Wednesday, October 15, 2008

I thought that Wylie made some very insightful points in "Good Science, Bad Science...". Her critiques of the inherent bias in both androcentric and feminist-revisionist anthropological studies (pp. 45-8) were particularly interesting. At the end of p 47 and beginning of 48, she describes M. Z. Rosaldo's self-critique: Rosaldo projected her own Anglo-American assumption of gender bias (men in the public sphere, women in the private sphere) onto the non-industrialized societies she studied, thus creating an ethnocentric study. Thus the ideas of writers we have previously read, such as Chandra Talpade Mohanty and Lila Abu-Lughod, are brought up in an anthropological context. Is this, in essence, on the same level as the androcentric anthropological studies (of Levi-Strauss, etc.) in terms of oppression or marginalization of non-industrialized peoples? Can any society analyze or critique the practices of another? Or is the only honest way to view another society through objective contrasts of practices? Is this even possible? Can anthropology be practiced in an unbiased way?

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