The “F” Word: Anthropology, Positionality, and Intersecting Lives in Oz

The organisers have invited us to reflect on the history of feminist anthropology in Australia through a key episode in our ethnographic experience. I have been delinquent in my response to that invitation by broadening the brief greatly to think ethnographically about Australian anthropology and its relation to feminism in the broader public sphere. I hope you will indulge my rather rambling personal reflections, which I orchestrate chronologically.

I first insist on the integral relationship between the second wave feminist movement in Sydney and the development of feminist anthropology at Sydney University and elsewhere in the 1970s. In that movement there was a robust, sometimes aggressive contest of theoretical and political positions between radical feminists, liberal feminists and socialist feminists. This pervaded many of our  debates and struggles, for example at the large “Women and Labour” conferences which attracted a huge number of delegates. My own position was decidedly socialist. As well as imbibing consciousness raising in several ways, I was a member of a group called NAMFS,  non-aligned Marxist Feminists, together with Kathy Robinson, Rosemary Pringle, Anne Game and others. My stance was what we would now call intersectional feminism—that the multiple oppressions of gender, race and class intersect and interact. 

There was a resounding resonance with challenges to patriarchal genealogies of disciplines at Sydney University in the early 1970s, including the philosophy strike of 1973, and the parallel struggle in anthropology. Some of our most pressing debates in anthropology were focused on that quintessential practice of ethnography, with early reflections about androcentricity in fieldwork: the male-centredness of both male and female anthropologists.

For me the experience of embodied ethnography in Vanuatu from early 1970 was crucial. I was a young woman from a working-class family in Sydney, and my mother had just died from breast cancer. This was my first trip overseas, apart from sojourns on the Manly ferry. My ultimate choice to live with the kastom people of South East of Pentecost, in the still colonized New Hebrides or Nouvelles-Hébrides, was no doubt moulded by an exoticism then pervading ethnography in the Western Pacific which remains entrenched. But it was also shaped by a certain “romance of resistance” (Abu-Lughod 1990). These folk were feisty, anticolonial and in that period anti-Christian people. I was captivated. 

How they saw me was more important than how I saw them. There was an express tension between being an aisalsaliri—a floating one—and an isin na ut lo, a woman of the place. Male dominance was crucial to a repurposed kastom and I needed to learn the tok ples, Sa, given that men were actively inhibiting women from learning the lingua franca, Bislama. My adopted father told me to stop teaching my sisters Tsibewano and Tsibuso while bathing in Tabiribiri creek. Learning Bislama would make them mobile and sexually available to other men (Jolly 2012 [1994]).

But my ethnographic experience was not just confined to the rural remote parts of Pentecost. Throughout the 1970s, before Vanuatu gained independence in 1980, I was having engaging conversations in Port Vila, with women like Grace Mera Molisa from Ambae—a nationalist and a strong advocate of women’s rights. I published several papers about her politics and her poetry. When she died unexpectedly early in 2001 I published a poem in her memory, called simply Grace. But in that period Grace was eschewing the ‘F’ word—feminist—as inappropriate to her struggle. She strongly contrasted the individualism of Women’s Lib in Australia with the distinctive collectivism of Pacific women’s movements. When Father Walter Lini came to power as the inaugural Prime Minister, she became his personal advisor and initiated a ten-year moratorium on foreign researchers. Although this effectively terminated my ethnographic engagement with Pentecost for a decade, I supported this attempt to catalyse Indigenous research through the Vanuata Cultural Centre’s filwoka program.

My Vanuatu experience was crucial to how I settled back into life in Sydney and life in anthropology at Sydney University. While I was still enrolled as a PhD student at Sydney , we were successful circa 1973 in getting the first feminist course established and I was offered a casual contract to teach it. My proposed title of “Feminist Anthropology” was rejected by the then Professor of Anthropology Peter Lawrence, and I had to accept the anodyne title The Anthropology of Women. Despite the fact that I had already composed nine weeks of lectures and orchestrated a linked film program, Lawrence advised that the late Les Hiatt would teach the final three weeks. I was furious. The course went ahead and was immensely popular, but I refused to do it again on those conditions and decamped to the more welcoming, if brutalist, grounds of Macquarie University, led by the charismatic Professor Chandra Jayawardena. My PhD supervisor Michael Allen inherited the course and continued to teach it for many years afterwards. 

In 1983, as a young single mother, I was seconded for a year or so to participate in the foundational project Gender Relations in the South West Pacific in the then Research School of Pacific Studies at the ANU. Initiated by Roger Keesing and Michael Young, the project brought some very fine scholars from overseas and Australia together: Marilyn Strathern, Deborah Gewertz, Jaimie Pearl Bloom, Martha Macintyre, Christine Helliwell and myself. That project was immensely productive, I was not. The challenges of separation from my daughter’s biological father, being a single mother and launching into a new love affair with Nicholas Thomas were all taking their toll. But that year laid firm foundations for my later intellectual life and writing. The experience of feminine support and friendship was as crucial as the intellectual frisson. Marilyn Strathern used to mow my lawn in Turner, and I looked after her kids for a while when she went to Berkeley to deliver the lectures that became The Gender of the Gift (Strathern 1988).

