Own or Other Culture

The view that fieldwork in the 'West' is easy or merely a reiteration of what is already 'known' is challenged by the author, who reveals pioneering articles on a wide range of subjects from Gypsies to British boarding schools and feminism.

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.