ABSTRACT
In this chapter we will journey to the centre of knowledge production where the debates which I am about to discuss are taking place. The majority of the research reviewed in the previous chapter were studies by Western scholars in developing countries. The intellectual tasks of these scholars are complex and difficult as the analysis of gender in the Third World1 by First World feminists is a highly contested area. The intellectual challenges of postcolonial feminism make the project of cross-cultural research a highly charged one for Western feminists. Yet such a situation is doubly hard for a researcher whose social location is in the East but whose intellectual training was in the West. I first went to university in Britain in the 1970s where I was trained in sociology. Some ten years ago, I did my Masters degree in an anthropology department in Malaysia. I therefore straddle both disciplines somewhat uncomfortably although the disciplinary boundaries between anthropology and sociology are increasingly blurred. As a researcher working in my own country, the issues I address are more sociological than anthropological in nature, but my methodological concerns are very much in anthropology. Although the following discussion is arranged in chronological time, the debates have shifted backwards and forwards through the years and over the decades. Thus, they are by no means impermeable boundaries. My discussion will start with the anthropology of women in the 1970s when I first went to university and when feminists began to question the conceptual frameworks in anthropology. From here I move to a discussion of feminist anthropology in the 1980s and then to feminist ethnography. The chapter will conclude with the framework of this research.