But we did not all agree.  I had major questions about Marilyn Strathern’s arguments in The Gender of the Gift and also with her dichotomous separation of anthropology and feminism (detached, distanced versus engaged, familiar). I was far more sympathetic to the historical anthropology of my colleague and still dear friend Martha Macintyre, and her staunch advocacy of the need to name and analyse inequality—on the basis of gender, class and the racial legacies of colonialism. It was from that theoretical and political viewpoint that we collaborated to co-edit the book Family and Gender in the Pacific: Domestic Contradictions and the Colonial Impact (Jolly and Macintyre 1989). Again, there was a problem of naming—although it was focused on the crucial importance of Christian conversion in reshaping domestic lives, Cambridge University Press refused to let us call it Bless this House (since it was the name of a UK soap opera at the time). Still it was widely read and cited.

I returned to the Australian National University again initially on secondment from Macquarie University in the early 1990s to establish the “Gender Relations Project” in the then Research School of Pacific and Asian Studies. Established with strategic funds from the Institute of Advanced Studies but responsible to the School Director, it had a rather ambiguous relation to the Department of Anthropology. But our mission was clear—with another dear friend and close colleague Kalpana Ram, also from Macquarie University, we were immensely productive and were soon declared a continuing centre. We established annual themes for our work, hosted a series of workshops and conferences, affiliated a series of talented early career scholars—including Shelly Mallett, Andrea Whittaker and Lisa Law—and supervised many graduate students. We produced a large volume of influential monographs and edited volumes. Although we aspired to be transdisciplinary and transregional, we were more grounded in the disciplines of anthropology, history and, for Kalpana Ram, philosophy, but sometimes caught in their fraught yet fertile intersection. I see that period as not just productive but reproductive—the scholars who worked with us, women and men, went on to good careers in the academy, the public service and international organisations with a firm feminist sensibility. 

Finally, I move fast-forward to the new millennium and the establishment of the Gender Institute at the Australian National University in 2011. I had the idea of establishing the institute when I was on sabbatical leave in France on a Poste Rouge in 2009 but its creation was the result of efficacious lobbying by several of us including Fiona Jenkins, Kim Rubenstein, Hilary Charlesworth and Gillian Russell. The news that the Gender Institute would be funded by VC Professor Ian Chubb and the University Chancelry came in the same period as the award of my Australian Laureate Fellowship, and we had a stellar launch by then Governor General Dame Quentin Bryce. The Gender Institute has a dual mission to connect the work on gender and sexuality at the Australian National University in our programs of research, education and outreach, and to promote gender equality, diversity and inclusion. Kim Rubenstein of Law and then Fiona Jenkins of Philosophy have  both been stellar convenors. After my Laureate Fellowship ended in 2016, I assumed the leadership for three years until mid-2019. The Institute has been a huge success but has also been presented with certain challenges. It creates cross-campus, transdisciplinary synergies, connecting staff and graduate research and engaging with public debates and policy, but the credit for seeding projects which go on to secure larger grants typically reverts to local disciplines and programs.

For me this perforce moved my frame from feminist anthropology to a far more transdisciplinary feminist frame. Given that, and especially as revealed by the diversity and inclusion-centred accreditation of SAGE-Athena Swan, we have witnessed divergent patterns in different disciplines. Some disciplines have been far more hostile than others to the revolution of feminist thinking and practice: anthropology and history in the humanities and social sciences have been far more open than philosophy, political science and economics. The approach we have been taking in the Gender Institute is that gender inequality in universities is not just a question of numbers but of knowledge. Targets are important, and we have to lament the woeful continuing numbers in areas of science (Mathematics, Physics and Engineering and Computing Science in particular.) But why the differences from the biological sciences where there are far more women, far more at senior levels and where the feminist revolution has also had an impact on the knowledge being created? Fundamentally, universities create and disseminate knowledge and we have to offer far more nuanced accounts of the power involved in both protecting and subverting patriarchal interests in the academy. And we have to be alert to the risks of technocratic tokenism in diversity and inclusion discourses and the ways they often create more hard work but little real inclusion or joy for those deemed “diverse”(see Ahmed 2023).

In conclusion I want to celebrate how far anthropology has moved and how far we have moved anthropology from those days when Marie Reay—the only woman with tenure in the erstwhile ANU Research School of Pacific Studies—was the victim of patriarchal constraints and the target of misogynist attacks. Now she has a fine, light-filled and welcoming building named after her, just across the road from the Kambri centre at the heart of the ANU campus. This is not just symbolic. Let us celebrate how feminism can transform our scholarship as well as our lives and how feminism needs to be both inclusive and intersectional.   

Read another piece in this series.

Works Cited

Abu-Lughod, Lila. 1990. “The Romance of Resistance: Tracing Transformations of Power Through Bedouin Women.” American Ethnologist 17 (1): 41–55.

Ahmed, Sara 2023. The Feminist Killjoy Handbook. Milton Keynes UK: Allen Lane, Penguin Random House.

Jolly, Margaret. 2012 [1994]. Women of the Place: Kastom, Colonialism, and Gender in Vanuatu. London: Routledge, Taylor & Francis.

Jolly, Margaret, and Martha Macintyre, eds. 1989. Family and Gender in the Pacific: Domestic Contradictions and the Colonial Impact. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Strathern, Marilyn. 1988. The Gender of the Gift: Problems with Women and Problems with Society in Melanesia. Berkeley: University of California Press.