Anthropology as a Feminist Project of Collective Practice

Second wave feminism, or women’s liberation, grew out of the new political energy that emerged in the USA in the 1960s. Movements for women’s liberation were a product of the social disquiet and dissent associated with US war in Vietnam and, for my generation of activists, Australia’s involvement in that conflict. These associated political movements were concerned with power and inequality; in addition, they had a phenomenological character, a concern with the inwardness of experience and inwardness of experience understanding the world .

In light of this lived political experience, we considered that the analysis we were exposed to in the university was oppressive, mechanical, reductive, and deterministic. This epistemic break predated the emergence of women’s liberation, dating from a 1960s New Left political philosophy grounded in the experiential. In this view, you did not wait for a power shift or revolution but set about living the life and creating the kind of society and politics that you wanted. This is the politics that I encountered in my involvement in the Women’s Liberation Movement in the early 1970s, which was the same moment that I discovered anthropology.

My engagement with women’s liberation followed my return to the University of Sydney to study anthropology and politics in 1970 after a gap year teaching in a remote Indigenous community. I received a phone call from a very excited high school friend, who told me about her conversation with women’s liberationists at a stall on campus during orientation week. She was immediately drawn to their political analysis of sex roles and said, “I thought you would be interested.” While the sex roles approach may seem simplistic now, given subsequent feminist theorizing, it was at this point that a light came on for me. As Sarah Ahmed (2017) says, once you have become a feminist, it can feel as though you have always been a feminist.

Feminism encourages us to begin to redescribe the world we are in. My school friend and I had been primed by a high school history teacher who in 1967 had urged us to read Betty Friedan’s newly published Feminine Mystique (1965) and be aware of the need to “do something for ourselves” before we married and had children (the taken-for-granted path for young women at the time). It’s very hard today to grasp the realities of that world in which we found ourselves. Until 1966, married women could not become permanent civil servants (as Martha McIntyre mentions in her essay in this volume). In 1972, only 32.7% of university students were women, whereas now it’s more than 50% (Booth and Kee, 2010).

Divorce was difficult, and no-fault divorce was only introduced in 1975 as one of the root and branch social reforms of the Whitlam government (elected in 1972).^[1]Arrow (2023) discusses the impacts of Whitlam social policies for women, but surprisingly there is no special focus on the introduction of no-fault divorce. Domestic abuse was not a crime, but a private matter. Child rape in families was a well-concealed public secret, as I later discovered through my feminist activism in a rape crisis center. Feminism, or what we at the time called women’s liberation, was a political practice grounded in the idea of consciousness raising. This is a phenomenological approach to understanding the political construction of ourselves and the forms of social and political oppression of women, discovered through sharing experiences with other women in our consciousness-raising (CR) groups. Women’s liberation activism began in the CR groups, and we all belonged to one or more. Feminist forms of collective learning became an important part of our student political life and intellectual development in addition to CR groups. I was in a feminist reading group at Sydney Women’s Liberation House, where we very seriously read Marx’s Capital from a feminist perspective, for example. This was the first of many engagements with Marxist feminist scholars and activists who profoundly shaped my anthropological understanding.

My other life-changing encounter at that moment was with anthropology, which in the USA was profoundly impacted by New Left political currents. Marshall Sahlins developed the “teach-in” at the University of Michigan as part of the critical response to the Vietnam War (Sahlins 2009; Perez 2021), and his generation of anthropologists were rediscovering materialism through social theory, New Left politics, feminism, and other forms of social critique.

At that time, anthropology’s ethnographic reports were mined by other disciplines, including by feminist scholars, to question assumptions about the naturalness of sex and other forms of social division. Margaret Mead had championed the idea of using ethnographic comparison to challenge taken-for-granted assumptions regarding social difference and inequality, and to apply these in public debate (for example, on the “naturalness” of sex differences; or the inevitability of adolescent “storm and stress”). In addition, anthropology’s paradigms and prctice—like those of other disciplines—were subject to a feminist critique of its patriarchal blindness or androcentrism. Around this time several critically important edited collections of feminist anthropological thought were published, including Rosaldo and Lamphere’s Woman, Culture, and Society (1974) and Reiter’s Toward an Anthropology of Women (1975).

