
were a compliment. On another occasion in Berlin, an elderly German
woman, a complete stranger eavesdropping on his conversation with a
friend, would in passing tell him—in German of course—that she can
perfectly follow his English because he doesn’t sound like people from
India. Or, that time when a German academic casually remarked how
his style of dressing was unlike Pakistanis. In all such moments, he is
reminded how class markers come to remedy anxieties that usually cluster
around migrant bodies. If only he spoke with a certain accent, dressed a
certain way, smelled of curry or whatever people expected him to smell
of, his experience of the city would have been radically different. Even in
their positive appraisal, migrants know what the burden of expectations
feels like, what assumptions are made of. It was not so infrequent when
German guys on dating platforms, learning he is from Pakistan, would
remark ‘wie exotisch’! (how exotic!). Or, that one time when exchanging
names in chat, the German guy on the other side asked: ‘So, what middle
eastern country are you from, Omar’? Or, the other who presumptively
responded in Arabic. Folded in such knowing-before-knowing, acts of
complimenting or curiosity is an enduring history of power. It’s not you
is also code for I know where you are from, my people were once there, I
know who you are!
Roast Beef, Rolling Eyes!

There were days when he was reminded how German, imperfect as it
was in his case, had settled into his ordinary ways of speaking. One has
lived far too long in Deutschland, he once declared to his friends on
Facebook, when one replaces intransitive verbs with machen (to make),
unfortunately in English and to its further detriment when one inadver-
tently closes one’s sentences with an open-ended word like ‘or’, just as
Germans use oder. And then that kleinen (little) moment of horror, when
he wondered if one day he too will sound like the refrain from Tracey
Ullman’s parody of Angela Merkel: ‘Oh mein Gott, I’m rolling ze eyes’
(2017).
He stood at the counter at Rewe asking for 100 grams of roast beef.
Though he had done so in German, he had caught himself, like so many
times before, germanizing his English words. He had learnt to make these
little adjustments for the benefit of his listeners. He hadn’t arrived at this
decision consciously. It had as if of its own will crept into his ways of being
in the city. It had often lent his German a certain kind of authenticity, the
kind that comes with not pronouncing English words in any English way.
So, on that day, as he stood before the counter, he asked for Roast Beef
when in fact he had meant roast beef. Despite his German enunciation of
the word, the German man at the counter picks the wrong sort of meat,
the one he hadn’t asked for, as if his generous gesture of germanizing
was entirely lost on him. Disappointed, he uttered the same words once
again, this time pointing to the roast beef … to which the guy responded,
das ist aber Roast Beef ! This time, like Merkel, he just rolled his eyes and
though he did roll his eyes in English, he was confident it couldn’t be lost
in translation. Endlich (finally), he was eine kleine (a tiny) bit happy!
City Inside Out

He has been reading Diane Chisholm. Her reading of the gay bath-
house points to the ways in which the labyrinthine logic of cruising
for sex mimics the architecture of the city in a way that it ‘interiorizes
the passages and meeting places of the external city’ (2005, 45), makes
contact among city-goers safe yet retains, in fact, magnifies its cruising
potentials and desirous contours: a kind of expanding, even testing of
the Erwartungshorizont of the city—he loves this German word he had
recently picked up. It literally means the horizon of expectations. But such
inversion has extraneous impacts. Men emerging from the interiorized
urbanity of the gay bathhouse return to the city transformed, with deeper
knowledge—both of their bodies and the city—a kind of knowledge that
renders them ever more skilled and adept at cruising the city. It all sounds
expectedly familiar to him. In fact, even before reading this work, he had
180 O. KASMANI
already begun thinking of whether or not what the young men did during
Zikr could be read in terms of a form of cruising, cruising for saints, as
he had noted down in his field notes.
Porous City, Porosity

He uses porosity like Avery Gordon does haunting—in her words: ‘to
describe those singular yet repetitive instances when home becomes
unfamiliar, when your bearings on the world lose direction, when the
over-and-done-with comes alive, when what’s been in your blind spot
comes into view’. Haunting, in Gordon’s terms, ‘raises specters, and it
alters the experience of being in time, the way we separate the past, the
present and the future’ (2008, xvi). For instance, when it comes to his
observations in the mosque and believers’ descriptions of saintly encoun-
ters in ritual time, he reads migrant hauntings as a fragile form of coming
close to subliminal figures and inheritances that in so long as these last in
ritual or remain effective alter and mitigate spatial, temporal, embodied
and affective divisions of the postmigrant city at large. It confirms his
feeling that intimacy matters not only in the moment migrants call out or
come into affective contact with religious-spectral objects—saintly ghosts,
shared pasts, sacred heritage—but also afterwards, and outwards, thus
enfolding in intimacy’s architecture that what lies in excess to the ritual
or might unfold in its wake.
Sex in Lieu of Celibacy

He is waiting to hear from a monastery: a revelation that kept returning
like a wilful ghost while they made out. He felt its presence most certainly
in the moment he had briefly pulled away from him to take off the thread
from around his neck. It carried a wooden cross, painted yellow; he had
kissed it before parting with it. Or in moments when his complete and
utter surrender to giving pleasure felt like a testimony, so powerfully
transparent that he could picture a life spent in devotion even if vows
of celibacy made little or no sense to him. He was no stranger to it. He
had known celibacy though only vicariously—through the lives of the
fakirs he had worked with for so many years. Fragments of his first field-
work in Pakistan would brush past. Yet surprisingly none of this traffic
was distracting. Just intriguing almost to the point of being meditative,
keeping him immersed in the present, ever more engrossed, attached.
Afterwards, they talked about the inferences he had been drawing all
this while. His earlier talk of BDSM didn’t quite extend to his impending
life with brothers at the monastery. At the same time, it wasn’t exactly
hard to imagine how his declared fetish for roleplay could come to rest
in Church vestments. There was a piercing gentleness to him, the kind
he had always associated with tablighi (missionary) Muslims. His humility
was not without an air of righteousness, the kind he thought proselytizing
Christians managed best. And his talk of capitalistic worship and ascetic
regimes conjured up familiar yet very distant fakir lives. One more day
when he would marvel at how life’s currents had their ways of circuiting,
flowing in more or less circular, somewhat closed paths, starting and
finishing at roughly the same place.
The Teary Moons of Istanbul

When she caught him crying in a church, he didn’t know how to explain
his tears. It was their first week living together and they had decided to
spend it in Istanbul. It was there she had named him the maker of dreams.
And dream-like it was. January and icy cold. They were young and full of
hope in a city of new beginnings yet each one of them scarred, each one of
them burdened with dreams of their own. On an afternoon stroll one day,
when he had briefly drifted from her, he had found some comfort inside
a church. Places of worship had always had a way with him. As he sat on
the old wooden pew, alone, he felt searing towards him what had passed
and the gush of what was yet to come. On the muddled borderlands of
sensing and (not really) knowing, his eyes teared up. He couldn’t contain
the surge. He may have cried like a baby.
Twelve years, nine months and some 10 days later he was back in
Istanbul, this time by himself. When he found himself at the home of
the Unknown Crying Man, he knew he too had cried in Istanbul. Then a
week or so later, without actually wanting to, he stumbled upon the same
church. He did not go inside. He did not cry this time. But in returning
to the scene years later, he had come closer to his past and to Istanbul, a
city where, as he would eventually read on a plane back to Berlin, ‘jeder
hatte ein bisschen Mond in seinen Händen’ (everyone had a little bit of
moon in their hands). In the company of Özdamar’s writing, he would
begin to see why in 2005, in Istanbul, their dreams had appeared like
planets within reach; why many moons later the future still shined here as
if it stood at arms-length. ‘The moon was so big as if it only lived in the
182 O. KASMANI
Istanbul sky, loved just Istanbul, and polished itself each day for this city
alone. Wherever one grasped, one caught hold of the moon’ (Özdamar
2005, 68, author’s translation).
Writing in the Wake

To write thin is to write in the wake, which as Christina Sharpe notes,
is a process, both reprise and elaboration (2016, 21). In this sense, to
recollect through writing, to remember, to recall a thing, past event or
experience is not to write after the fact but rather to intimately tarry with
that thing. His ways of re/membering turn thin with time; his memory
stretched to its seams, but in so doing it also makes room for a regath-
ering of objects of the mind. These are coterminous in that the moments
he writes about are sticky, linger around, secretly remain with him, turn
and return long after he thought they were gone. He proceeds in the
knowledge that writing through affect is, in some measure, also writing
for affect. Not simply a placeholder for feeling, affect in his work is tied
to an interest in the ethical–political stakes of intimacy and refers to a
felt and unfolding mode of knowing. And so, when he speaks of attach-
ments and affection, he tries to chart how intimacy folds in, out or how
it unfolds over time and the forms of affective knowing it yields in the
process. Intimacy thus serves as that critical but also sensuous interface
by which he traces continuities that might otherwise remain implausible:
between ostensibly straight pasts and queer futures, between men and
saints in Berlin, between the bedroom and the mosque.
A Sheikh Walks into a Cafe …

He had often wondered how he would feel if men from the mosque
would run into him in the Kiez (hood) where lovers like him were known
to kiss on street corners, genau wie im Film (exactly like in films).13 On
a Thursday in February many moons later, just when he was engrossed
in his daily ritual of writing in the cafe, he saw walking towards him not
men from the circle but the sheikh himself. He couldn’t believe his eyes.
So, he looked down and then up again and there he stood with his gentle
smile. He had paused to wonder how this was in fact possible in a cafe
with zucchini cakes.
As he stood up to greet the sheikh, he felt his body shrink, just enough
to signal a reverence he had seen other followers give him in the mosque,
his head lowered, his body folding inwards. Salam-aleikum, they both
greeted. Two white women looked up. He spoke with him in German.
Rare occasions where his German fared better than his fellow-speaker, he
thought. He feared he might ask him why he hadn’t been to the mosque
in almost a year. Instead he told him it was his first time in the cafe. When
the sheikh came and sat next to him, his image of passing-by neighbours
had also cracked a little. There he was, not passing by as other neigh-
bours did but inside his café, a place where the mosque and his writing
the mosque were eventually crossing paths. It was in search of such dila-
tions and permeations that he had begun to write about intimacies of the
mosque beyond the mosque in the first place. Soon enough, the sheikh
would be on his way to a German lesson at the Integrationskurs (inte-
gration course) right next door. In that moment, he takes a break from
writing what he was writing. He knows he must grasp what fades. He
writes a scene.
Missing Bani
He watches the leaves fall. From where he usually sits outside this café on
the street where he lives, the scene is pretty much the same. Breakfasts
continue on both sides of the street. A woman walks past dragging a
wheeled bag of groceries, another familiar scene within the scene. She,
however, is not Pakistani. The wind is colder, the sun scarcer than it was
just a month ago. It is only late August. He watches the leaves fall. He
doesn’t smell autumn. Not yet. But then he was never sure of his olfactory
aptitudes to begin with. He misses Bani. When she left for Karachi less
than a month ago, he couldn’t really understand why someone would
want to leave Berlin in the summer. Precious, he now sees it slipping
away. He writes her a message on Whatsapp. He’s anxious to hear what
she thinks of his prologue to Thin Attachments. He usually bounces his
ideas off her, mostly because she has an oddly superior talent for sifting
through academic bullshit. She tells him she loves the title. He’s now sure
she hasn’t read it beyond the title. He misses her even more. He watches
the leaves fall.
The Last Day of a Mosque

