The Outsider Within: Margery Wolf and Feminist Anthropology

MARGERY WOLF, PROFESSOR EMERITUS of the Department of Anthropology, University of Iowa (UI), and currently secretary of the American Anthropological Association, has played a formative role in anthropology. This interview takes the occasion of Professor Wolf's recent retirement to offer a retrospective on the importance of her work for cultural anthropology. Wolf has always been a risk taker. This risk taking has made her a groundbreaker in U.S. cultural anthropology. At the time of her early works in the late sixties and early seventies, most anthropologists had turned to formalistic analyses of culture, abstracting rules and laws from social processes and symbols from everyday cultural practice. Moreover, they described a "public" culture that focussed on men's activities. Wolf, against this current, wrote her first book, The House of Lim: A Study of a Chinese Farm Family (1968) using novelistic elements to describe the "private" life of a family she lived with in Taiwan. Wolf highlighted the informal processes at work in constituting Chinese kinship and family relations, and she put women's lives at the center of her story. The House of Lim not only foreshadowed the later turn towards postmodern reflexivity and experimental writing in anthropology, but it also began a revolution in anthropological theories of family and kinship by challenging the dichotomy between public and private in the production of culture and by placing women's perspectives at the center of understanding how kinship relations are formed and reproduced. Wolf more explicitly laid the groundwork for this revolution in her next work, Women and the Family in Rural Taiwan (1972). This work placed her at the forefront of the emerging field of feminist anthropology. Women and the Family in Rural Taiwan balanced two foci: a description of how cultural conceptions of gender are systematically linked to the organization of social inequality and an emphasis on the importance of placing women at the center of the political processes of village life. Wolf articulated her famous concept of the uterine family: Against the formal description of Chinese lineages and their rules of patrilineal descent, Wolf described the unofficial family politics whereby women gain formidable influence over family and thereby other village decision making by creating strong, lifelong ties with their sons. Wolf also traced other forms of women's power in the face of constraints of patriarchal kinship, including women's informal talk (what used to be dismissed as gossip) that can make or break public reputations. This work, her subsequent article on "Women and Suicide in China" (1975), and her monograph on women in the People's Republic of China (PRC), Revolution Postponed: Women in Contemporary China (1985), together created a new opening in anthropology for feminist debates about the relationship between gender and power. In all of these works, Wolf encouraged a view of power that crosses conventionally established boundaries between politics and everyday life, between the state and the family. Throughout her career Wolf maintained a unique approach to writing ethnography. She began as a writer and brought that sensibility into her anthropological work. In her last published monograph, A Thrice Told Tale: Feminism, Postmodernism, and Ethnographic Responsibility (1992), Wolf addressed these concerns explicitly. Remaining true to her willingness to cross conventions, Wolf argued with the postmodern turn in anthropology (in part because of its initial overlooking of women's texts). But far from rejecting it, she used an experimental approach herself to tell the same story of a woman shaman in three different genres, thereby highlighting the pleasures and dangers of blurring genres in ethnography. Wolf has, in some respects, both been viewed by those in the discipline and by herself as an "outsider within," for her nontraditional entry into the professional discipline of anthropology (having never obtained a graduate degree). Yet it is precisely this status that has enabled her to push the discipline time and again to extend itself beyond its own disciplinary conventions. She is currently at work on both a historical ethnography and a novel about a place in California (northern Marin and Sonoma County) and the four cultures that have successively inhabited it.