Sally Cole – författare

Through ethnographic case studies and activists' narratives, Contesting Publics analyses the challenges feminists face as they seek to engage with new spaces of participatory democracy in Latin America.Lynne Phillips and Sally Cole analyse how new silences, exclusions and re-inscriptions of inequalities have emerged alongside these new spaces of participation. They re-examine the relationship between public and private and address a larger theoretical question: what is the meaning of 'the public' within democracy projects?Contesting Publics considers current debates among feminists from different generations on the merits of a variety of strategies, goals and issues, drawing out vital lessons for students, researchers and activists in anthropology, gender studies and Latin American studies.

This book is written by anthropologists who are currently engaged in research on gender. The editors argue for the development of an ethnography-based feminism that both pays heed to what women in specific circumstances identify as their concerns and recognizes the contradictions inherent in the goals of feminist anthropology. The essays consider a range of "awkward" issues, including feminism in international contexts, the invisibility of women''s working lives, and the problems of voice and ethnographic representation. Referring to a variety of ethnographic contexts, and working from diverse perspectives, the contributors examine the multiple dilemmas and conflicts of gender and power.

Rainy River Lives is the long-lost collection of stories of Ojibwe men and women as told by a hitherto unpublished, traditional Ojibwe storyteller, Maggie Wilson (1879–1940). Wilson lived on the Manitou Rapids Reserve on the Rainy River, which flows along the Ontario-Minnesota border. When anthropologist Ruth Landes arrived at Rainy River to conduct her doctoral research in 1932, Wilson often worked with the young scholar, telling her many stories. Their relationship continued after Landes returned to Columbia University. During the following decades, however, the letters and stories Wilson had sent Landes, which Landes had carefully collected, were lost. Only recently were they discovered in the basement of the Smithsonian Institution, where they had been misfiled with papers of another anthropologist.This rich set of narratives takes us inside the intimate world of Ojibwe families at the turn of the twentieth century, a time of great upheaval when the Ojibwes were being relocated onto reserves and required by the government to abandon their seasonal migrations and subsistence activities. These remarkably detailed stories of ordinary Native people, precisely through their everyday character, reveal much about Ojibwe cultural beliefs and paint a nuanced ethnographic portrait of Ojibwe life. In the distinctive voice of an exceptional and highly creative individual, the stories address both the culturally specific world of the Ojibwes and universal human themes of love,  loss, and perseverance.

Ruth Landes (1908–91) is now recognized as a pioneer in the study of race and gender relations. Ahead of her time in many respects, Landes worked with issues that defined the central debates in the discipline at the dawn of the twenty-first century. In Ruth Landes, Sally Cole reconsiders Landes's life, work, and career, and places her at the heart of anthropology. The daughter of Russian Jewish immigrants, Landes studied under the renowned anthropologist Franz Boas and was mentored by Ruth Benedict. Landes's rejection of domestic life led to an early divorce. Her ideas regarding gender roles also shaped her 1930s fieldwork among the Ojibwa, where she worked closely with Maggie Wilson to produce a masterpiece study of gender relations, The Ojibwa Woman. Her growing prominence and subsequent work in Bahia, Brazil, was marked by outstanding fieldwork and another landmark study, The City of Women. This was a tumultuous time for Landes, who was accused of being a spy, and her remarkable work fed the envy of such prominent scholars as Melville Herskovits and Margaret Mead. Ultimately, however, the errors and excesses that her critics complained of long ago now point us to the innovations for which she is responsible and that give her work its lasting value and power.

Feminist Fields offers a rich and varied portrait of both the current work in feminist anthropology and future possibilities for dialogue between feminism and anthropology. Contributors to the book present critical analyses of a broad range of ethnographic topics: national feminism, gender and identity formation, cultural continuity, ethnographic authority, ethics and representation, empowerment and resistance. Here, young practitioners alongside more established scholars share their theoretical insights, bringing them to life through first-person narratives and stories. Throughout, there is a clear sense of the intellectual inspiration to be had from the practice of feminist anthropology and its emphasis on the power of thoughtful reflexivity in fieldwork and writing practices. Also recognized is an urgent need to bring forward the perspectives of those whose knowledge has been forgotten, ignored, or actively silenced.