Bir, iki, üç, dört ….. or so counted the young men in Turkish, all as one,
keeping score as they took turns doing push-ups. In this almost empty
184 O. KASMANI
room in Neukölln, there was hardly much left: just the fervour of voices
reverberating off its now bare surfaces and cold fluorescent lights that
dodged contours of well-toned bodies. The setting, drab with a palpable
ease, was almost pallid. Yet none of this was routine. Vivid or spirited, too
green or painfully yellow, words that he would’ve once used to describe
the character of this room were no longer imaginable. The Koranic callig-
raphy that had long adorned the walls was now buried in multiple coats of
white paint. The last cycle of sonic chants and haptic rituals was already
a faint memory. An even if the elderly sheikh was still in audience, an
earlier mood of reverence was no more. In fact, the rolled-up carpets on
which the men sat had been removed only minutes ago. Its coiling, as
if, had unfurled an air of playfulness. One after the other, amid bouts of
praise and cheer, the young men showed off their physical prowess, their
heavy biceps taut against the concrete floor. In this moment, even the
sheikh, who until now only smilingly watched, knew well that at some
point, he too, would have to take the floor. How remarkable were these
moments, he had said to myself as he observed the space of the mosque
gradually transform from a room of prayer to that of leisure, recording
it photographically over the span of an evening. The last features of the
mosque had been dismantled, an entire mosque and its 15 years put away
in boxes. Left behind was a bare concrete floor that now stood haunted
with traces of colour. Faint but stubborn vestiges of the carpet had stuck
to the floor, a memory far easier to arrest than the many immaterial trails
lost to the eye of the camera.
Loss, as he would eventually come to appreciate, was not a closure but
an opening. Those who apprehend the world in delicacies of the revealed
and the hidden know that potentiality is distinct from a thing that simply
might happen; that it involves a certain mode of nonbeing; or that fear,
loss, disappointment, indeterminacy are potentiality’s affective contours,
indispensable to the work of imagining the world otherwise. When Sufis
in Neukölln long for the unrevealed, they know well that as much as a
tactfully hidden world of saints, spirits, djinns, and holy men is at arm’s
length during Zikr, it is not exactly durable outside it—illuminating as a
potentiality, hence present without actually existing in the present tense
(Muñoz 2009, 9). As leisure took hold in the room that day, departing
from its air were rhythms of the body, sounds of joy and fear, and possibly
the saints too who were known to haunt the room week after week. Of
the last traces of a mosque that the room now bore, this moment of
laughter was most fleeting, he had thought: hard to photograph, least
likely to stick to its surfaces, lesser still to be carried along in boxes. How
do we belong in a site of loss, he had then asked himself in line with Ann
Armbrecht (2009, 176), how do we hold on to its parting knowledge,
especially once something comes to an end?
Notes
1. Parts of this work have formerly appeared in Capacious: Journal for
Emerging Affect Inquiry, 1(3) as part of the author’s article, ‘Thin Attach-
ments: Writing Berlin in Scenes of Daily Loves’ (2019). In its present
iteration, it features a new introduction as well as a modified curation
of scenes, which involves removing some and the addition of seven new
fragments. This work and its conceptual underpinnings constitute an inde-
pendent line of research resulting from the author’s joint project with
Hansjörg Dilger and Dominik Mattes. It is carried out within the frame-
work of the Affective Societies Collaborative Research Center at Freie
Universität Berlin (FUB) and funded by the German Research Foundation
(DFG).
2. In a highly personal ethnography of a place of pilgrimage in Nepal, Ann
Armbrecht (2009) turns to the idea of thin places. While this work is
substantially different from her project, it has helped me arrive at the
notion of thin attachments.
3. This mode of writing in third person is inspired by the scholarship of
Kathleen Stewart, in particular her work, Ordinary Affects (2007).
4. For an ethnographic reading of the ritual by the author, see Mattes et al
(2019).
5. I use postmigrant not as a reference to being past the condition of migra-
tion, but rather to accentuate what it means to endure with or remain
in the wake of historical affects of migration. For more on postmigrant
research, see Römhild (2017).
6. I remain aware that by providing ahead of the scenes, a conceptual and
formal deliberation, I have in this instance decisively introduced a not-so-
ideal separation. The intent here is to offer readers, in addition to a sample
of writing thin, a methodological reflection on how and why I came to
it, what informs the form or what the form brings to ethnography.
7. For ethnographer as witness, see Michael Jackson (2017, 47).
8. Affect as Kathleen Stewart (2007) argues is ordinary and indeed always
already part of how we experience the world.
9. For more on crossovers of ethnography and fiction, see Ingridsdotter and
Kallenberg (2018).
10. For a deliberation on religious affects, see Schaefer (2015).
11. As part of a formal ‘guest-worker’ program, migrants sought work in
former West Germany from the 1950s up until the early 1970s.
186 O. KASMANI
12. For more on endurance of intimacy, see Berlant (1998).

13. This image of street-corners is borrowed from Aras Oren’s (1973) poem,
Was will Niyazi in der Naunynstraße.
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Incorporated Genre and Gender: Elsie
Masson, Her Writings, and Her Contribution
to Malinowski’s Career
Daniela Salvucci
Introduction
This chapter aims to give an overview of the works by Elsie Masson
(1890–1935), including her book, newspapers articles, reports, and
letters. It draws on bibliographical and biographical sources, and refers
to postmodern and feminist theories on anthropological writing. In rela-
tion to genre, it underlines Masson’s originality in writing, and her
politically engaged point of view, stressing the multiple connections
in-between literature, journalism, and anthropological sensitivity. With
reference to gender, it highlights Masson’s ‘writerly incorporation’ as a
‘hidden scholar’ in the work of her husband, the social anthropologist
Bronislaw Malinowski (1884–1942), according to a ‘two-person, single
career’ model based on gender asymmetry. Thereby, the article introduces
the main themes of my two-direction ongoing research on Elsie Masson’s
whole work and on her contribution to Malinowski’s career.1
D. Salvucci (B)
Free University of Bozen-Bolzano, Bolzano, Italy
e-mail: daniela.salvucci@unibz.it

Switzerland AG 2021
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-71726-1_8
190 D. SALVUCCI
Elsie Masson’s Travels, Writings,

and Work as Mrs. Malinowski
The following enthusiastic review of the book An Untamed Territory:
The Northern Territories of Australia, authored by Elsie Masson in 1915,
appeared in the Geographical Journal of the British Royal Geographical
Society in March 1916:
This book, short as it is and dealing mostly with the personal experiences of
a visitor to the Northern Territory of Australia, is a really valuable addition
to the literature on that territory. It is so because the writer has an excellent
gift of description and a power of avoiding trivialities. Her accounts of a
motor journey into the bush – a pioneer journey by car – of the deserted
station of Port Essington, of the trip up the Roper River, and of the trial
of natives for the murder of a white man, are admirable of their kind,
and these are only a few examples of a series of vivid pictures. (…) the
book is both well written and well constructed, and if it be the first the
writer has put forth, it may be hoped that opportunities for further work of
this character will not be denied to her. (The Geographical Journal, March
1916, vol. 47 (3), p. 215)
Although Elsie Masson was a talented journalist and writer, and one of
the first women to take part in the scientific explorations of the Australian
North,2 she did not have many opportunities to further this kind of work.
It is probably because she started helping Bronislaw Malinowski with
his own work, and contributed to his career as his wife and intellectual
supporter. The following sections will give an overview of her writings,
suggesting that her labour as a writer and as a wife was ‘incorporated’ in
her husband’s career according to an asymmetrical gender pattern.
Elsie Masson was born in 1890 in Melbourne to Mary and Orme
Masson; the latter was a Scottish chemistry professor who had moved
to Australia to hold a position at Melbourne University. Although Orme
Masson had been promoting women’s admission to university, neither he
nor his wife encouraged their two daughters to attend public school and
university (Young 2004, 450–51). Like many other girls of their time and
social class, Elsie and her sister Marnie were educated at home, while their
brother went to grammar school. The two girls had trained in languages
and literature and visited Europe as teenagers together with their mother
to study music and art (Selleck 2013; Young 2004).
INCORPORATED GENRE AND GENDER: ELSIE MASSON, HER WRITINGS … 191
In 1913, as a young woman in her early twenties, Elsie Masson moved

to Port Darwin in the Northern Territory of Australia to work as a
tutor and companion of the daughters of the new Administrator of the
Northern Territory, John Gilruth, an academic friend of her father. Living
there for a year and a half, and travelling through this still ‘untamed’
region of the country, Masson had the opportunity to observe and
describe different aspects of the local social life, publishing her notes first
in several regional newspapers and subsequently in the book An Untamed
Territory: The Northern Territories of Australia (Masson 1915). During
World War I, she was politically involved in supporting the ‘humanitarian
principles of socialism’ (Young 2004, 454) and, as a nurse trainee, highly
engaged in the struggle for better working conditions for nurses, as well
as for women’s suffrage (Wayne 1995, I; Young 2004).
When young Bronislaw Malinowski was living in Melbourne, from
April 1916 to October 1917—between his two long field stays in the
Trobriand Islands—Baldwin Spencer, Orme Masson, and other profes-
sors on Trobriand culture introduced him to their academic milieu, and
to Elsie Masson. At that time, Malinowski was examining ethnographic
data from his first Trobriand fieldwork expedition (March 1915–March
1916). Being interested in Australian indigenous life himself (Mali-
nowski 1913), and having read and appreciated Masson’s book, he asked
her for help in processing his material and revising his manuscript on
Trobriand culture. During Malinowski’s second fieldwork expedition in
the Trobriands (October 1917–October 1918), Masson corresponded
with him, commented on his fieldwork accounts and discussed novels and
literature they both were reading in their spare time. They got married in
1919 and moved to Europe a year later, making South Tyrol their home,
where Masson lived and raised their three daughters while Malinowski
taught in London. Although Masson continued to write short stories and
newspaper articles from Oberbozen-Soprabolzano and Bozen-Bolzano in
South Tyrol, she mostly devoted herself to family care after marriage,
and supported her husband’s career. As early as 1925, she discovered the
symptoms of a serious illness, later diagnosed as multiple sclerosis, which
progressively robbed her of her mobility and led to her death in 1935.
The letters Masson and Malinowski exchanged, collected and edited
in 1995 by their younger daughter Helena Malinowska Wayne (1925–
2018), show that Masson assisted Malinowski as a copyeditor and discus-
sant in the most important period of his career (Wayne 1995, I, II). Her
role seems to have been particularly important in the long gestation of
192 D. SALVUCCI
Malinowski’s masterpiece Argonauts of the Western Pacific: An Account of

Native Enterprise and Adventure in the Archipelagoes of Melanesian New
Guinea (Malinowski 1922). With reference to their Melbourne period,
Malinowski’s biographer Michael Young (2004) points out that Masson
worked together with Malinowski at Victoria Library in Melbourne
already in 1917, helping him to process his ethnographic material for
a manuscript from which Argonauts and further anthropological mono-
graphs were elaborated. Young defined Masson as Malinowski’s ‘chief
editor’, emphasizing that her influence allowed him to use a very
appealing style—one that is both academic and popular (Young 2004,
467). Helena Malinowska Wayne highlighted that Masson actively assisted
Malinowski in writing Argonauts as ‘aide and critic, not least with his
style’ (Wayne 1985, 535). Raymond Firth, Malinowski’s assistant and
friend, stated that although Masson did not influence Malinowski’s theo-
retical thought, ‘she was an acute appraiser and critic of it, and helped
him much with it in draft’ (Firth 1988, 27), and Malinowski ‘relied very
greatly upon her judgment’ (Firth 2004, 79).
In her travelogue on the Northern Territory of Australia, Masson
(1915) developed a young, fresh, usually ironic and humorous style,
collecting personal impressions and descriptions of people, situations,
and landscapes. According to Lydon (2016, 77–96), on the one
hand Masson’s book contributed to popularize the evolutionist theory
promoted by her mentor and family friend, Baldwin Spencer. On the
other hand, she proposed a humanitarian approach to the aboriginal
question, which showed her independent mind and her more demo-
cratic attitude compared to that of her parents’ generation and of the
middle-class milieu in which she socialized (Lydon 2016; Richardson
2016; Young 2004). During his career, Malinowski, too, was concerned
with popularizing his work—and social anthropology as a new disci-
pline—by writing books that sold well, publishing in both academic
journals and newspapers, participating in public debates, and promoting
applied anthropology. The key to his success in cultivating large popu-
larity was a less abstract and more narrative writing approach, according
to MacClancy (1996, 11–15, 30). Historian Payne (1981) considered
Argonauts to be Malinowski’s first experiment with a new, captivating
style, which features vivid descriptions of characters, actions, and land-
scapes, uses the rhetoric of the travelogue, and applies a literary imagina-
tion that recalls Sir James Frazer’s bestseller (Frazer 1894), and above all,
Joseph Conrad’s novels (Thompson 1995; Thornton 1985; Young 2018).
Malinowski, in fact, referred directly to the Polish (naturalised English)

novelist in his intimate private diary (Malinowski 1967), as anthropol-
ogists within the postmodern turn have remarked (Clifford 1986). He
shared with Masson a veritable passion for adventure novels and especially
for Conrad’s work to the point they used to apply the adjective ‘con-
radesque’ to the many picturesque situations they encountered within, as
well as to their own writings, such as in the case of Masson’s authored
tales in this sense (Wayne 1995, I, II).
Although Young (2004) remarks on the strong interests in litera-
ture and art of young Malinowski, in his early writings Malinowski
seems absorbed more by philosophical, sociological, and anthropolog-
ical theoretical questions (Thornton and Skalník 1993, 2) rather than
stylistic issues. Despite Malinowski’s interest in literature and his talent in
writing, he apparently chose a more scientific writing approach in his early
academic works written before Argonauts (e.g. Malinowski 1913, 1915).
Thornton (1985, 8) highlights that, when writing on his masterpiece,
‘Malinowski thought of himself as a writer’, struggling between science
and art, drawing on both Frazer and Conrad to develop an evocative
literary imagination through the rhetoric of a travelogue. The intensive
labour on his Kula manuscript, from which Argonauts took form (Young
2004, 468), was made in close collaboration with Elsie Masson, and this
partnership probably fostered him to switch towards a more literary style
by combining narrations and descriptions, and by applying the writing
strategies of travelogues to make his work more appealing to a wider
audience.
In the following sections, I will first discuss concepts from the post-
modern and feminist anthropology on the relations among literature,
journalism, and ethnography, as well as on genre and gender exclusion in
the history of anthropology. I will then underline the originality of Elsie
Masson’s gaze on social change in colonized indigenous Australia with
the main focus on her book by highlighting her anthropological sensi-
tivity as well as her political engagement. I will finally highlight Masson’s
interest in South Tyrolean politics and society with reference to her corre-
spondence with Malinowski and introduce some extracts from Masson’s
article on fascism in South Tyrol. Throughout the chapter, I suggest that
Masson’s appealing writing approach, based on a very personal narrative
style, could have influenced Malinowski’s own writing style.
194 D. SALVUCCI
Writing Genre and Gender

