Some Thoughts on Kathleen Gough's Contribution to Feminist Teaching in Anthropology

Abstract

Our contribution to this volume was prompted because the reflections we heard about the theoretical and political significance of Kathleen Gough's work seemed not to give sufficient attention to those aspects of her work that have had the most impact on us: her contribution to a politically engaged yet intellectually rigorous feminist anthropology. One of the things which we believe it is important to communicate at the outset in our teaching is that anthropology is always and everywhere a political undertaking and that consequently the theoretical models we rely on are prone to ideological blindspots -- a point of view that came all too slowly to the discipline.(f.1) For us as student anthropologists in the 1970s and 1980s, and for the students we now teach, Kathleen Gough's writing and her example help to impress upon us the political consequences of what we do (and do not do) in our research. As teachers of anthropology charged with interpreting the discipline for our students in the mid - 1980s through to the present, we continue to face the daunting, yet crucial, task of capturing the historical nature of socio - cultural anthropology. The present context for the teaching of anthropology provides us with opportunities to take theory and ethnography in new and appealing directions, as well as requiring us to negotiate a difficult route through some potentially paralyzing hazards. On the one hand we need to be sensitive to the deeply contentious issues arising from so - called post - colonial contexts, such as the question of voice, of subtle and not - so - subtle forms of domination and of our own role, as white academics, in the reproduction of inequalities. On the other, we must come to terms with the theoretical rifts which have developed between Marxists, feminists and those espousing the newer perspectives associated with post - modernism. While these recent developments open up promising avenues for refining the tools of the discipline, they can have the tendency to focus our attention more on the fragmented and complex present and away from a constructive critique of the ways the discipline has evolved through several decades. In this period of rapid and apparently paradigm - shifting change in the discipline, an historical approach to the production of knowledge is fairly easily overshadowed, yet it is essential to our analysis of the present that we recognize the various interpretative lenses through which theories of the past have been brought into focus. Since neither of us developed subject specialization in South East Asia, the political implications of our research and that of others was most clearly communicated to us through Kathleen Gough's writings about marriage and family, gender and feminist scholarship. For her, the debates surrounding kinship and marriage were not simply intellectual, but were filled with political meaning and consequence as well. In her article on the Origin of the Family (1971b) she makes clear that we should not be swayed by our commitment to feminist goals to the point where we distort our interpretations of gender divisions of labour in favour of ideas/ideals of matriarchal societies. As subsequent feminist scholarship revealed, her measured approach and caution were appropriate. …