Book 70

Arguments with Ethnography

by Cecilia Busby and I.M. Lewis

Published 1 January 1999
A critique of the globalisation of the culture principle, arguing that theory is dependent on the actual study of peoples.

Book 71

The Performance of Gender

by Cecilia Busby

Published 1 January 2000
The Performance of Gender presents a vivid description of everyday life in order to explore the concept of performance for an anthropology of gender. A detailed and evocotive account of the lives of men and women in a South Indian fishing community reveals new ways of framing gender relations, the body and kinship. The ethnographic account is set within the context of social and cultural theory, notably the ideas of Judith Butler, Pierre Bourdieu and Michel Foucault. The study sheds new light on the ways in which gender is understood as both performative, that is enacted through everyday practices, and also substantial and embodied, that is marked out in the separate sexual fluids and procreative capacities of husbands and wives.