Since the 1980s, postmodern scholars have underlined the strong
connection among ethnographic-anthropological writing, travel litera-
ture, and journalism (Clifford 1996; Pratt 1986). Even though profes-
sional modern anthropology was defined as a new discipline, precisely by
establishing a rigid border between the scientific ethnographic method
and writing when compared with all the other genres dealing with travels
and sociocultural life, some authors claim that ‘blurred genres’ (Geertz
1980) and experimental ‘artistic ethnographies’ (Behar 2007) have chal-
lenged such a frontier. Scholars even tend to recognize that professional
ethnography itself evolved from travel writing (Stagl and Pinney 1996).
With reference to literature, Craith and Kockel (2014), literary critics
in search for connections between British literature and anthropology,
have stressed that Victorian social novelists, such as the authors Masson
and Malinowski read, were themselves interested in describing the socio-
cultural customs of their time:
Many Victorian Writers in the XIX century Britain engaged with anthropo-
logical themes. (…) Like anthropologists, Victorian writers such as Charles
Dickens, George Eliot, George Meredith and William Makepeace Thack-
eray endeavored to describe life authentically and without idealization.
These authors regarded their novels as objective (i.e. scientific) accounts
of human behavior. (Craith and Kockel 2014, 690)
To this argument, Salomon (2005) adds the connection with journalism,

as some of these authors, such as Thackeray and Dickens, had previously
trained as journalists:
(J)ournalism rather than poetry, can be seen as the ‘precursor’ of the Victo-
rian novel, both in terms of the formative professional experience of many
novelists and the formal development of the genre. (Salomon 2005, 140)
Several hidden interconnections, reciprocal influences, and intertextual

relations can be traced in line with these scholars that link travelogues,
journalism, and social and adventure novels to the ethnographic and
anthropological writings in the epoch of the rise of the discipline. The
so-called ‘Imperial romance’, which refers to British adventure novels
in colonial settings written between the 1880s and 1920s (Jones 2004,
406)—including, among others, Conrad’s, Stevenson’s, and Kipling’s
novels—is considered to have been directly influenced by the new anthro-

pological and ethnographic knowledge of the time. These works often
show a critical approach to colonialism and seem to have had a recip-
rocal influence on travelogues and journalistic reportages as well as on
ethnographic and anthropological writings, promoting narrative rhetoric
and style, but also fostering skepticism towards imperialism. In the case of
Malinowski’s Argonauts, as already noted, scholars have emphasized the
several connections with Conrad’s novels (Thompson 1995; Thornton
1985), an author with whom Malinowski himself identified (Malinowski
1967).
Postmodern anthropologists consider the ethnographer and anthro-
pologist specifically as an author, looking at ‘works and lives’ (Geertz
1988), and arguing that anthropological toil consists ultimately in ‘writing
culture’ (Clifford and Marcus 1986). Thereby, they have suggested
putting aside the scientific epistemology of the discipline and decon-
structing the politics and poetics of classical anthropological texts, among
which Malinowski’s bestsellers; at the same time they have promoted
experimenting with more explicitly subjective and dialogic ethnographic
writings.
Feminist anthropologists, however—although there have been many
differences within feminist anthropology (Strathern 1987, 284–85)—
have critically highlighted the fact that this postmodern approach has
neglected gender in dealing with ethnographic-anthropological writing
as a genre (Abu-Lughod 1990; Behar and Gordon 1995; Lewin and
Silverstein 2016; Reed-Danahay 2001). They emphasize that many female
scholars have produced experimental ethnographic writings and anthro-
pological accounts that were unfortunately deemed too narrative, i.e. not
sufficiently scientific, at the beginning of modern anthropology. These
‘hidden scholars’ (Parezo et al. 1993) were marginalized and excluded
from the oft-cited genealogy of the male founding fathers of the disci-
pline (Applegarth 2014; Lamphere 2004; Parezo et al. 1993; Tedlock
1995). It also happened where the pioneers of the field were almost all
women, as is the case in South Africa (Bank 2016).
The same previous contribution of women travelers and social
observers who popularized an anthropological sensitivity through trav-
elogues and journalism, as Elsie Masson did by disseminating among
a wider audience the scientific and political endeavours of her mentor
Baldwin Spencer, has never been considered pertinent to the history of
the discipline.
196 D. SALVUCCI
As the historical research in rhetoric has pointed out, professionaliza-

tion in early modern anthropology went hand in hand with strategies
of control over genre, producing a regime of rhetorical scarcity (Apple-
garth 2012), which artificially reduced the range of rhetorical tools
deemed appropriate for the writing of a proper ethnographic account.
Through this process of definition and production of modern anthro-
pology as a professional, scientific, academic, and therefore bounded
discipline, ethnographic-anthropological writing became a more specific
and controlled genre.
Although Malinowski, likely supported by Masson, clearly gave both a
narrative and descriptive literary inflection to his masterpiece Argonauts,
thereby promoting and popularizing anthropology, after him, even most
of his students opted for a more abstract and theoretical writing approach.
As MacClancy puts it:
Until the 1930s, most anthropological articles and books could be read by
any educated person with a sense of dedication. But within two decades
the language of university-based anthropologists had become sufficiently
abstruse and their analyses sufficiently arcane as to bar the majority of
readers who had not been trained in the subject. (1996, 14)
Scholars disseminating ethnographic-anthropological knowledge through

a narrative writing style started being devaluated and marginalized. It is
relevant that the majority of them were ‘those female graduates of anthro-
pology who did not enter the university hierarchy’ (MacClancy 1996,
34–35).
The increasing valorization of theory within the academy was thus one
of the many mechanisms of the institutionalisation of gender asymmetry
within the discipline, as male scholars were associated with highly valued
theoretical work, while female scholars with less prized descriptive tasks
(Lutz 1995).
In the several husband-wife anthropological couples, this ‘sexual divi-
sion of textual labor’ (Tedlock 1995, 267) was at work, producing a
general misrecognition of the labour of women in anthropology.
Many of the hidden scholars of the discipline were indeed anthropol-
ogists’ wives who—without public recognition—helped their husbands
with both fieldwork and anthropological writing, as Tedlock (1995)
pointed out mocking Geertz, and focusing on ‘works and wives’, rather
than ‘lives’.
From the beginning of the discipline, anthropologists’ co-working

wives have done their fair share of the work by taking fieldwork notes,
discussing, copyediting, and proofreading their husbands’ texts (Mead
1986; Tedlock 1995), according to a ‘two-person, single career’ model.
This concept, formulated by Papanek (1973), refers to the multiple, non-
remunerated, and publicly unacknowledged contributions of wives to the
work and career of their husbands, above all in middle-class professions
and academic employment. Before the struggles of the women’s move-
ment for gender equality began in earnest in the 1970s, this ‘two-person,
single career’ pattern pushed women to interrupt their own careers in
order to devote themselves to those of their husbands. Wives were
supposed to take charge of domestic duties and raise their children, as
well as to manage public relations and even work as ‘incorporated wives’
(Callan and Ardener 1984) to the benefit of the institutes, among which
there were many universities that employed their husbands (Ardener
1984; Sciama 1984).
Within anthropology, although these invisible and silent wife-co-
workers have generally accepted a ‘writerly incorporation’ in their
husbands’ books (Tedlock 1995, 271), many of them, such as Rose-
mary Firth (1972), Edith Turner (Engelke 2000; Turner 1987), and
Elizabeth Fernea (Fernea and Fernea 1989), among others, started
their own careers as anthropologists, led their own fieldwork research,
and wrote their own books. Nonetheless, collaboration in anthropolog-
ical ‘wife-husband-teams’ (Parezo et al. 1993, 352–54) has rarely been
publicly recognized and even less investigated (Ariëns and Strijp 1989;
Gottlieb 1995). The ambiguities of this ‘academic intimacy’ (Gottlieb
1995, 21) mirror the contradictions of both academia and intimacy.
Although Malinowski and Masson developed their relationship as ‘pure
love’ (Giddens 1992) according to the modern ideology of intimacy
and family (Richardson 2016), their work collaboration seems to be a
good example of the ‘two-person, single career’ model, as Bauer (1998)
suggested when reviewing Wayne’s book (Wayne 1995, I–II).
Untamed Territory: Masson’s

Gaze on Indigenous Australia
Elsie Masson’s book An Untamed Territory: The Northern Territories of
Australia (1915) is a travel account of her stay in Port Darwin and her
excursions in the region. It is mostly composed of texts from different
198 D. SALVUCCI
articles she had previously published in regional newspapers in 1913,

such as the Melbourne Argus, the Wellington Evening Post, the Auck-
land Herald, the Christchurch Press, and the Otago Daily Times (Masson
1915, viii). Masson dedicates the book to Mr. and Mrs. Gilruth, who
hosted her in Port Darwin, making it possible for her to travel and take
part in several exploratory missions. In the preface, she thanks Professor
Baldwin Spencer, who facilitated her to move to Darwin and fostered her
publications with his editor, MacMillan. Spencer was a Darwinist biologist
and anthropologist who had carried out research on Australian aborig-
inal groups; he promoted an evolutionist perspective and supported the
claim for the protection of indigenous people in reserves (Stocking 1995).
Masson’s book contains some pictures taken by Spencer, as well as by
Masson herself,3 and by Mervyn Holmes, who was at that time Chief of
the Health Office in Darwin, and two maps.
In the introduction, Masson presents the Northern Territory as an
‘untamed’, exotic, and fascinating space that resists civilization. She
summarizes the history of the region, from the ancient presence of
Malaysian fishermen and trepangers (fishermen of trepang, or sea cucum-
bers) on the Northern coast, to the several failed historical attempts
to explore and colonize this area by Europeans. With some humour,
she recalls the steps of the slow, uncertain English colonization of the
Australian North in the second half of the XIX century, underlining the
lack of infrastructure and productive activities that had affected this region
until that moment. Because of this, in 1907, the federal government of
the Commonwealth took over the responsibility of such an ‘underdevel-
oped’ territory, sending scientists and politicians, such as Spencer and
Gilruth, to promote colonization4 in a region where no more than
1500 Europeans, a similar number of Chinese people, and approximately
40,000 Aborigines lived at the beginning of the XX century (Masson
1915, 23).
Although Masson supports the political efforts of her mentors, sharing
mainstream opinions from her parents’ social milieu about the value of
colonization as civilization, she seems to openly enjoy the resistance of
the northern territories to colonization and its romantic appeal made of
‘indifference and mystery’ (Masson 1915, 3). She argues that ‘the official
and political side is not the only one of interest; from the picturesque
point of view the Territory is endlessly fascinating’ (Masson 1915, 24).
Her presentation of places aims to transport the readers, allowing them
to imagine being there in person to taste the ‘romance of the life’ and the
flavour of the tropics:
The Australian [the ‘white Australian’]5 who visits it [the Northern Terri-
tory] is surprised and strangely entranced with this portion of his continent.
He is fascinated by the romance of the life and by the varied elements that
compose it – the crude beginnings of white man’s civilization, the savage
state of the Stone Age Aboriginal, and foreign to both, the peculiar flavour
of the East, reminding him that he is now within tropic regions. (Masson
1915, 1)
In the following three chapters (II, III, IV), Masson proposes to ‘study
life in Darwin’, dealing with the colonial town and its mixed population
of Chinese, Japanese, Aboriginals, Malayans, Mestizos, and British people.
Giving an account of this multicultural society, she focuses on colonial
relations and sharply remarks that, even if interconnected, these different
sociocultural ‘little worlds’ remain separated:
Life in Darwin is made up of many little worlds, each continuing in its own
way, impinging on, but never mingling with the others. There is the life
of white officialdom, the Eastern life of Chinatown, the life of the pearling
fleets and, under all, the life of the native camps. (Masson 1915, 51)
In her ‘vivid pictures’ of the colonial life in the town, Masson gives
space to the ‘servant question’, presenting portraits of the local working
class, remarking on the asymmetrical racial social relations between work
employers and labourers. British owners live in their comfortable houses,
the most important space of which is the tidy verandah, where ‘the
family lives, eats and sleeps’ (Masson 1915, 32). Among them, white
traders commercialize tortoiseshells and pearls, employing Japanese divers
who are ‘paid according to the weight of (their) catch’, promoting
‘intense rivalry’ between them (Masson 1915, 52–57). By considering
the exploitation of the Japanese divers, Masson emphatically reflects on
the ‘social life of things’ (Appadurai 1986), stressing the worldwide
connections incorporated even in the most ordinary pearl product:
A row of neat pearl buttons on a card – how commonplace, how quietly

