: This essay offers a short overview of feminist history of science and introduces a new project into that history, namely feminist history of colonial science. My case study focuses on eighteenth-century voyages of scientific discovery and reveals how gender relations in Europe and the colonies honed selective collecting practices. Cultural, economic, and political trends discouraged the transfer from the New World to the Old of abortifacients (widely used by Amerindian and African women in the West Indies).1.

Like some other human sciences, sociology has had a recurrent concern to clarify the ambivalent relationship between its professional accounts of social reality on the one hand and lay understandings of social reality on the other. Sociological ethnographers have claimed to accomplish this clarification by including in their accounts both direct representation and responsive interpretation of the vernacular voice of those human subjects whose actions and understandings comprise the focus of their inquiries. I briefly examine some of the practical and (...) textual strategies by which studies have accomplished this. I go on to note that the authenticity of ethnographic work has itself become a matter of dispute on the grounds of the ineradicable asymmetry between the professional voice of the researcher and the vernacular voice of research subjects. Drawing on work in literary theory, anthropology and feminist scholarship, a favoured solution to this problem has argued for the necessity of acknowledging the essentially dialogical character of the relationship between researchers and subjects and also of finding ways to make ethnographic texts reflect this character. This article draws attention to an alternative set of professional practices that prefer ‘co-construction’ to ‘dialogue’ as a term of art. Its use encourages and facilitates the close and detailed examination of the multiple ways in which subjects already speak of and for themselves and others within the local sites of their real-world activities. Studies of these matters accord the vernacular voice of human subjects renewed significance for sociological investigation as part of a radical ‘respecification’ of prior understandings of the proper relationship between vernacular and professional accounts of social reality. The article assesses the upshot of these claims for the current practice and future prospects of sociology as one of the human sciences. (shrink)

In this article, the author argues that feminist anthropology as a field of study should pose questions about how differential power is constituted as gender differences. Addressing these questions calls for an approach to the study of gender and power that articulates the relationship between structure and agency. Such an approach is one that analyzes the practice of gender over time from intersubjective, political perspectives. Last, the author argues that feminist anthropology is a justice claim, which demands an ethic of (...) engagement. Working on this project, feminist anthropologists contribute to debates over the concept of culture and the epistemological problem of representation within anthropology in a way that allows anthropology to speak more fluently to current debates within cultural studies over the politics of culture. (shrink)

Attention to diversity in women's attitudes toward farming and in women's patterns of farm work activity expands our understanding of the linkage between agrarian structure, regional history, and the behavior and values of individual farm women. We combine several disciplinary and methodological approaches to reveal patterns in work and values in a Southern case and then verify the existence of similar patterns in the Midwest. Two divergent conceptions of women's relationship to farm and marital partnership were found in a Georgia (...) study, the agrarian and the industrial, and we explore how they emerged in the context of the political and economic history of the South. We find these marital models are linked today to different patterns of farm work. We then extend the Georgia analysis to a statewide survey of Ohio farm women, where attitudinal diversity is not as marked, due to the stronger agrarian traditions of the Midwest and its distinct political economy. We find similar patterns, however, in Ohio farm women's work and affirm the validity of Carbert's categorization of Rosenfeld's survey items. Attention to diversity in the work patterns, values, and attitudes of farm women highlights that the term “traditional” is a misnomer when applied to Southern women and reinforces the value of multi-disciplinary approaches and regional comparisons. (shrink)