Women in Anthropology

Autobiographical Narratives and Social History

Maria G Cattell, Marjorie M Schweitzer

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN:
  9781598740837
• eBook ISBN:
  9781315415673
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Social Science Biographies
• Index: Social Sciences

Women in academia have struggled for centuries to establish levels of acceptance and credibility equal to men in the same fields, and anthropology has been no different. The women anthropologists in this book speak frankly about their challenges and successes as they navigated through their personal and professional lives. Riding the changing tides of social and disciplinary history, they struggled through various and sometimes conflicting arenas of life—marriage, raising children, caring for families, publishing, conducting research, going into the field, teaching, and mentoring. They did this during volatile periods in the twentieth century when the roles and expectations for women were being constantly reestablished and repositioned. For anyone interested in the cultural and demographic shifts that are fundamentally altering opportunities for women in the workplace, Women in Anthropology is a thought provoking and inspirational read. For anthropologists, it is an important and intimate portrait of the realities of professional life.

Section 1
Possessed by Anthropology

POSSESSION HAS been part of Judy Rosenthal's life since childhood. Held first by her religious faith, then by 1960s political activism in Paris, she carried that passionately involved emotional style into her discovery of anthropology—or her discovery that in a sense, she had always been an anthropologist. Anthropology became Judy's religion, though a different sort from her earlier fundamentalist Christian faith. Anthropology, she says, has been for her a "pagan religion, never a totalizing one." In addition, in the small African nation of Togo, she has carried out field research on—what else?—Gorovodu possession. It was there, in Togo, that anthropology finally caught her.

We put Judy’s story first because many of our contributors (and many other anthropologists we know) also feel some sense of being possessed—or called or grabbed—by anthropology. Some have a sense of having been born an anthropologist or having always been an anthropologist. Some speak of being in love with anthropology. Others recognize in anthropology, when they finally discover it, a focus for lifelong interests and passions. As in the children’s song, “you put your whole self in, you put your whole self out,” we put our whole self into anthropology; we made anthropology our passion and our way of life. And in return, we got our whole self back, transformed from everything we had been to someone who was also an anthropologist.

Possessed by Anthropology

Judy Rosenthal

The Challenge

The three Vodu women and I drank our beer with relish, enjoying a temporary victory over heat and dust. Conversation darted back and forth, and my friend Sylvio translated now and then. There seemed to be an agenda that didn’t belong to any one of us. Our banal respite from weather and work was happening on the porch of a little bar in Togo, West Africa, on the beach road that stretched from the border with Ghana to the border with Benin. It was 1985. I was in the country for a year to teach English at the American Cultural Center in the capital, and was living with Sylvio in a little house near the bar, about twenty minutes from Lomé.

Judy Rosenthal: PhD 1993, Cornell University. Dissertation: “The Dancing Gods: Personhood, Possession and the Law in Ewe Gorovodu.” Judy, who has done extensive research in West Africa, is associate professor of anthropology and women’s studies at the University of Michigan–Flint. Her publications include a book, Possession, Ecstasy, and Law in Ewe Voodoo.

A month earlier I had seen one of the three women in trance during a Gorovodu ceremony.¹ It was held in a nearby village with no plumbing or electricity, but with breathtaking dancing and all-night drumming that I still heard in my head weeks afterwards. Antou was beautiful in and out of trance. That first time I saw her, she moved with abandon and sang at the top of her astonishing voice, shouting vibrato instructions to the drummers. In a state of sheer grace, she stamped first one foot and then the other, over and over, into the sand of the ceremonial ground. While in trance, she embodied Nana Wango, a fierce grandmother spirit “from the north,” who was also a crocodile and a piroguier, the ferryman who took people to the other side of dangerous rivers and other crossings. One of the other Vodu women in our little beer party had asked me to let her clean our house, as she badly needed financial support. Akoko’s husband was favoring his other wives and children, and one of her children was “a child of the Vodu,” in need of rituals that required her to spend money she didn’t have.

Afi, the third woman, lived five minutes away from the beer bar, on the other side of the road, on the way to Dogbeda, where I had first seen Antou possessed by her spirit. I often passed by her compound while walking to the village, and she would wave for me to come visit. Soon I would meet Comfort and Kponsi, two other spirit hosts in Dogbeda that took center stage in my life several years later. I don’t know whether I took center stage in their lives—perhaps the stage I am imagining is after all a shared one, giving us all access to each other’s performance.

At a certain moment that day when we sat drinking together, I turned to Sylvio to make sure I had understood what Antou was telling me. “Did she just ask me to write a book about Gorovodu?” He nodded. “The women are saying that they’re very interesting people and white folks know nothing about them. They want you to write about them.” “But I’m not an anthropologist,” I protested. “I wouldn’t do a good job.” “Then go learn whatever you must learn to write about Gorovodu,” they commanded, “and afterwards come back here.” I was stunned.