domestic they are! Nothing could appear more uninteresting than the
material of which they are made, yet through what strange scenes of
200 D. SALVUCCI
romance it has passed – calling men from sleepy Eastern villages, gath-
ering them together in far-off countries, there to sail upon uncharted seas,
to walk the bottom of the ocean, to laugh, to fight, to cheat, and perhaps
to die. (Masson 1915, 57)
Describing Chinatown, Masson gives a picture of the Chinese migrants’

social position within the local job market as small retail salespeople,
fishermen with their sampan-traditional boats, likely opium smugglers,
as well as cooks, housekeepers, and door-to-door salespeople in British
households.
Above all, she seems to be strongly attracted by the ever-present
‘undercurrent’ of the town, the world of the indigenous people (Chapter
IV), also called ‘blacks’: the aboriginal migrants who dwell in different
camps at the periphery of Port Darwin according to their tribes (Chap-
ters II, III, IV). Throughout the book, Masson underlines that these
aboriginal migrants come from different regions and speak very diverse
languages, often using Pidgin English to communicate with each other
(Masson 1915, 57). At the end of chapter IV, Masson describes a ‘cor-
roboree’, a nightly aboriginal ritual in which she took part, allowing the
readers to encounter the ceremony together with her:
(…) all the Borroloola natives who were already in Darwin would collect
when the day’s work was over. Every night. As soon as darkness fell, the
regular beating of sticks and clapping of hands (…) announced that the
corroboree had begun. On the third night the clapping was more insistent
than ever (…). We made our way across the road (…), and found ourselves
at the scene of a corroboree. (Masson 1915, 62–67)
Masson remarks on her attempts to investigate the meanings of this ritual

while the ceremony was going on by posing questions, which remained
without answers as people she asked were too engaged in the performance
(Masson 1915, 63–67).
In the subsequent chapters (V, VI, VII, VIII, IX), Masson reports on
her adventures ‘out bush’ together with her mentors’ group to explore
the region and enter the so-called ‘Never-Never’6 to “experience to the
full the fascinations of the Northern Territory bush” (Masson 1915, 75).
In a very appealing writing style, she describes first-person adventures of
the small group of explorers. They travel by train and by coach along
the Overland telegraph, ride horses, and camp in the forest dwelled in
by aboriginals and some ‘solitary man – a miner, a carter or a stockman’
(Masson 1915, 80–81). She also gives an account of the pioneering travel
through the bush by motorcar (VI) she took part in and of the first explo-
ration of the Alligator River (VII) where, in a cave near the bank, her
group discovered an indigenous rock painting (Masson 1915, 108–9).
On one of these explorative excursions, Masson had the opportunity to
visit, as ‘the first white woman’, a buffalo hunter’s settlement at Oenpelli
(VII), close to the Alligator River. Describing the daily life of his family
and their relations with the aboriginals who work for them, she praises the
respectful attitude towards the indigenous people shown by the hunter
and ‘his wonderful sympathy with their customs and beliefs. He never
laughs at them; he speaks to them in their own language, and calls them
by their indigenous names. In return, they give him their confidence, and
no ceremony is too sacred to be enacted before him’ (Masson 1915, 103).
Masson instead regrets the attitude of the missionaries who run
the Church of England Mission to Aborigines, whom she visited at
Leichardt’s Bar, during an expedition up the Roper River, which she
describes both in her report ‘Impressions of the Church of England
Mission to Aborigines’ (written for Spencer) and in chapter IX of her
book. In ‘Impressions…’ she emphasizes that: ‘A very unsympathetic
attitude is adopted by the missionaries toward any of the natives’ own
customs and traditions’ (Masson 1913, 2). To a certain extent, she
questions the entire missionary approach, which aims to evangelize the
indigenous people and to ‘preserve’ them by keeping them apart both
from the colonial society and from indigenous society, whereas she argues
it would be better to allow them their autonomy or to integrate them into
the new society (Masson 1915, 141).
Although Masson follows racial stereotypes and sometimes describes
black servants and guides as ‘funny’ and ‘lazy’, she looks at aboriginal
cultures and cultural change with great interest. Taking into consideration
the effects of colonial processes on the indigenous cultures, she sheds light
on the relations between ‘wild’ indigenous people—at the time deprecat-
ingly called ‘myall’—and ‘black fellows’, the aboriginals who work for the
colonizers (Masson 1915, 111, 133–34). Sailing up the Roper River, for
example, she describes how the ‘black fellows’ who accompany the explo-
ration group react to the presence of ‘wild’ indigenous people along the
river by wearing all the clothes and hats they own as a status symbol or
to probably protect themselves against the magic of the others (Masson
1915, 134). Masson remarks on the different attitudes the indigenous
show towards objects and possessions: ‘If he [the indigenous person]
202 D. SALVUCCI
himself is not actually using a possession at the moment, any one else
is welcome to it’ (Masson 1915, 155).
She also notices aboriginal kinship taboos and reports on the following
episode, which happened on the way to the Oenpelli station.
A few wild blacks had collected round us, and presently one pointed to
an object moving towards us in the distance – a black boy on horseback.
As he approached the edge of the creek that wound across the plain, one
of the wild blacks suddenly threw up his arms. Romula (a ‘black fellow’)
stopped dead, while the blackfellow plunged into the jungle bordering the
stream and vanished. Some little bit of tribal law this must have been that
forbade them to meet face to face. This bit of by-play, so swiftly passed,
seemed strangely full of meaning. (Masson 1915, 112)
She also observes and describes a kinship taboo performed during the
religious service at the Church of England Mission, with a certain
ethnographic-anthropological sensitivity:
In the midst of this orthodox Christian service, some of the blacks sat
with their hands over their eyes so that they might not see those of their
relatives on the opposite benches whom they were forbidden by aboriginal
law ever to behold. (Masson 1915, 139)
Masson’s Political Engagement

In the concluding chapters of her book (X, XI), Masson explicitly presents
her political perspective and her open approval of the new administrative
regulation based on the mandate of the Protectors of Aboriginals to limit
abuses against aboriginals and prevent cultural ‘contamination’ (Masson
1915, 151), praising Spencer’s anthropological research and his political
proposals to save indigenous cultures from destruction and disappearance:
It is the more pathetic that every service he (the ‘black fellow’) renders the
white man today is helping towards the destruction of his own race, and
hastening the time when the aborigines of the Northern Territory will be
but a myth to the young and a memory to the old. Must the native of the
Territory die out as he has done in the South? (Masson 1915, 150)
In Chapter XI, reporting on the trial for a murder of a white man who
had brutally killed one of his aboriginal workers and was killed in revenge
by other aboriginal workers of the group, Masson takes on the political

point of view of the indigenous, underlining their right to ‘their own
moral law’ and complaining against the ‘savage white’:
Who can blame them for what they did? Who can say they committed a
crime in ridding themselves of this cruel intruder into their bush world,
who acted towards them with deliberate brutality. Were they not justified
in obeying their own moral laws (…)? [T]he savage black who commits an
act of violence is simply avenging equal outrages done to his own race by
the savage white. (Masson 1915, 177)
As Lydon (2016) argues, on the one hand, Masson’s book links to her
sociocultural context and contributes to popularize a specific scientific
and political view promoted by a particular social group. On the other,
she shows a new interest in sociocultural differences and takes on the
aboriginal question directly by proposing a humanitarian approach to the
issue, also by publishing in her book photographic portraits of indigenous
people to show their humanity beyond racial stereotypes (Lydon 2016,
2018).
Although her book is a travelogue and not a scientific work, based on
personal impressions rather than on systematically collected data, it shows
a new anthropological sensitivity in paying attention to colonial relations,
social change, acculturation, and hybridization processes. As a form of
political engagement, this book points out the contradictions of colo-
nization as well as the paradoxes of ‘civilization’, which would explode in
the coming years, becoming one of the main anthropological subjects of
study throughout the modernday.
Back to Melbourne, in 1914, Masson started a nurse-training course
and was engaged in the battle for better nurses’ working conditions
already in 1915 when, together with her colleagues, she openly insisted
on the public acknowledgement of the nurses’ position in response to
a journalist’s attack after an accident in the ward published in two local
newspapers, the Argus and the Ages. As a member of the committee of
nurses of the Melbourne Hospital, together with her colleagues, Masson
denounced the exploitation of nurses as workers in the hospital.
The nurses of the Melbourne Hospital give to the public at least ten hours
of service, mental and physical, on six days of every week, and for this they
are ‘paid by the public’ a salary which, beginning at nothing a week, rises
204 D. SALVUCCI
in the fourth year of training to 15/5 a week. Let the public think over
this, and it will see that the nurses are in the position of givers of charity.
(Dobson, Hudson, Mackay, Masson, Rogers, Tucker 1915, 11)
In the following years, during WWI, Masson was also politically

involved—publicly debating within the socialist movement, taking posi-
tions against the anti-war radical socialists and writing her opinions in
the weekly newspaper The Socialist, published in Melbourne since 1906
(Wayne 1995, I, 20). As a nurse trainee whose first beloved fiancée had
been killed in the battle of Gallipoli, she was tragically aware of the conse-
quences of aggressive German politics, and thought of the current war
as needed in order to reach a new, hopefully peaceful and democratic,
global order. She expressed her opinions speaking publicly at the Yarra
Bank, an open space for citizens in Melbourne, which was later closed
and forbidden by the authorities. On 23 July 1917, she participated in a
public debate organized by the Socialist Party of the State of Victoria at
the Socialist Hall of Melbourne, promoting the idea that socialists should
support the war and vote for conscription at the following referendum on
the matter. She discussed this issue in opposition to Adela Pankhurst, one
of the main leaders of the anti-war movement (Young 2004, 454).
In 1917 and 1918, during her training as a nurse, Masson continued to
be deeply engaged in the struggle to improve nurses’ working conditions
by promoting reform in the State of Victoria to reduce the number of
working hours and the length of training. She tried to raise awareness
on this issue among the militants of the Women’s National League, and
among politicians from both the Liberal and the Labour Party (Wayne
1995, I, 38), eventually presenting a petition to the parliament of the
State of Victoria. She used to refer to her political activity with some
humour as ‘bolsheviking’ (Wayne 1995, I, 98, 101, 102), whereas within
the hospital she was apparently nicknamed ‘Trotsky’ (Young 2004, 456).
Masson was engaged in the struggle for women’s suffrage, too, and
firmly discussed this subject with Malinowski, who seemed to have
opposed the women’s suffrage movement, at least at the beginning of
their relationship. In November 1917, she wrote to him:
Of course I do not think the sexes are equal. I feel more strongly than I did
that sex affects psychology profoundly (…). But I don’t regard the vote as
anything to do with this. It seems almost a technicality… there are really
practical difficulties which confront women who try to earn their livings
in England, such as being able to practice at the Bar though qualified

as lawyer, and not be able to get a degree though qualified, at the two
main universities. These things are symptoms of the same sentiment which
won’t allow them to vote… On these practical grounds I shall always be
suffragette. (…) We do agree au fond on this subject, but it’s you who
won’t concede this. (Wayne 1995, I, 55)
Masson and Malinowski’s letters show their attempts to understand each

other and to negotiate their positions on this subject. Eventually, Mali-
nowski recognized the influence Masson had upon his own interests and
attitudes—above all, in terms of political issues.7
From Oburaku, Trobriands, he wrote to her on 8 January 1918:
I am much more interested in ever so many things (politics, actualités,

etc.) through you than I would be on my own account and my ideas are
deeply modified through your influence… it makes for a broadening and
deepening of my mind and a greater equity of my character…. (Wayne
1995, I, 97)
Incorporated Genre and Gender

