“We Are Not Feminists!” Egyptian Women Activists on Feminism

Experimental and post-colonial anthropology has increasingly problematized the “pursuit of the other” (Visweswaran 1994: 20), power relations between researcher and informant as well as representation. Attempts to decolonize anthropology have been particularly notable with regard to feminist scholarship, which, by its very definition, needs to continually challenge the very notion of the canon. Nevertheless, not every feminist scholar doing research in the Arab world is as conscious of power relationships between cultures (colonizer / colonized) as s / he might be of power relations within culture (male / female). Therefore, an analysis of “positioning” is a key to understanding how many feminist ethnographers theorize. A new kind of feminist scholarship related to the “wind of cultural decolonization” (Morsy / Nelson / Saad / Sholkamy 1991) has taken different directions. One manifestation of this kind of research is marked by the various ways in which female ethnographers confront their biases as western women, feminists, or belonging to a particular class, religion, etc. Many anthropologists have pointed out that fieldwork is situated between autobiography and anthropology (Hastrup 1992) and that it connects a personal experience with a general field of knowledge. Fieldwork is not the unmediated world of “others”, but the world between ourselves and the others. The concept of “intersubjectivity” – the relationship between the researcher and the re-