Growing Up as Other

My earliest memory is of cold sand on my bare bottom. It was the early 1940s. I was two years old and we were living on a tiny farm in Uvalde, Texas. My eighteen-year-old mother had been arrested for selling The Watchtower on the street corner and accused of un-American activities by the American Legion.² Daddy had to walk three miles into town with me on his shoulders to get her out of jail. It was there in Uvalde that my father plowed under, by accident, our last forty dollars. That was the straw that broke the camel’s back. Our family moved back to Corpus Christi. “I am simply not a farmer,” Daddy insisted. So he became a bread-truck driver. My mother was still a teenager who liked dancing jitterbug. Daddy danced the Charleston.

When I was five and six, my family lived on Harvard Street in Corpus Christi, where my brother Danny was born. My father sold insurance door-to-door, became a welder and then a construction worker. We moved almost every year, from town to town, state to state—wherever there was work. I went to twelve different schools in as many years, and in every school, because I was a Jehovah’s Witness, I could not salute the flag in class every morning, for that would have been an act idolatrous of the state. Everywhere we went, my mother and I and both my grandmothers worked door-to-door, insisting to everyone who would listen that a paradise earth would someday be our home, that the wicked would no longer be here to disturb us, and that they—the householders, we called them—should join us.

In Corpus Christi, at the age of six, I wrote my first poetry. It was about dogs, rabbits, and snakes, all of which would be in God’s new world with us, the righteous people, after the battle of Armageddon. I had asthma almost constantly, so I often stayed inside. I spent entire afternoons fantasizing about God’s earthly paradise that would be our home. I would roam around the entire earth on the head of a lion, his mane tickling my bare skin. And that lion would lie down with lambs without hurting them, and we would eat dust, like the serpent, so that no animals would be killed, not even for food. (I had a close reading of the prophet Isaiah.)

One night when my mother and I came home from the Watchtower meeting, we found an enormous, entirely black wildcat lying dead on the kitchen floor. My father liked to poach deer on the nearby King Ranch, but that night he had not found any deer, so he set his sights on the magnificent puma and brought it home as a trophy. I was not happy about the demise of the black cat, but its head made a statement on our walls from Texas to South Carolina and Colorado and back to Texas, from project houses to little caravans, from edges of towns to giant trailer parks for construction workers in the brush of pine forests. Sometimes when we were traveling, my father took his rifle from the trunk of the car and shot wild turkey, quail, anything we could eat, right from the side of the road. We ate almost everything except the Old Testament serpent’s diet of dust (my fantasy of eating dust notwithstanding).

My father could smell snakes nearby, even from inside our dwellings. He would say, “Come on, Judy, let’s go find out what kind of snake is out there.” If it was a rattler, he would kill it. If it were a constrictor, he would toss it to me and I would play with it for a while before letting it go. He wanted me to feel at home with snakes and other crawling creatures. On Harvard Street and later in Brownsville there were horned toads and tarantulas, black widows and praying mantises. I learned to handle granddaddy longlegs without crushing any of their legs, learned to grab lizards darting up the side of the house quickly enough to prevent their “popping off” the wall (and thus landing on my face, a fate worse than death), yet gently enough to avoid injuring any lizard guts, or so I hoped. Catching and controlling minimally without killing or maiming was my constant project in all of our home sites throughout the years. This close knowledge of crawling things enabled me years later to live in intimate quarters with West African creatures like geckos and insects, some very big (but no bigger than cockroaches and scorpions in southern Texas), with little fear or discomfort. Indeed, I was eager to hold the sacred pythons of the Vodu.

In Corpus Christi I played at being Jesus, “the little girl Jesus,” with my hands nailed to the side of the house and my mouth open in pain. My friend Darlene said that if we died we would go to heaven, so we went and lay in Harvard Street, hoping to be killed by a car and thereby gain immediate access to paradise. At night my mother read Bible stories to me about sex and violence and the wiping out of the entire tribe of Benjamin because of the rape and murder of the Levite’s concubine. Deborah cut off the head of the Syrian captain after having seduced him and slept with him. King David was a handsome adulterer; Christ loved prostitutes; and Absalom died tragically (but justly), lifted right off his horse by the branch of a tree, thanks to his very long and beautiful hair. I also had long and beautiful hair.

When I was seven, we moved to Brownsville to a big two-story house with my mother’s sister and her husband and two other single construction workers. We almost always lived in an extended family. The vast badlands beyond the houses were inhabited by many sorts of cactus. We children loved to roam that wild place, a place I believed was another world across all known borders. In third grade I began to learn Spanish. The Spanish language became part of my imagination and my reasoning, and I fell in love with Chuy, a Mexican boy my age.

Several years later I could see my father working on a construction site as I sat in my fifth-grade classroom. I saw him walk across beams three or four stories up in the air, with no support. I held my breath, terrified he would fall, and eventually I told him I was afraid for him. He said he was part Indian, and Indians could do that, it was a well-known fact, that’s why so many Indians worked in construction. My grandmother, with long braids and salient cheekbones, was truly Native American, as everyone knew. But she would never tell me what kind of Indian she was, nor would anyone else. Even now I am not sure. I used to say she was Apache (I loved the story of Geronimo), but I suspect she was Cherokee.

