Wolf, Margery. A Thrice Told Tale: Feminism, Postmodernism, and Ethnographic Responsibility. Stanford,
CA: Stanford UP, 1992. Print.
Summary:
Key Terms:
- fieldnotes – “the first ordering of what we know” (91).
Important Quotes:
- “Whether or not an anthropologist believes she creates, interprets, or describes culture, she must recognize that she creates ‘Others’ as the result of her work, and that she must bear some responsibility for those Others” (12).
- “Feminist anthropologists are struggling with ways of transforming the objects of research into subjects, who themselves identify and design the research projects they think are needed, who retain control over the written outcome of the research, and who jointly publish with the anthropologists” (52).
- Frances Mascia-Lees: “Our suspicion of the new ethnographer’s desire for collaboration with the ‘other’ stems not from any such refusal to enter into dialogue with that ‘other,’ but from our history and understanding of being appropriated and literally spoken for by the dominant, and from our consequent sympathetic identification with the subjects of anthropological study in this regard” (52).
- “Perhaps I/author was attempting to lead the reader to the conclusion that authorial authority is dangerous, that accepted truths about the nature of reality are flawed, and that cloaure is misleading” (55).
- “our truths will always be partial at best” (85).
- Rena Lederman: “Fieldnotes are dangerous. Observations are noted or written down in order to aid memory, but reading fieldnotes can challenge memory. It threatens to return one to uncertainty about what was what; it acts against the sense of the whole that one carries around in one’s head. Fieldnotes can contradict the single, anthropological voice we are all encouraged to adopt in our formal ethnographic writing at home by recording–however indirectly–the voices of the people we lived with when doing fieldwork” (89).
- “There is no final truth” (92).
- “Our agenda, whether we are engaged in adding to the descriptive material on women’s experience or in building theory, is to expose the unequal distribution of power that has subordinated women in most if not all cultures and discover ways of dismantling hierarchies of domination” (119).
- Stephen Tyler: “While it is laudable to include the native, his position is not thereby improved, for his words are still only instrument’s of the ethnographer’s will…[N]o amount of invoking the “other” can establish him as the agent of the works and deeds attributed to him in a record of dialogue unless he, too, is free to reinterpret it and flesh it out with caveats, apologies, footnotes, and explanatory detail” (120).
- Frances Mascia-Lees: “From women’s position as ‘other’ in a patriarchal culture and from feminists’ dialogue and confrontation with diverse groups of women, we have learned to be suspicious of all attempts by members of a dominant group to speak for the oppressed, no matter how eloquently or experimentally” (122).
- Sandra Harding: “Feminists in the scientific tradition have attempted to reform and transform the theories and practices of these traditions in order to create less partial and less distorted representations of the world than the mainstream androcentric ones. They want less false stories about nature and social life; they want scientific explanations that can provide useful guides to improving the conditions of women” (125).
- “Experience is messy…When human behavior is the data, a tolerance for ambiguity, multiplicity, contradiction, and instability is essential…[W]e must constantly remind ourselves that life is ‘unstable, complex. and disorderly’ everywhere. As ethnographers, our job is not simply to pass on the disorderly complexity of culture, but also to try to hypothesize about apparent consistencies, to lay out our best guesses, without hiding the contradictions and the instability” (129).
- “Whether we are talking about nonexploitative methodology in field research or authority in writing ethnography, we are talking about power–who has it, how it is used, for what purposes. This is what the study of gender, class, and race is really about: how subordinated sectors accommodate to and resist the power of privileged sectors, how privilege (like resistance) is camouflaged, how power is earned, learned, and occasionally spurned” (133).
- “In our desire to avoid objectifying our informants, we run the risk of patronizing them” (135).
- “Feminist work has always been under suspicion, often for the same things the postmodernists’ critiques now celebrate–like questioning, objectivity, rejecting detachment, and accepting contradictory readings. Feminists who have only recently gained some academic security might think carefully about whether intense reflexivity in their research and writing will be evaluated as being in the new postmodernist mode or as simply tentative and self-doubting” (135).
Discussion:
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