Paper short abstract:

Looking back at my own history as an anthropologist and ethnographic filmmaker, I will reflect on the issue of gender inequality, and the qualms and quandaries it raises when an anthropologist makes films about women.

Paper long abstract:

In the early 1970s, when the Women's Liberation Movement got under way, I tried to make sense of gender inequalities while doing fieldwork in Hamar, Southern Ethiopia. In the same period Robert Gardner made Rivers of Sand, an unashamedly biased view of gender relations in Hamar (in an interview Gardner admitted he "especially disliked Hamer men"). As an anthropologist I was not happy with this film and faced the following quandary: gender relations in Hamar seemed unfair to me, and yet women were the ones who most vigorously endorsed gender inequality. When I came to make my own films (the Hamar Trilogy and Duka's Dilemma), I was determined not to be judgemental, but to ask Hamar women to explain the whys and wherefores of their gender relations. Through filming I came to appreciate the advantages Hamar women gain from a gender division of labour, reproduction, defence, etc. and why they foster gender inequality as a way of gaining sway over their menfolk. Now I face another quandary: my films may shed light on gender relations, but they also provide fuel for governmental and nongovernmental organizations to intervene in the name of gender inequality, and oblige women to abandon their traditional practices. This undermines their time-honoured mode of sustainable subsistence, and leaves the women with no way of harnessing the support of their menfolk to cope with the exigencies of life. But if I advocate that women should decide themselves what kind of gender relations they cultivate, am I anti-feminist?

Paper Download (73 KB)