During Malinowski’s second stint of fieldwork in the Trobriands (October
1917–October 1918), Masson corresponded with him, not only to
exchange political opinions, but also to give feedback on his reports from
fieldwork, becoming progressively more involved in his research work.
From Melbourne Hospital, where she was training as a nurse, Masson
wrote to Malinowski on 18 January 1918:
I am most intensely interested in every step of your progress (...). I am

keeping your letters very carefully, not only for my own sake as I would
do anyhow, but because so much of them will be of use for your descriptive
book…. (Wayne 1995, I, 99–100)
Masson’s feedback often remarks on the narrative aspect of Malinowski’s

descriptions of his experiences, stressing their literary potential, as in the
following extract from her letter to him on May 29, 1918:
I think the thrill of the ethnologist as he approaches and arrives at a new

hunting ground of which he has heard, as you did at Vakuta, must be
different to anything else…your arrival there was most fascinating. It is
like being ‘in’ a story to row up a creek, or follow a road, and literally not
206 D. SALVUCCI
know what happens round the next bend, although you know your object
in general. It is like the description I once read on a properly constructed
dramatic dialogue: -‘leading by a series of small surprises to a foreseen
close’…. (Wayne, 1995, I, 144)
In this period, as their correspondence shows, they used to discuss novels

and literature, as they shared a veritable passion for adventure and social
novels. Both of them grew up in an intellectual milieu, and some of
their relatives and friends were writers and poets: one of Masson’s aunts
(Flora Masson) was an author (Wayne 1995, I, 31), while Malinowski’s
best friend in Cracow was Stanislaw Witkiewick, known as Witkacy, who
became a famous expressionist painter, writer, and playwright (Skalník
1995). During their relationship in Melbourne, Malinowski and Masson
often exchanged books. They appreciated the same authors and continued
to send novels to each other even when Malinowski was doing field-
work in the Trobriands. In his private diaries—diaries ‘in the strict sense
of the term’—Malinowski (1967) referred to the many novels, among
which masterpieces by Charles Dickens, George Meredith, and William
Makepeace Thackeray were to be found, and magazines he used to read
to escape from reality, nostalgia, illness, and boredom during fieldwork,
as Christina Thompson (1995) has pointed out. In their letters, Masson
and Malinowski compared their own writing approaches to those of their
favourite authors, along with many Victorian novelists. On their different
strategies of narrative description, for instance, Masson—referring to
Dickens and Kipling—wrote to Malinowski in 1919:
Your description of the bush fire was most complete and I realized every
word of it to myself. In the way you describe things you remind me of
Dickens. I, on the other hand, might modestly liken me to Kipling. The
difference seems to be that I aim at giving one realistic flashlight of the
scene in words that by their sound and association somehow convoy the
feeling evoked. You on the other hand carefully pile up one effect after
another, giving, in the most deliberate and awfully well selected language
the entire history of the scene as it unfolds before you …. (Wayne 1995,
I, 184)
Masson also commented on the social novel La terre by Zola that Mali-
nowski had given to her, as well as on Robert Louis Stevenson’s letters
she had sent to Malinowski, who identified immediately with this author
and his struggle against illness while living in Samoa with his wife and his
mother. As Young (2004, 535) suggests, likely prompted by Stevenson’s

example, Malinowski and Masson dreamed of a joint voyage and even of
shared fieldwork to carry out ethnographic research as a couple. Masson
wrote to Malinowski from Melbourne Hospital about this on 18 January
1918:
Together we will pitch a tent not far from one of the villages, and I shall
learn from one of the women how to make their pots…Do you think it
would be feasible for me to go back with you to New Guinea as assistant
ethnographer? … I am sure if I learned the language I could get a lot out
of the women that perhaps has been never found out. Tell me seriously if
it could be …. (Wayne 1995, I, 100)
Unfortunately, it did not happen, and Malinowski failed to collect enough

ethnographic material on women’s practices, as Annette Weiner (1976)
later underlined, critically updating Malinowski’s work both ethnograph-
ically and theoretically, promoting the anthropology of women in the
Trobriands and filling in the missed gendered pieces of a more complex
cultural puzzle.
Malinowski and Masson’s interest in literature included autobiographic
novels, travelogues, and journalistic reportages on ‘exotic’ regions, too.
Masson quoted in her book the novel We of the Never Never, written
by Jeannie Gunn, whereas in his private diary Malinowski referred to the
travelogues by Beatrice Grimshaw, an Irish-Australian writer and traveler
who spent many years in Papua New Guinea, just to give a few examples.
Above all, they seemed to share a true passion for adventure novels: both
of them highly appreciated Kipling and were literally fascinated by the
novels of Joseph Conrad, whom Malinowski once even met during a train
journey through England (Young 2004).
Because of this common literary background, and because of Masson’s
talent in writing, as well as her anthropological sensitivity and her interest
in Malinowski’s research, she was progressively incorporated into Mali-
nowski’s work and writings, as shown in her correspondence, at least from
December 1917:
All my interests and any ambitions I may have had seem to have been
deflected. It isn’t so with you, because your work is ‘our’ big interest, and
is bound up with us and we with it. (Wayne 1995, I, 67–68)
208 D. SALVUCCI
They got married in 1919 after Malinowski came back to Melbourne

from the Trobriands, and went to Europe the next year, visiting England
and then Scotland, where their first daughter was born. While waiting for
an academic position for Malinowski, they chose to stay on the Canary
Islands for some months, rented a house—called el Boquín—in Tenerife,
where they used to work together (Wayne 1995, 14). Here, Malinowski
wrote Argonauts (the title of which had originally to be ‘The Kula’) in
a very short time, using his material previously elaborated with Masson’s
help. In a letter to Masson, after having submitted the manuscript for
publication, Malinowski recalled their collaboration at home in Tenerife:
(…) by the way Boquín has been already sublimated into a wonderful expe-
rience and I am looking back upon some of our times, from the departure
of Rivers to the arrival of the Johnstons, as the happiest of my life. The
way we dealt with the Kula was very pleasant and the walks and the general
domestic atmosphere and routine we created. (Wayne 1995, II, 22)
In a handwritten note on the copy of Argonauts Malinowski gave to

Masson, he acknowledged her merit with the dedication on the copy:
‘To my collaborator, who had half the share at least and more than half
the merit in writing this book’ (Wayne 1995, II, 26).
The couple moved from Tenerife to Southern France, where their
second daughter was born near Marseille, and then to Cracow, Mali-
nowski’s native city in the search for a suitable place to work. In
1922, they eventually moved to Oberbozen-Soprabolzano, on the moun-
tains over Bozen-Bolzano, in South Tyrol, a region that belonged to
the Austrian-Hungarian Empire until 1919 and passed to the Italian
Kingdom after WWI. They arrived there following a suggestion of a friend
from Vienna (Wayne 1995, II, 27), and then chose to stay, bought a little
country house to enjoy the healthy place, to write and to raise their chil-
dren, the youngest of whom, Helena, was born in Bolzano in 1925, in
the old hospital that is now part of the university campus.
Over the next ten years, they made a home in Oberbozen and
Bolzano8 (Stocking 1997; Salvucci et al. 2019; Tauber and Zinn 2018;
Wayne 1995 II), where Masson settled with the children, whereas Mali-
nowski was travelling between London and Oberbozen, since he had
obtained a position as a lecturer (1924) and subsequently as a professor
(1927) of Social Anthropology at the London School of Economics
(LSE). In Oberbozen, Malinowski wrote articles and parts of his most
famous monographs. He was likely assisted by Masson in this endeavour.

She also took care of his students, who used to visit him in summer (Firth
1957; Kuper 1996; Powdermaker 1966).
Referring to the publication of The Sexual Life of Savages (1929), Mali-
nowski wrote to Masson: ‘I shall love this book which in a way is as much
ours as the Argonauts ’ (Wayne 1995, II, 118), and she commented:
… I like the sound of your volume immensely. (...) I have always a feeling
of faint surprise when I think of the embryo of our spiritual child. It
seems a wonder that the little creature should suddenly spring all armed
with pictures, index, and other ornaments out of your head. (Wayne 1995,
II, 133)
As Selleck (2013, 280) underlines, in the foreword of this book, Mali-

nowski explicitly acknowledges Masson’s contribution to the writing
enterprise of both Argonauts and The Sexual Life of Savages:
My greatest debt in this book, as in most I have written, is to my wife. Her

counsel and practical co-operation have made the writing of the Argonauts
of the Western Pacific and of this an agreeable task instead of a drudgery.
If there is any value and interest in these books for me personally, it comes
from her share in the common work. (Malinowski 1929, XLIX)
In her first years in South Tyrol, Masson had also worked on her own,
writing newspaper articles on the Italian political situation, describing
the politics of fascism in the region (Wayne 1995, II, 28). In 1923, she
published an article titled ‘Viva il Fascio! Black Shirts at Bolzano’ in the
Australian Journal Forum: A Journal for Thinking Australians. Masson
gives an account of the presence of the fascists in Bolzano in the text,
describes first person their performances in the public space and reports
on the opinions and fears of the local people. She introduces the article
by sharing her personal experience:
My first sight of a flesh-and-blood Fascista was on autumn evening in

the little Tyrolean town of Bozen, or Bolzano, as the young Black Shirt
himself would certainly insist on my calling it. Bozen, once a proud part
of the Austrian Tyrol, but, since the Treaty of Versailles, torn off from
its motherland and given over to Italy, to the helpless indignation of its
inhabitants. Nevertheless, the Italian rule has so far not lain heavy upon it.
210 D. SALVUCCI
German is freely spoken (…). But the Italian Government was one thing
and the Fascio another.
Then, she reports on the climax of the political events that affect the daily
life of the local people in Bolzano:
When I returned three weeks later to Bolzano (Bozen) things had gone
much further. The Fascisti had seized the municipality, dissatisfied with the
not sufficiently Italian way things were being carried on. (…) The statue
of Walther von der Vogelweide, the famous Tyrolean Minnesänger, which
looks down, inartistic and stiff, but not without a certain simple dignity,
on the main place of Bozen, the Walther Platz, had two flags of red, white
and green, thrust impudently through the passive arms. (…) Within a week
came the Coup d’Etat, the proclamation of martial law, its withdrawal and
the triumph of Mussolini.
Finally, she addresses the political contradiction within fascism, prefig-

uring its metamorphoses into a state regime:
Well, what is to happen now? Fascismo cannot continue to exist now that
Fascismo is in power. One of the two things must go –Fascismo or the
State. It is a precarious matter to be raised to power by the physical force
of half a million hot-heated youths. (Masson 1923, 12)
In the 1920s and 1930s, Masson reported to Malinowski by letter on

the impositions and abuses of the fascists, referring to press censorship,
the banning of German newspapers and German schools, as well as the
banning of the German language in general (Wayne 1995, II, 46, 51, 86,
95, 101, 109, 111).
Due to Masson’s health condition, the family moved to London in
1929, but continued to holiday in Oberbozen, where Masson often stayed
to easily reach the Austrian and German spas she used to attend for
treatment.
As Helena Malinowska Wayne has suggested (Wayne 1995, II, 162),
Masson’s works remained committed to humanitarian principles and
continued to express her critical point of view against colonial accultura-
tion and political oppression of individual rights. At the end of the 1920s,
she tried to publish a play against imperialism, in which she also mocked
anthropological ethnographical practices.
Elsie had begun to write a play. The theme was ‘what if’ the Europeans,
the British, were subject peoples within a black empire, and what would
the role reversal mean? (…) Elsie drew parallels not only from within the
British Empire but also from dictatorships such as Mussolini’s and the
intolerances of Hitler’s growing movement in Germany. (Wayne 1995, II,
162)
Conclusion
In her writings, Elsie Masson expressed her original and politically
engaged opinions, as well as her talent as a writer and a social observer.
In her 1915 book, she described the social life of a frontier territory,
and paid attention to sociocultural aspects and Australian indigenous lives.
Even if she shared the racial ideology of the time and the fascination for
the exoticism, she developed a personal point of view on the contradic-
tions of colonization as civilization, calling for humanitarianism towards
the indigenous people and showing an anthropological sensitivity towards
cultural difference and social change.
In her book, Masson often constructs amusing dialogues and little
humoristic scenes, but she also writes more literary prose that recalls
the novels of Joseph Conrad. Her narrative voice is usually a ‘we’ that
often overlaps with ‘the traveler’, and the readers discover the Northern
Territory together with her. This particular writing technique, as well
as her style, made of humour, a popularizing attitude, and descriptions
of picturesque and literary landscapes, could have influenced Bronislaw
Malinowski’s own writing approach. Narrative and descriptive strate-
gies of travelogue and journalism seem to have been incorporated in
ethnographic-anthropological writing, above all in the case of Mali-
nowski’s first bestseller Argonauts. In the introduction of this book
he defined the ethnographic method as a professional one promoting
modern anthropology as a scientific discipline in opposition to nonpro-
fessional data-collection or to literary writing genres as travelogues and
journalism were thought to be. Nevertheless, he drew on literary sources
and imagination in writing his masterpiece. In doing so, he was supported
by his wife and her talent in writing, as well as by their shared interest in
literature and their discussions on authors of adventure and social novels.
Masson, instead, deflected her attention from her own interests in travels,
journalism, and literary writing to devote herself to her family duties and
to her husband’s work and career, as the incorporated gender of the
212 D. SALVUCCI
two-person, single career model. In spite of their anthropological sensi-

