Own or Other Culture

Own or Other Culture challenges those anthropologists who suggest that fieldwork in the ''West'' is easy or merely a reiteration of what is already ''known'' to either Westerners or non Westerners. Revealing some pioneering articles in social anthropology written over a period of twenty years, Judith Okely discusses selected themes which include: * questions of reflexivity and autobiography * anthropology in Europe * the cultural location of the anthropologist * feminism in anthropology. Illustrated with photographs, Own or Other Culture covers subjects ranging from the author''s own boarding school revealing a British exotica and colonial comparisons, to how Gypsies, who treat non-Gypsies as the ''other'', act to create or manipulate cultural difference. Feminist anthropology is developed in a reassessment of de Beauvoir and Kaberry while gender and bodily experience is explored in the face of popular demands by women readers for cross-cultural examples.