This feminist anthropology was significant in critiquing the discipline’s approach to kinship and marriage, which my first year tutor had told my class was the “life blood” of anthropology. Structural functionalism (the dominant paradigm in Sydney University anthropology at the time), for example, analyzed kinship and marriage as juridical norms that regulated social relations and provided order, particularly in stateless societies. By contrast, feminist critique focused on marriage as the site of the reproduction of gender relations, influenced by contemporary critiques from the left (see Robinson 2024, especially chapter 1, and Robinson 2018a). Marriage was analyzed in terms of the conjugal bond and the family, regarded as sites of personal life in critiques of capitalism. Marriage and the family were seen as bulwarks against the alienation of capitalism, as well as the crucible of unequal gender relations in social reproduction (Zaretsky 1976).

My cohort of anthropology honours students participated in a student strike to demand that the university approve a proposed course in Feminist Philosophy. We followed suit with a demand that the Anthropology Department approve a course in Women and Anthropology, an issue taken up by Margaret Jolly—who taught the course—in her essay in this volume. The activist student body wanted the epistemological critiques of feminism, but also Marxist political economy, to be taken seriously.

My first feminist writing in 1971 was a critical analysis of marriage written for my politics honors course at the University of Sydney, taught by R.W. Connell. In hindsight, in response to the provocation of this conference session, I realized that this essay was a foundational moment for my developing anthropological scholarship. Other contemporary political critiques were in this mix. In 1970, when I encountered anthropology, the first-year syllabus at Sydney had just been radically redesigned by Jeremy Beckett embracing the material analysis blooming in contemporary US anthropology: scholars like Eric Wolf and Marshall Sahlins, whose critical materialist analyses were a challenge to the prevailing paradigm of structural-functionalism. At the same time, anthropology embarked on an auto-critique of its colonial origins (see for example Asad 1979) in part precipitated by accusations of the discipline’s involvement in counterintelligence in American wars. This controversy was hot during my undergraduate years, especially as some of our lecturers at Sydney were accused of being involved in counterintelligence operations in Thailand, in the orbit of the Vietnam War (see Robinson 2004). As a Marxist feminist, I was torn between my desire to become an ethnographer and concerns about anthropology’s colonial origins.

I found a solution when I embarked on PhD research in anthropology at the Research School of Pacific Studies (RSPacS) at the Australian National University (ANU).(now incorporated in the College of Asia and the Pacific). As ethnographic field site I chose a community in Indonesia that had been displaced by a multinational mine under General Suharto’s militarized New Order regime (1965-1998). I began field work in 1977, and my PhD thesis (published as Stepchildren of Progress in 1986) was a political economy analysis of the mining town and the place of the Indigenous people within it. The political economy lens illuminated women’s loss of access to economic resources, consequent to mine development.

The development of capitalist social relations was accompanied by a rapid shift—happening before my very eyes—from arranged to free choice marriage. This might seem an excellent development for women in terms of mainstream feminist critiques. Marriage was at the center of the critique of inequality offered by the Women’s Liberation Movement. Fieldwork encounters showed this was not a straightforward process. Free choice marriage in a circumstance where women had lost access to economic resources was seen by some women as a poor option compared to arranged marriages that guaranteed ongoing support for women and their children from parents and in-laws in the case of marriage breakdown (Robinson 1988). Fieldwork challenged many of my feminist assumptions and taken-for-granted truths of women’s liberation.

I have continued to research the complex issues thrown up by marriage (in its many forms) in the analysis of gender relations in different cultures in the Indonesian archipelago (Robinson 2008). I have recently published a book critiquing the pejorative stereotypes in the public discourse around “mail order brides” (Robinson 2024) and my argument rests on feminist and anthropological analyses of marriage. I have also been involved with Muslim feminist activists in Indonesia opposing child marriage. I was invited to the Women’s Ulama Congress in Indonesia (Kongres Ulama Perempuan) in 2017, where I presented an anthropological perspective on child marriage to a group strategizing on how to respond to conservative interpretations by Muslim scholars justifying child marriage, thus extending the textual analysis the women ulama had been focusing on as a means to address an important growing women’s rights issue (Robinson 2017). Anthropology (still) has an important place in conversations about women’s rights.

