Changing Minds: Feminist Methods in Anthropology

During the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Anglo-American anthropologists conducted field expeditions to disparate regions. Some of these anthropologists contributed to the social reform efforts of a trans-Atlantic community of Progressive experts. Within this highly populated landscape, a small field of feminist anthropologists emerged with a distinctive set of ethnographic methods. My paper will trace the empirical practices of one such figure: Elsie Clews Parsons. Parsons formed queer kinships with a disparate group of cultural anthropologists who straddled the socialist-pacifist salons of Greenwich Village, the settlement houses of Chicago, the academic departments of Columbia and U.C. Berkeley, and the artist colonies of Sante Fe. With ample personal connections and financial means, Parsons conducted fieldwork with the Pueblos of New Mexico and Arizona. In 1918, after revitalizing the cultural anthropology program of Franz Boas, she began to experiment with ethnographic writing. She learned how to bring the changing minds of indigenous subjects into the cultural foreground, thereby capturing the development of human personalities. This interpretive skill, I argue, emerged from her encounters with several "men-women" and Zuni women conducting domestic labor. Parsons, while writing about these experiences, denaturalized gendered norms circulating within Pueblo culture. She then turned these observations back onto her own culture, leading her to generalizations about the dynamics of power and mind. This conceptual practice -- what Sarah Richardson might term a "gender-critical" method -- sustained her identity as a feminist anthropologist. My exploration of Parsons places feminist science studies into historical relief.