Abstract

Almost forty years ago the anthropologist Marilyn Strathern published an article in Signs titled “An Awkward Relationship: The Case of Feminism and Anthropology.” She argued that feminist perspectives could not bring about a paradigm shift in anthropology. In the intervening years, even if the contributions of feminist anthropology, according to Lilith Mahmud, have become “mainstream tenets of ethnographic methods and writing” the awkward relationship persists. I will reflect on the ambivalence I have experienced in crossing these fields, beginning with the formative fieldwork I did in Egypt that resulted in Veiled Sentiments and ending with the tensions that drove my recent books, Do Muslim Women Need Saving? and The Cunning of Gender Violence. If, as Elizabeth Povinelli has argued, fieldwork leads to an existential “coming to terms” with what it means to be part of incommensurate worlds, I show precisely how anthropology’s imperatives and core ethics have for me made the awkwardness stubborn.