In South Carolina, when I was eleven, I was infatuated with a boy I would see briefly every morning as we waited for the school bus. His parents knew we were Jehovah’s Witnesses who did not believing in “fighting wars that only God should fight.” One day he shouted to me, “Go home and kiss Stalin, you filthy Communist!” (That was the McCarthy era, and the FBI had put Jehovah’s Witnesses on a long list with other groups suspected of seditious Redness.) That boy’s parents held my family in contempt—much as my “fellow Communists” were held in contempt in court for being un-American, much as Jesus was held in contempt, I reasoned. We were poor. They lived in an expensive mobile home that only management could afford. They had a purebred English setter that impregnated my own lovely mongrel, and they blamed my dog for the scandalous miscegenation. Misplaced semen was apparently never the male’s fault. I learned something then about class, race, and gender that I have never forgotten, and a tiny bit about an international Left that made me feel close to it before I had any actual knowledge of it.

Political Activism and Intellectual Lust

I didn’t leave the Jehovah’s Witness fold until I was twenty-five years old and about to divorce my Jehovah’s Witness husband, a construction worker like my father, whom I married when I was barely twenty and he was only nineteen. The emotional security of close community was hard to give up. I was finally able to cut the cord thanks to the particular nature of the sixties. I began my period of sex-and-drugs-and-rock-and-roll at a later age than most hippies, but more importantly I began several years of apprenticeship in political activism. I studied alongside Angela Davis with Herbert Marcuse at the University of California, San Diego. I joined in civil rights, antiwar, antiracism, and feminist demonstrations and went to jail once because of having helped lead a campus sit-in against the U.S. invasion of Cambodia. I worked some with Students for a Democratic Society (a leftist campus organization), helped begin a women’s liberation group, supported the Black Panthers, and attended their big 1969 meeting in Oakland. I went to Cuba with the Venceremos Brigade.³ By 1971 I was being watched by the FBI. They tapped the phone lines of even very small game at that time. But I was no longer sure what could be done politically to bring about lasting structural change. I was fruitfully lost.

A dear friend of mine, a woman who had been a member of the Black Panthers, put me on the plane to France, where I taught English for fourteen years. I also took marginal part in numerous political movements there and joined more street demonstrations than I can now remember. For twelve years I raised Clara, my French daughter, the child of a man I lived with. Then I was seduced to Africa. Had I not spent all those years involved in political movements, thinking through problems of inequality, racism, colonialism, and state violence in the world, I don’t think I would have been ready to know West Africa up close—its colonial past, its difficult present, and its uncertain future.

As my parents had never graduated from high school, and no one in my mother’s or father’s families had a university education, and given the fact that I spent numerous years not wanting to be “part of the system,” I was very long in imagining a PhD for myself. I loved university life in San Diego and Paris, where I also had to work to earn a living and was already older compared to most of the students I knew in those places. But my degrees—a French license and maîtrise⁴—were not career driven. I just wanted to be in school for the rest of my life. I never thought of myself as a “real” intellectual, certainly not on the path to becoming a professional academic. I was ever a novice in book learning for the pure enjoyment, and sometimes terrible sadness, of getting to know the world as deeply and broadly as possible. I studied Foucault, Derrida, and Lacan with women from the group called Politique et Psychoanalyse. We also worked with Julia Kristeva and the writings of Michele Montrelay, Luce Irigaray, and Hélène Cixous.

I took courses in political economy for a year and a half, and then studied Chinese, music, comparative literature, sociology, and anthropology at Paris VIII, the Vincennes campus founded in 1968 through the political events that united so many students and workers. Thousands of students in Paris were from unprivileged origins, and many were immigrants, fleeing prison or worse in Latin America, North and West Africa, Iran, and other parts of the globe. I thought we were a dazzling crew in Paris, motley in our origins and experience; and we all were somehow amazed to be alive and on the move, still engaging in huge street demonstrations for various African and Latin American revolutionary struggles, against neocolonialism, against Franco, against racism, for women’s and workers’ and immigrants’ rights, and so on. From so many different countries, we were used to tapping into each other’s “otherness,” and the cultural differences between us were fundamental to our enjoyment of life.

Later I went to Hautes Etudes for a course on the political writings of Max Weber and another on the sociology of religion. It was all for love, not for a degree. But all those Marxist, feminist, poststructuralist, and deconstructionist theorists played a strong role in my ethnographic thinking and in my teaching years later.

The Lure of the Other

I had been attracted to African and Latino cultures since my youth in south Texas, when my aunts taught me to dance mambo and cha-cha to the music coming from Mexican radio stations. I began to speak Spanish around the age of eight. I always went to the local movie houses to see the “native films,” those half-ethnographic, half-sensationalist black-and-white reportages of African ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Foreword
• Preface
• Voices of Women Anthropologists: Autobiography, Social History, and Anthropology
• Gender Roles in Sociocultural and Historical Context
• Section 1. Possessed by Anthropology
• Section 2. Changing Roles, Challenging Stereotypes: Women's Roles in Twentieth-Century America
• Section 3. The Web of Lives: Family Involvements, Career Interactions
• Section 4. Being the Other: Encounters with Difference
• Section 5. Being an Anthropologist, Living Anthropological Lives
• Section 6. Legacies for Future Generations
• Index