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Lila Abu-Lughod Writing Against Culture Analysis

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Lila Abu-Lughod, is a professor of Anthropology and Women’s and Gender Studies at Columbia University, her main works including, Do Muslim Women Need Saving? (Lughod 2013), Writing Women’s World (Lughod 1993). She has also contributed an essay to Recapturing Anthropology: Working in the Present edited by Richard Fox. Her essay titled “Writing Against Culture” reflexively explores how the discipline of anthropology should reevaluate the definition of culture (Lughod 1991). Lughod is a feminist anthropologist who draws from aspects of cultural relativism to influence her studies of women in the Middle East. Her anthropological theory can be seen in her main arguments, background and data collection. One can use Alan Barnard’s text History and Theory in Anthropology (Barnard 2000) to help to …show more content…

Feminist anthropology is described by Barnard as a commentary on “power relations, symbolic associations… as well as a discourse of issues such as reflexivity, the gender of the ethnographer and therefore the place of the ethnographer in anthropological fieldwork” (Barnard, 2000, p.139). This focus on women has come to fruition because of the lack of female representation in ethnographies, they were not portrayed as having agency (Barnard, 2000). Lughod’s ethnographies seek to portray specifically Muslim women with a sense of agency and as being dynamic characters. (Lughod 2013). While she is considered to be a feminist anthropologist, she has rejected certain aspects of feminist ideals regarding western feminists wishing to save oppressed women of color in 3rd world countries (Lughod 2013) In “Writing Against Culture” she writes “for whom did feminists speak? Within the women's movement, the objections of lesbians, African-American women, and other "women of color" that their experiences as women were different from those of white, middleclass, heterosexual women problematized the identity of women as selves.” (Lughod, 1991,

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