tivity, their critical political perspectives, and their literary relevance, Elsie
Masson’s works are scarcely known, and their contribution to Bronislaw
Malinowski’s career remains to be acknowledged.
Notes
1. Based at Free University of Bolzano-Bozen (unibz), I am currently carrying
out research on Elsie Masson’s work and on her contribution to Mali-
nowski’s career, in collaboration with the MFEA-Malinowski Forum for
Ethnography and Anthropology is coordinated by Dorothy Zinn and
Elisabeth Tauber (website: https://mfea.projects.unibz.it/).
2. In 2018, on the online information-and-dissemination platform Conver-
sation. Academic rigour, journalistic flair, connected to the academic
world, the historian and anthropologist Jane Lydon defined Elsie Masson
as ‘photographer, writer and intrepid traveler’ for the new series of the
platform ‘Hidden women of History’. See the webpage: https://thecon
versation.com/hidden-women-of-history-elsie-masson-photographer-wri
ter-intrepid-traveller-107808.
3. The pictures Masson took during her stay in the Northern Territory are
held at the Pitt Rivers Museum, Oxford (https://www.prm.ox.ac.uk/) as
Lydon (2016) highlights.
4. In 1911, Spencer and Gilruth, both scientists from Melbourne University,
were appointed by the Commonwealth government to undertake a Prelim-
inary Scientific Expedition in the Northern Territory. In 1912, Spencer
moved to Port Darwin as a Special Commissioner and Chief Protector of
Aborigines, while Gilruth became Administrator of the Northern Territory
in 1913 to promote the development of the territories (Lydon 2016, 78).
5. Enclosed in brackets within the quotes are my own notes to the original
text.
6. In her book, Masson refers to the autobiographical novel We of the Never
Never published in 1908 by Jeannie Gunn on her experiences as a settler
woman in the Northern Territory of Australia at the beginning of the
twentieth century.
7. As Michael Young also highlights, Malinowski’s ‘political convictions had
“crystalized” (as he put it) during his third epoch in Melbourne. This was
largely due to the stimulus of Elsie’s engagement with the socialists (…)’
(Young 2004, 455).
8. Since 1926, the family started spending winters in Bolzano, in the district
of Gries, which had been a ‘Kurort’ (a spa town) since the second half
of the nineteenth century. As we know from Helena Malinowska Wayne
(Wayne 1995, II), in Gries, the Malinowski family rented a flat first in Villa
Elisabeth (in 1926), and subsequently in Villa Marienheim (in 1928).
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———. 1915. “The Natives of Mailu: Preliminary Results of the Robert Mond
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———. 1922. Argonauts of the Western Pacific: An Account of Native Enter-
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———. 1932 (1929). The Sexual Life of Savages in Northwestern Melanesia:
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———. 1967. A Diary in the Strict Sense of the Term. New York: Harcourt,
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———. 1915. An Untamed Territory: The Northern Territory of Australia.
London: Macmillan.
———. 1923. “Viva il Fascio! Black Shirts at Bolzano.” Forum: A Journal for
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pologie. Paris.
Afterword
Marilyn Strathern
This stimulating volume relives for me many of the intellectual pleasures

of the Bozen-Bolzano symposium on gender and genre in ethnographic
writing, at which these comments were initially delivered. Recalling some-
thing of the impact of the original programme, and given that Elisabeth
Tauber and Dorothy Zinn have already taken us through diverse themes
in how they have woven the chapters together, I keep to that first order
of presentation. The intersection of genre and gender proved a hugely
generative symposium focus. Among the issues that rose to the surface
was the self-consciousness with which ethnographers write—as at once a
matter of how to harness it and how to keep it at bay. Time and again, it
is the people ethnographers work with who help keep it at bay.
Silence in an Ethnographic Key (Chapter 1)

It is appropriate to begin with Nigel Rapport, unusual among anthropol-
ogists for the way in which he draws direct inspiration from literature. The
M. Strathern (B)
Social Anthropology, University of Cambridge, Cambridge, UK
e-mail: ms10026@cam.ac.uk

Switzerland AG 2021
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-71726-1_9
220 M. STRATHERN
central conceptual problematic of how life escapes the writing of it comes

from the novelist Virginia Woolf, whom he puts in the company of certain
philosophers (life escapes the thinking of it) and a painter (who could
never paint his self enough). Writing is but one genre among others that
also dwell on the vernacular relationship between individual and society.
Here, as an ethnographer in such a world, Rapport keys us into gender
in an arresting way. He reports on two contrasting situations: the cross-
gender relations between him and the farmer’s wife (Doris) who took
him in when he was still an anthropological recruit, and the same-gender
relations between him and a hospital porter (Ian). Of course each had
others at their back—it was Doris and Fred together who tried to make
something of the young Nigel, and Ian is a gatekeeper among many
porters.
Through his own writing, Rapport bridges these field experiences and
what many have written about experience as a matter of individual inte-
riority, only to take a surprising direction. A writerly preoccupation with
words is displaced by a focus on the silence people keep; whether words
are seemingly absent or instead animate constant internal dialogue, the
consequences for giving an account of silence defy any simple narrative.
On the one hand, many of those he cites describe how silence may simul-
taneously conserve people’s sense of themselves and join them in their
common humanity. This is a theme thoroughly embedded in English liter-
ature as a search for authenticity, and the space where it may be found
when the clutter of social life is cleared away.1 On the other hand, in
debate with fellow anthropologist James Fernandez, interested in how
interiority is translated into sociocultural interchange, Rapport points to
keeping silent as itself a socially visible action. A thing-in-itself, it bears (he
puts it) not only on individual consciousness but on ‘those social others
with whom the individual acts’.
Rapport’s own motives for keeping silent when faced with Doris’s
attempts to teach him how to belong by talking properly are instructive.
He was in a dilemma, since engaging reciprocally by voicing his own opin-
ions would be to refuse the hospitality on which he depended. Getting a
public reputation for silence was an escape. A cross-gender relation was
acted out as a cross-generational one, literally through his infantilization
in her eyes as an object of parenting. By contrast, in the company of
male hospital porters, he encountered a situation where among them-
selves porters valued silence from time to time but were the judges of
when that time could be taken. Keeping silent was an institutionalized
AFTERWORD 221
privilege: it had to be earned. Only by belonging to their community

could a porter be allowed to be left alone.
All this has consequences for ethnographic writing, namely what it is
that one can or cannot take from what people say, and what they say when
they are not speaking. If we regard silence as the kind of comfortable
being-at-home relation that someone has with themselves, then it also
throws up diverse instrumental uses, as well as the ethical issues on which
the essay concludes. Offering his disquisition on silence in terms of his
own reticence about the kind of language that has already decided (objec-
tified) what ‘others’ (non-selves) are, Rapport leaves the reader with the
project of writing itself. When that writing is a matter of argument and
demonstration, analysis and description, what is its object? Intersubjec-
tively, between persons, silence might be an aid to de-objectification. But
is it not also—despite Woolf—the writer’s task to create objects: objects to
be read, objects of attention, of aesthetic response, of sharing, interpre-
tation, appropriation? We return to the writer’s genre, (object-making)
words, not just to their deployment but—we have learnt—to realizing
their frequent confinement to those that are speakable and spoken. How,
Rapport ponders, might a writer, anthropologically speaking, take care of
the rest?
An Ethnographic Inflection
to Feminist Writing? (Chapter 4)
Traffic between literary sensibility and anthropology is given a further
turn by Hande Birkalan-Gedik’s invitation to enter a world until now
largely unmapped: the development of feminist praxis in Turkish schol-
arship over the last four decades. The turn is not just in her search,
across diverse writings, for self-conscious textuality. What elsewhere one
might take for granted as a relation internal to ethnographic writing, a
literary genre tied to a special kind of anthropological investigation, is
here uncoupled by a history of events. For the trajectory that feminism
took in Turkey requires differentiating and recombining ethnography and
anthropology in very specific ways. Unravelling these interconnections—
intellectual, institutional—leads to silence, a term that Birkalan-Gedik
herself uses for certain feminist-perceived experiences.
As I understand it, Turkey from the 1980s onwards witnessed a surge
of scholarly interest that knew itself as feminist. With a strong activist
222 M. STRATHERN
presence, it took gender to be primarily an issue about women, academ-

ically manifest in centres or institutes of gender and women’s studies, as
well as in a stream of publications. It was immediately lodged in—thus
burgeoned along with—a cross-disciplinary milieu. This kind of milieu,
which in the United States (and one might add the UK, Australia and
elsewhere) had only slowly unfolded over the previous 15 years, sprang
up so to speak fully formed in Turkey, and was receptive of the new surge
of scholarly interest. When ‘ethnography’ later became a generic practice
for feminist studies, this was the milieu that nourished it; it was never
tied to ‘anthropology’ alone. Rather, places where anthropology was
taught were (silently) left or kept themselves somewhat to one side, and
anthropology was not the impetus it had been elsewhere to developing
feminist scholarship at large. What Birkalan-Gedik derives from her histor-
ical investigations is that, in turn, the reflexive sensibilities that feminist
scholarship brought to anthropology in those elsewheres—and arguably
enhanced, even if such scholarship did not alone open up space for, the
literary and political sensitivity of the ‘Writing culture’ programme—was a
moment that in Turkey never happened. The specificity of the case makes
one realize how much indeed gets taken for granted in diverse traditions.
With considerable candour, Birkalan-Gedik sets against this history a
delineation of ‘feminist ethnography’. If, in Turkey, mainstream anthro-
pology was in this regard left behind, many cross-disciplinary ethnogra-
phies seem to her to suffer from what she calls ‘weak textuality’. Their
power has lain in developing a feminist analysis largely independent of
any one academic discipline (e.g. promoting the method and theory of
intersectionality), as well as in continuing to speak to feminist activism.
But that aside, they often fail to engage critically with the practice of
writing itself. Is that because other kinds of practice, such as long-term
fieldwork, do not or cannot provide a model? The feminist conviction is
in place, but the reflexive and experimental possibilities she would seek in
a fully ethnographic self-consciousness may be passed by.
This chapter provokes two pertinent questions. The first is in relation
to what anthropologists know about themselves, and the histories that
have made them. Outside Turkey, anthropologists often complain about
other disciplines claiming to do ethnography, but what about the varied
differentiations and recombinations of theirs with just such other disci-
plines? In the United States, in particular, the radical–critical potential
of feminist anthropology came to join with other work on sexualities,
AFTERWORD 223
including queer studies and masculinities, while many feminist anthropol-

ogists have turned their attention to biotechnology and the new genetics,
to science studies, to inter- and multi-species ecologies, and so on. The
second is about the potentiality and limitations of different kinds of
literary genres, and what helps propel a writer to analytical experimenta-
tion. Above all, an anthropological ethnography produces interlocutors,
whether or not their hand is visible. Rapport’s hosts did not hold back
from instructing the fieldworker; in her writing Birkalan-Gedik came to
cultivate a ‘non-distanced, sincere, intersubjective and emotional stance
in representing the lives of women, children, and men alike’, and perhaps
we can discern here a more implicit set of instructions from hers.
Writing with and Against the Grain (Chapter 6)

Birkalan-Gedik’s starting point (after Abu-Lughod) was whether the
descriptive reportage supposedly characteristic of ethnographic—rather
than anthropological—writing does not challenge the possibility of a femi-
nist ethnography. Daniela Salvucci offers an astute commentary from the
perspective of one who had worked as a reporter of sorts. Apparently
Elsie Masson had no problem developing an observational style that ran
against the grain of white prejudice. In turn this seems to have infused
her husband’s writing, for that was to go both with and against the grain
of scientific and literary narration alike. The feminist challenge depends
on an earlier one: how the genre of ethnography as such became possible.
It is refreshing to hear of Masson’s work, rather than simply of her
adjunct status; by focusing on her writing, Salvucci raises questions about
Malinowski’s. She dwells on the sharpness of Masson’s observations, as
well as on the broad and probing nature of her interests, which covered
several strands of a population whose differing perspectives she tried—
insofar as she could—to adopt. This visitor to the Northern Territory
certainly does not seem to have held back from commenting frankly
on what struck her as untoward in people’s behaviour or missing from
current convention. Yet here an uncoupling is again necessary, for when
it came to categorizing persons Masson’s use of the language of the time
is not kind to how her ideas might be appreciated a century later. Salvucci
has to steer a tricky passage between moments that history has since
treated differently—the everyday racial overtones of Masson’s vocabu-
lary—and the then journalist’s innovative approach to describing white
and black Australian life. Masson reported with both condescension and
224 M. STRATHERN
empathy. But above all it seems to have been curiosity that compelled
her to address the situations she encountered, with whatever section
of the heterogeneous populace it happened to be. This then seemingly
became part of the descriptive magic with which she wrote, magical
insofar as her style ‘sympathetically’ aroused corresponding curiosity and
then fascination in the reader. Such a facility is not so far from the skill
an anthropologist needs in raising and then answering questions in the
course of unfolding an argument.
Here the diverse genres of composition that were part of the literary
milieu in which Masson and Malinowski lived—travel writing, adventure
stories, social novels, all turning on the organization of persuasive narra-
tive—have something to tell us: how to move from one episode or topic
to another. Latter-day critics have sometimes said that, without the social-
structural or ‘systemic’ theorizing that was still embryonic in the early
twentieth century, Malinowski had no reason to write about one aspect
of Trobriand life rather than another. Indeed anthropological accounts
were very often organized as just that, lists of topics. To me, of all that
Salvucci has brought to our attention,2 Masson’s letter of 29 May 1918
conveys a wonderful prescience. She is writing about Malinowski’s arrival
on Vakuta during his pursuit of kula exchanges. ‘It is like being “in” a
story to row up a creek or follow a road, and literally not know what
happens around the next bend’. The story line! In the end, the famous
Argonauts gathers what he then wanted to say about the Trobriands into
an account of kula voyaging, from landing place to landing place, simul-
taneously construed as a travel narrative and a journey through Trobriand
culture.
How Masson became ‘the incorporated wife’, incorporated as Salvucci
suggests into her spouse’s career just as different genres remain enclosed
within anthropology, suddenly becomes clear. By the time she was 35 and
diagnosed with multiple sclerosis, so much had already happened in terms
of children, moving houses, Argonauts published, Malinowski’s London
appointment; who knows what another 35 years might have brought.
But it is especially the perspective from an institutionalized discipline that
subsequently rendered her invisible, that is, from anthropology’s growing
professionalism, evident in the tenor of her husband’s departmental life,
the succession of students, the famous LSE seminar, collegial networks
and so forth. Authorial collaboration alone could never hold its own
against that level of visible ‘anthropological’ activity.
AFTERWORD 225
Devising Reciprocity (Chapter 3)

