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.