I always had a keen concern for the feminist project of collective practice and learning, linked to direct action. As a PhD scholar in Canberra from 1976, I sought out and facilitated different feminist collectives, our mode of acting in the world. I was part of a collective of scholars and activists that edited a Canberra edition of the Sydney-based radical feminist journal, Refractory Girl, in 1977. I was in a Marxist feminist group, the Red Fems,^[2]This group of leftist scholars and activists wrote a paper for the 1982 Women in Labour Conference, the peak research activity for left feminists (Red Fems 1982). while writing my PhD. Returning from fieldwork in 1979, my first academic teaching was in ANU’s newly established Gender Studies program. Collective forms of action informed the way that many women scholars worked in academia: for example, I have been active in the Women’s Caucus of the Asian Studies Association which from 1978 promoted women’s scholarly and career interests (see Crouch 2024).

Such modes of being in the world—working together, publishing together, researching together—are under pressure in the contemporary university. As a PhD scholar, I had a very powerful experience in Jakarta when I met Indonesian sociologist Mely G. Tan (recently deceased) and Hannah Papanek, a pioneering scholar of South and Southeast Asia, especially in debates about women and development. I was a student enjoying the experience of long-term fieldwork and had no concept of what I was going to do when I finished my PhD. They said to me, “your role [as an Australian PhD graduate] is to train these young Indonesian women (indicating a few in the room with us) as scholars.” I have always remembered this: it reflected the sense of collective practice that is fundamental to feminism. I have continued this concern for feminist collective practice in my career, working with many PhD students at ANU, many of them women from Indonesia and other parts of Asia and the Pacific, who have gone on to have illustrious careers, and who I treasure as colleagues and friends.

Read another piece in this series.

Works cited

Ahmed, Sarah. 2017. Living a Feminist Life. Durham: Duke University Press.

Arrow, Michelle. 2023. Women and Whitlam: Revisiting the Revolution. Sydney: New South Publishers.

Asad, Talal. 1973. Anthropology and the Colonial Encounter. Ithaca Press

Booth, Alison L. and Kee, Hiau Joo. 2010. “A Long-Run View of the
University Gender Gap in Australia” IZA Discussion Paper Series, No. 4916.

Crouch, Melissa. 2024. “Celebrating Women’s contributions to the Asian Studies Association of Australia, Asian Currents.” Accessed 21 May 2024.

Friedan, Betty. 1965. The Feminine Mystique. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books.

Perez, Gladys. 2021. “Marshall Sahlins and the birth of the teach-in.” Fierce Urgency. Accessed 20 May 2024.

The Red Fems. 1982. “The implications of technological change for women workers in the public sector.” In Worth Her Salt. Women and Work in Australia edited by Margaret Bevege, Margaret James and Carmel Shute. Sydney: Hale and Ironmonger.

Reiter, Rayna. 1975. Towards and Anthropology of Women. New York and London: Monthly Review Press.

Refractory Girl. A Journal of Radical Feminist Thought. Nos 13-14 March 1977.

Robinson, Kathryn May. 1986. Stepchildren of Progress: The Political Economy of Development in an Indonesian Mining Town. Albany, NY: State University Of New York Press.

Robinson, Kathryn. 1988. “What Kind of Freedom is Cutting your Hair? Class and Gender in a Peripheral Capitalist Economy. In Asian Women, Victims of Development, edited by Norma Sullivan and Glen Chandler. Monash Papers on Southeast Asia #18, Clayton: Centre of Southeast Asian Studies, Monash University.

Robinson, Kathryn. 2004. “Chandra Jayawardena and the ethical ‘turn’ in Australian anthropology.” Critique of Anthropology 24 (4): 38-404

Robinson, Kathryn. 2009. Gender, Islam and Democracy in Indonesia. London and New York: Routledge.

Robinson, Kathryn. 2017. “Female Ulama Voice a Vision for Indonesia’s Future,” New Mandala 30 May 2017. Accessed 20 May 2024.

Robinson, Kathryn. 2018. “Gender, Marxist theories of” In International Encyclopedia of Anthropology, edited by Hilary Callan. Wiley.

Robinson, Kathryn. 2024. Marriage Migration, Intercultural Families and Global Intimacies. Springer Nature.

Rosaldo, Michelle and Louise Lamphere. 1974. Woman Culture and Society. Stanford: Stanford University Press.

Sahlins, Marshall. 2009. “The Teach-ins: Anti-war protest in the Old Stoned Age.” Anthropology Today. 25, (1): 3-5.

Zaretsky Eli. 1976. Capitalism, the Family and Personal Life. Pluto Press.