Alongside Paloma Gay y Blasco’s conviction that making knowledge
through ethnography is inherently collaborative, the idea of collaboration
is thoroughly complicated by Liria and Paloma’s tale. First, though, note
that what becomes a strong presence in this chapter was foreshadowed
by Salvucci’s comments on that diverse cluster of women who collabo-
rated with established anthropologists on the point of gaining professional
prominence.3 As the former appear today, the more visible were them-
selves writing, sometimes experimentally, sometimes fictionally. This was
the time when ethnography was emerging as a genre of its own, and long
before it became theorized (as dialogical or whatever). Otherwise put,
a kind of periphery was created in the early effort to define professional
prominence: anthropology was to be driven by theoretical agendas.
Making an anthropological life outside such theoretical framing may
be welcomed as a challenge; it takes courage to talk of the anguish. What
happens when the often (perhaps too easily) acknowledged collabora-
tions with interlocutors include collaborative effort not just in authorship
but in the praxis of writing? Gay y Blasco’s experiment in writing with
Hernández, the Liria whose life she had documented but who now made
her (Paloma) step out of accepted modes of analysis, was based on a
commitment as much experiential as theoretical. On Paloma’s side it
was a means to engaging with Liria on recognizably reciprocal terms.
But to organize a text on such terms plunged Gay y Blasco into a
changing terrain of expectations and interpretations, and she became
uncertain of—among other things—how to proceed methodologically.
In finding a counterpart engagement with uncertainty in the works
of some of those earlier women—exemplars, forebears—she also found
something else. If she was echoing previous struggles with the unre-
liability of reporting/reportage, with the instability of knowing, and
a sense of narrational failure, were their efforts not saying something
about any ethnographic enterprise? Like attention to Masson’s writing
exposing something of Malinowski’s, were they not revealing fault-lines
that invariably accompany the making of social knowledge?
From among those who tried writing themselves, several had stressed
the value put on being prepared to let people choose the terms through
which to speak to an anthropological audience. Here, in effect, they were
creating other kinds of collaborators, subjects of study, anticipated in
those situations where the scholarly collaborator was already herself an
226 M. STRATHERN
interlocutor. Many anthropologists have hoped to bring about something

like this, for one purpose or another, and indeed the actor’s voice, long
seen as part of the data, has increasingly been seen as part of the analysis
too. But Gay y Blasco and Hernández’s joint writing pushes the boat out
much further. As a theoretical object, reciprocity is one of those summa-
tive anthropological concepts that encapsulate some of the complexities
of social life through deducing guiding principles, if only indirectly artic-
ulated as such. Turning it around, against the current, they were forcing
reciprocity to behave as a literal and voiced guide to their creation of
texts.
Gay y Blasco’s chapter has necessarily to fall short of much that lay
behind her collaboration with Hernández, but as an ethnographic effort
she says enough for the reader to imagine that her colleague would
approve. Paloma does not have to apologize for writing anthropology,
at least insofar as Liria has her own purposes for it. Moreover, Liria is
unimpressed with inequality as a baseline: she knows how to measure reci-
procity. Or, rather, we might add, differences among mortals pale beside
the difference it makes to be doing God’s work—hence the insistence that
God’s will be brought into the picture. Gay y Blasco casts Hernández’s
openness to her in a humanistic vocabulary, but I do wonder whether
talk of common humanity was an idiom that Liria needed. Anthropolo-
gists might draw on it, but I revert to the observation that the writing
the two undertook revolved around their friendship. If on Liria’s side it
was friendship in the sense that one might speak (say) of love between
ritual friends, sworn brothers or co-parents, then perhaps it was carrying
its own sturdy inflection of loyalty and commitment. Co-writers they were
indeed.
Not I but He (Chapter 5)

I retain part of Omar Kasmani’s original title, noting that in these recol-
lections of writing Berlin the Bolzano conference also figures. On the
occasion I had been struck by the way Gay y Blasco’s paper led into them.
For her ‘patchwork’ comes his ‘scenes’, although Kasmani is less inventing
a genre than working inventively upon a genre already in fruition. Her
friendship with Liria involved struggling with incompatible expectations
about ‘writing together’, and if the anthropologist felt they failed, neither
completely seeing the other’s view, perhaps this was bound up with the
other author’s continuing presence. Kasmani draws in various persons, yet
AFTERWORD 227
conserves them in rather different terms: he is not looking to see Berlin

through another’s eyes (one path to thick description). Instead some-
thing else happens. The anthropologist is seen to be already with these
people, part of the same milieu as they, appearing as another third person.
The passage to which ‘Not I but he’ is now attached directly addresses a
withdrawal from self-consciousness, that is, from an ‘I’ who plumbs the
depths of itself. Instead he hopes to recount his memories as though they
were street furniture, and himself a passer-by. Yet there is nothing casual
about this exposure to the present; in the end the accumulated presents
acquire their own weight. Almost, in a way, it is the genre to which he
is contributing that emerges as an enduring friend: in this chapter, the
prospect of ‘writing thin’ is peopled with those scholars making the effort
alongside him.
Kasmani asks what it means for a migrant to study a postmigrant
community, and we are shown how words perpetuate prejudice. His
answer is a writing mode that attends to his present habitation, that does
the affective labour of belonging, a longing to be (in the new place)
(present/loved/understood/comforted). So he is writing Berlin through
himself, while it is a self deliberately avoiding nostalgia for elsewhere, a
deliberateness pushed to the edge through the device of recollecting other
times and places (even daring to mention missing someone) from which
longing is displaced to make the recollection itself stick. The past comes
into the picture as a being of the present place. Moreover, his friend, the
genre, deploys a figurative language that hardly draws on other people’s
words, not needing to give them ‘voice’ as is frequently the idiom of
(ethnographic) depth. Cultivating descriptive thinness takes away some
of the power words ordinarily have. Instead of using more words to get
out of the problems that words get one into, this writer pares them down
to make room for the abundance of everything else.4
Gender, Kasmani observes, pervades the text. If the cultivation of
affect, knowing through feeling, is to be drawn entirely from the way
he is presently ‘in Berlin’, then it matters the kind of third-person he is.
It affects where he sits, what he observes, who talks to him, the intima-
cies he seeks. And if his conceptual offering is a ‘scenic genre’ then we
can take his diverse scenes, felt modes of city dwelling, as gendered too.
Yet that is not because his writing is organized from the perspective—self-
consciousness—of himself as an identifiably coherent subject; rather it is
surely because of the writing’s own queering effect. Ethnographic writing
can be allowed, as he puts it, to tarry, carry forth or saunter in and out
228 M. STRATHERN
of minds and diaries. In his telling phrase, such writing turns (itself, him,
us) cruisy.
Scenes within scenes. On the occasion I said: ‘I was captivated by this
writing. At the same time, I confess to a certain awkwardness. This is what
I wrote before I came here: “This is lovely as a piece for silent reading,
but I do not feel entirely comfortable as a commentator. I wonder if
the awkwardness comes in part from the fact that I cannot use the third
person device for Omar in order to create the distance that commentary
ordinarily requires – it is already pre-empted. Perhaps she will not feel so
awkward in his presence, listening to him speak”’.
Experiments in Engagement (Chapter 2)

Kasmani created a situation where no one need observe the observer. By
contrast, as an activist, Marina Della Rocca is observed and described:
stepping into an arena of which she is already part, she has to make
herself freshly visible to it. Her account brings us into a differently
gendered space from that of the previous chapter, although it too
concerns migrants. It is a space institutionally focused on women (seeking
help, offering help), and to which she brought a set of ameliorative
intentions: the hope that studying a familiar workplace would bring an
increment in understanding how to improve things. The passion with
which she pursued this sprang partly from her former role as at once
an antiviolence operator and a feminist activist. So she was already an
insider of sorts. However—and we might look back on the temporality
of Kasmani’s piece—the space was also a kind of time, since what she saw
as a continuity of care on her part was not received that way by those in
charge. Her private motivation had not generated public entitlement.
The theoretical perspective on which Della Rocca draws, intersection-
ality, aims to overcome rather than encourage marshalling information
into different areas, at least insofar as it opens up policy-oriented research
to the overlapping nature of organizational demands. Where official
response is concerned, a welfare system unable to deal with the way
problems in one area affects those in others perpetuates an institu-
tional vacuum. What feminist debate makes all too clear with respect to
the multidimensional nature of structural violence is here woven into a
practical agenda with respect to bureaucracy on the ground That same
multidimensionality also leads to the research questions that make this
chapter an apt ending point for the Afterword. Women’s predicaments do
AFTERWORD 229
not vanish from their being inside the shelter, nor for that matter inside
a project of research, and here Della Rocca pursues another very practical
agenda through her writerly experimentations, how to speak politically.
The women’s shelter also gave shelter to her: the project it stood
for allowed her to finesse both analytical and activist concerns. It also
provided her with interlocutors, the other operators,5 who helped at each
step. Thus she scrutinized her previous work in the company of some in
order to query how she had reproduced herself (‘not her but I’); collab-
orated with them and others in the compilation of her texts (here ‘voice’
has a positive inflection), and made them all a reference point for her
subsequent advocacy writings.
Contouring this account are the intersections of Della Rocca’s own
multiple position. If her policy orientation required her to articulate a
specific lexicon, then it was with not only feminist and anthropological
axioms in mind but also her ethnographic placement. The terms of anal-
ysis and description had to resonate with the operators’ language, while
opening that up to innovative moves in the apprehension of migrants’
sufferings, for example through promoting the concept of agency. Simi-
larly, consider how she handles the concept of vulnerability, a term often
used to conceal inequalities and injustices (‘the vulnerable’, en masse,
becomes a label similar to that of victim). However, Della Rocca effec-
tively deploys the concept to describe the strategy by which she exposed
herself to those co-operators rendered vulnerable by her enquiries: she
made herself in turn ‘vulnerable to their critical analysis’. Yet what might
be somewhat momentous for an author afforded insufficient credibility
for her to be awarded automatic access to the shelter on night-service.
The operators had other people to think about. And, when it came,
the newly approved ethnographer had in turn to undo much previous
learning. This included the kinds of relations she had with the migrants,
who were looking for (her old practices of) bureaucratic advocacy; she
notes she was also told that perceiving her personal ties to the operators
made some of the migrants guard their responses. In sum, in aiming for a
public focused ethnography beyond academic debate, she serves the latter
too. Della Rocca at once harnesses authorial self-consciousness and makes
room for the people who help keep it at bay.
230 M. STRATHERN
We, the Readers

The focus on ethnography reminds us that every time Malinowski is
recalled as a founder of fieldwork he is being recalled through his—‘his’,
‘her’, ‘their’—writing. There is no doubt as to the spell it has cast. That
these days readers might wish to celebrate it, or criticize it, as a work of
multiple hands does of course reflect present times. We think we want
to get out from under the spell, that we see things with clearer eyes. Yet
what is so invigorating about the discussion that the editors have put on
the table, as it extends across these contributions, is that it also invites us
to witness the power of new spells in the very weaving of them.
Notes
1. In vernacular terms authenticity or integrity thus trump criticism; like
sincerity, the supposed inaccessibility of ‘true’ feelings appears beyond
reproach.
2. Already encompassed no doubt in the observations of Harry Payne, and
others who have noted the influence of the travelogue, to which Salvucci
refers.
3. It involved both cross-gender relations as between husband-wife pairs, such
as Edith and Victor Turner, and same-gender ones as between Ruth Bene-
dict and Ella Deloria—the woman from the area Benedict was studying
who knew so much.
4. I realise that I attribute to Kasmani (one kind of) an answer to the question
I attributed to Rapport [above].
5. As well as the migrants (such as the cohort of ‘interviewed women’), who
were not involved in the writing. As for the antiviolence operators, did
their role create a common viewpoint on their part? The operators became
writers (including authoring a chapter of her Ph.D. dissertation), but not
anthropologists, ready as they were to engage with one. Perhaps, to the
extent that feminist thought was a rubric they held in common, they shared
something of a conceptual field among themselves.
Index
A Authorship, 27, 101

