Gender and Genre in Ethnographic Writing

This book provides new insights into an intense and long-standing debate on women, gender, and masculinity with an explicit focus on ethnographic writing. The six contributors to this book investigate and discuss the multiple connections between ethnographic writing and gender in both the history of anthropology and contemporary anthropology, underlining problems, potentialities, stereotypes, experiments, continuities, changes, and challenges. Building on a prologue by two Malinowski grandchildren and an exploration of the role that Bronislaw Malinowski’s first wife, Elsie Masson, played in his literary presentation, the anthropologists collected here problematize writing gender and gendered writing in ethnography, revealing how these twin themes touch the history of the discipline itself and the classics of anthropology. Has the legacy of Writing Culture and Women Writing Culture obviated the need to consider gender in writing? Or could it be that the very mechanics of ethnographic writing are still imbued with hidden gendered divisions of labor?  Following the editors’ extensive overview of the question, the contributing authors tackle gender and ethnographic writing from various vantages: with a view to the past, but also to the influence of previous feminist critiques in the present, and with accounts of the issues they themselves have faced and the solutions they have devised.