Abu-Lughod, Lila, 20, 22, 24, 102, Autobiography, 21
104 Autoethnography, 12, 21, 22, 28, 30,
Academia, 10, 15, 23, 25 34, 37
Academy/academic, 8–12, 14–18, 20, Autotheory, 34, 164
22–28, 31, 32, 36
Adventure, 52
Affect/affective, 34–36, 163 B
Affective turn, 34, 35 Behar, Ruth, 12, 13, 18, 28, 30, 31,
103, 106, 118
Agency, 72, 77–79, 83
Belonging, 47, 59, 227
Alterethnograpy, 30
Benedict, Marion, 137, 141
Alverson, Marianne, 137
Benedict, Ruth, 138, 150
Ambiguity, 138, 141
Berlin, 163, 226, 227
Anthropology, 224
Birkalan-Gedik, Hande, 221, 222
Applegarth, Risa, 12–14, 16–18, 21,
Boas, Franz, 138
36, 37
Boundary work, 18
Argonauts , 224 Bureaucracy, 228, 229
Atatürk, Mustafa Kemal, 109, 111
Audience, 22
Australian aboriginal groups, 198 C
Australian indigenous life, 191, 211 Canonical, 10, 12, 14, 20, 23, 36
Author, 114 Central discourse, 14
Authority, 8, 10, 20, 21, 104 City, 165
© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive 231
license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-71726-1
232 INDEX
Co-authored, 108 Ethnographic genre, 136

Collaboration, 26–30, 35, 36, 108, Ethnographic novel, 106
114, 118, 120, 133, 193, 197, Ethnographic writing, 133
208, 229 Ethnography, 166, 222, 223, 225
Collaborators, 225 Ethnonationalism, 109
Collins, Hill, 11 Experience(s), 100–103
Colonialism, 195 Experimentation, 11, 12, 16, 18, 26,
Colonial life, 199 27, 33, 153
Colonial relations, 199, 203
Colonial society, 201
Colonized indigenous Australia, 193
Consciousness, 45, 46, 48, 49, 52, F
53, 56, 57, 220 Failure, 138, 149
Conversation, 49, 56 Feeling, 170
Cosmopolitan politesse, 49 Feminism, 9, 19, 21, 26, 30, 31, 221
Cotera, María Eugenia, 147
Feminist, 10–12, 15, 17, 24–36
Cross-gender relations, 220, 230
activism, 100, 108, 115, 117–119,
Cruisy(ing), 163
123
activist, 228
D anthropology, 108, 117, 222
Death, 103, 104 challenge, 223
De-colonialism, 14 debate, 228
Delbo, Charlotte, 57 embodiment, 22
Della Rocca, Marina, 228, 229 epistemology, 100, 107
Deloria, Ella, 137, 141, 147, 150 ethnography, 18, 99–103, 105,
Descriptive, 9, 19, 20, 211 108, 113, 115, 117–121, 123,
Desire, 53, 167 124, 222
Dialogue, 152 fieldwork, 101
Differences, 100–104, 108–110, 115 perspective, 71, 72, 76
Domínguez, Virginia, 147 scholarship, 222
textuality, 100, 101, 103, 113, 116,
122–124
E
Feminization, 12
Ecevit, Yıldız, 116, 117
Écriture féminine, 114 Fernandez, James, 47, 48, 52, 220
Eliot, George, 57 Fiction, 46, 56, 168
Embodiment, 20, 21, 34, 53 Fieldwork, 8, 9, 11, 16, 21, 23, 35,
Emotion/emotional, 53, 103, 104, 180, 222, 230
107 Fieldworker, 223
Empowerment, 76–78, 82, 87, 90 Freedom, 51
Epistemology, 14, 18, 22, 101, 116 Friction, 144
Ethnographic fiction, 164 Friendship, 226
INDEX 233
G Interlocutors, 226, 229

Gardner, Susan, 150 Intersectionality, 11, 13, 31, 74, 78
Gay, 179 Intersectional perspective, 74, 77
Gay y Blasco, Paloma, 225, 226 Intimacy, 163
Gecekondu, 102, 103, 105 Introspection, 53
Gender, 99, 102, 104, 110, 111, 114, Irigaray, Luce, 46, 66, 67
116–120, 124 Ironic, 52, 65
asymmetrical, 190, 196 Islam, 165
exclusion, 193
incorporated, 211
studies, 117, 118 K
textuality, 104 Kasmani, Omar, 226–228
Gender-based violence, 73, 74, 91 Kurdish, 103, 106, 107, 110, 111,
Genre, 99, 100, 118, 122 115
Geography, 169
German, 183
Gieryn, Thomas, 18 L
González, Jovita, 137, 147 Ł˛acka, Józefa, 2
Greene, Graham, 68 Language(s), 8, 13–15, 25
Larkin, Philip, 52
Lather, Patti, 152
H Lawless, Elaine, 29
Haraway, Donna, 22, 25, 152 Levinas, Emmanuel, 46, 67
Haunting, 180 Life projects, 49, 52
Hegemony, 30, 33 Life story, 134
Hernández, Liria, 225, 226 Literary, 11
Homeliness, 49 Literary genres, 223
Howard, Elizabeth Jane, 46, 66 Literature, 16, 219, 220
Humanism, 147 Love, 54, 55
Hurston, Zora Neale, 17, 20, 21, Lutz, Catherine, 19
137, 147
M
I Malinowska, Helena, 1, 3, 5, 6
Identity, 48 Malinowska, Jozefa, 1, 3–6
Inchoate, 47, 48, 52, 68 Malinowski, Bronislaw, 7–10, 16, 19,
Indigenization, 17 22, 27, 35, 133, 223–225, 230
Indigenous Australia, 197 Masculinity, 32, 33
Indigenous authors, 18 Masson, Elsie, 3, 7–10, 19, 22, 36,
Indigenous knowledge, 18 223–225
Indigenous scholars, 17 Mead, Margaret, 16, 19, 23, 37
Individual, 46–57, 59, 64, 67, 68 Memoir, 136, 177
Interiority, 48, 49, 220 Migrant belonging, 165
234 INDEX
Migrants, 227–229 Positionality, 11, 22, 29, 31, 32, 36

Migration, 170 Positioning, 71, 79, 83, 85, 86, 89
Mosque, 184 Positivist, 12
Motherhood, 107, 108 Postcolonialism, 14
Postmigrant, 165
Postmodernism, 18
N Power, 71, 74, 83–85, 89, 91
Narrative aspect, 205 Private archive, 164
Narrative description, 206 Professionalism, 224, 225
Narrative rhetoric and style, 195 Public, 23–27, 164
Narrative strategy, 211
Narrative style, 193
Narrative writing approach, 192 Q
Narrative writing style, 196 Queerness, 32, 163
National, 100, 109, 110, 123
Nationalism, 100, 109, 112
Nationalist, 101, 109 R
Nationalistic, 112, 113 Rappaport, Joanne, 149
Nation-building, 109 Rapport, Nigel, 142, 219, 220
Nation-state, 110 Reciprocity, 24, 29, 138, 142, 226
Neukölln, 184 Reed-Danahay, Deborah, 21
Nietzsche, Friedrich, 53 Reflexive turn, 12, 20
Non-academic, 23 Reflexivity, 11, 21, 28, 31, 112, 113
Non-canonical, 23 Religion, 170
Novel, 114 Religious, 169
Novelistic writing, 123
S
O Saints, 169
Objectivist, 12 Salvucci, Daniela, 223, 225
Otherness, 46, 55, 66–68 Same-gender relations, 220
Sameness, 100, 101, 110, 112, 123
Scene, 163
P Self, 47, 49, 51–53, 55
Parsons, Elsie Clewes, 137, 143 self-consciousness, 222, 227, 229
Passion, 54 self-reflection, 12
People of colour, 10, 11, 16 self-reflectivity, 114
Peripheral discourse, 14 self-reflexivity, 101, 103, 104, 108,
Phenomenological, 47, 48, 56 113, 122, 124
Poetry, 114 Senses, 21
Political engagement, 193, 202, 203 Sex, 170
Popularization, 22, 23, 192, 196, 211 Silence, 46–52, 56, 57, 61, 62, 64–66,
Porous scene, 173 68, 220, 221
INDEX 235
adventures of, 55 Turner, Victor, 138

anthropology of, 49
appreciation of, 46
ethics of, 66 U
explorations of, 49 Uncertainty, 138–140, 142, 225
feminity of, 45 United States, 222
focus on, 48 Urban, 166
habitus of, 63, 66
homeliness of, 50, 66
V
humanity of, 68
Victorian novel, 194
mapping of, 66
Victorian novelists, 194, 206
meditative, 66
Visweswaran, Kamala, 13, 18, 19, 30,
pragmatism of, 55
32, 33, 37, 152
privilege of, 58
Voice, 8, 11, 17, 20, 25, 27–30, 57,
significance of, 66
101, 113, 118, 119, 121, 122
Solitude, 52
Vulnerability, 74–77, 79, 80, 87, 229
South Tyrol, 191, 193, 208, 209
Spencer, Stanley, 54
Steiner, George, 55 W
Stirling, Nina, 3 Welfare system, 228
Strathern, Marilyn, 8, 31, 36, 101, Wolf, Margery, 11–13
108 Women, 7, 9–13, 15, 16, 18, 19,
Structural violence, 75, 76, 80, 82 21–24, 27, 28, 30–33, 35
Subjectivity, 20, 46–48, 56, 67 migrant-origin, 72, 78, 79, 85, 90,
Sufi ritual, 165 91
shelter, 72–75, 77, 78, 83, 85–87,
89, 90
T Women Writing Culture, 12, 13, 15,
Tauber, Elisabeth, 219 18, 19, 30, 31
Textual authority, 101 Woolf, Virginia, 45–47, 50–52, 56,
Theory, 20 66, 220, 221
Thick description, 173 Worldviews, 49, 52, 57
Thin attachments, 173 Writing Culture, 11–13, 15, 18, 20,
Third-person, 175, 227 26, 31, 34, 36, 102, 103, 112,
Time, 170 222
Trobriands, 224
Tsing, Anna Lowenhaupt, 144
Turkey, 221, 222 Z
Turner, Edith, 137, 143, 151 Zinn, Dorothy, 219

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PALGRAVE STUDIES IN

Gender and Genre in

More information about this series at

Gender and Genre

Palgrave Studies in Literary Anthropology

Cover illustration: ideabug, Getty Images

Palgrave Studies in Literary Anthropology publishes explorations of new

as anthropologists, but moved on to a literary career. Their anthropologi-

Deborah Reed-Danahay and Helena Wulff

this home to their intangible memories. At Palgrave, we first of all thank

Matera and Viums

“This remarkable volume draws us into a gripping conversation regarding

Incorporated Genre and Gender: Elsie Masson, Her

Hande Birkalan-Gedik (Ph.D., Indiana University) is Professor of folk-

Omar Kasmani is a post-doctoral Research Associate in social and

edited La Ricerca Folklorica 2019 Archive and Ethnography: The Case of

Lucy Ulrich and Rebecca M. Stuart

Talk delivered by at the 4th Biennial Symposium Anthropological Talks in

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature 1

Society of Oxford on the key women in Malinowski’s life, entitled ‘Bro-

and sold, our Polish great-grandmother’s silver. According to my Aunt

Elisabeth Tauber and Dorothy L. Zinn

On Sunday 24 April 1927 Elsie Masson wrote to Bronislaw Malinowski

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature 7

He responded enthusiastically to Elsie, finding her observations ‘excellent’

Malinowski’s ethnographic legacy (Tauber and Zinn 2018). The subse-

of ethnography’s scientific quality as an ambivalent exorcism of the femi-

Genre and Context

114). Moreover, as we have learned from Bakhtin, genres mediate

…the matter is not simply about the use of a particular language as a

Language(s), concepts, categories and genres risk being homogenized

inscription and can be reconsulted’ (Geertz 1973, 19). The inscription of

Blurred Genres and Boundary Work

journal HAU that spawned, as a major consequence, an incredibly vocal

This [Coming of Age in Samoa] is a discursive, or perhaps I should say

Theory has acquired a gender insofar as it is more frequently associated

the scope of this essay, it would be interesting to verify to what extent

did not erase their embodied subjectivities as ethnographers. We cite

Writing for Whom?

with a literary sensibility. One thinks here of Margaret Mead, of course,

academic institutions—and it is especially explicit with contemporary eval-

Writing with Whom?

writing has therefore included a careful attention to forms of represen-

to varying degrees. Moving a step further along the continuum, ethnog-

doing ethnography among the hearing impaired, Bruegemann concludes:

By this I mean not coauthoring with community members but conducting

Bearing in mind Bruegemann’s admonition, this kind of writing with

The chapter by Paloma Gay y Blasco discusses the challenges and

the process of developing her collaborative book with Liria Hernandez,

Gender in Genre: From Writing

presence, offering more accurate accounts of women in specific cultures

Gordon regrets, however, that the intersectional dimension of class,

to a textual engagement that brings together many strands of position-

…a broader conception of the relationship of feminist theory to social

(ibid.) irritably notes—to examine masculinity in a paradoxical way with

of feminist engagement. Birkalan-Gedik addresses the history of femi-

Studies of Literacy, edited by Peter Mortensen and Gesa E. Kirsch, 17–39.

New York: Berghahn Books, 2016. Journal of the Royal Anthropological

Moore, Henrietta. 1988. Feminism and Anthropology. Minneapolis: University of

Skoggard, Ian, and Alisse Waterston. 2015. “Introduction: Toward an Anthro-

Trevisan, Paola. 2008. Etnografia di un libro. Scritture, politiche e parentela in

Preamble: The ‘Femininity’ of Silence

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature 45