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INSIDERS/OUTSIDER-EMIC/ETIC STUDY OF WOMEN AND GENDER IN THE NEW MILLENIUM
by Laura Rice

During autumn 2000, more than 60 participants joined the Association for Middle East Women Studies (AMEWS) in an e-mail discussion, organized by Sherifa Zuhur, that explored socially situated knowledges and identity construction in the context of teaching and research about women and gender in the Middle East. Four panelists - Sondra Hale, Eleanor Doumato, Sherifa Zuhur, and Jennifer Olmsted - posted e-mail presentations, each describing the panelist's personal research or teaching context and exploring a particular instance of the insider/ outsider dynamic. Participants in the discussion had five days in which to comment on the panelist's intervention, followed by a summary statement by the panelist. At MESA in Orlando, the thematic convention, chaired by Amaney Jamal, continued with presentations by Sherifa Zuhur, Jennifer Olmsted, Laura Rice and Cynthia Nelson, followed by a round table discussion involving around 35 more participants. As in most contemporary explorations of identity and difference, the boundary between insider and outsiders was a sight inviting both conceptual instability and mutually structured definitions across it.

Boundaries, while they mark the end of one conceptual territory, signal as well the presence of new terrain, so they are always both delimitations and openings at one and the same time. In the presentations and throughout the larger discussions that evolved on e-mail and in the round table session, the unstable emic/etic border served as a heuristic device used to explore the practice of research and teaching across cultures.

Hale addresses the differences and similarities in teaching about gender and women in two contexts: gender teaching in the Middle East, and teaching about the Middle East and Muslim women in the US. Her inquiry into the development of Women Studies as it occurred in the "Western" academy and the growth of women's/gender studies in the Middle East suggested that what may be a reasonable practice in one context may be problematic in another. Women's Studies in the US grew out of "modernist notions of emancipation and progress towards an end." Western programs began as "women-centered," based on journeys of personal discovery that involved variations of "feminist process;" its pedagogy combined with Moa Tse Tung style conscious-raising and criticism and self-criticism with the liberatory epistemology of Paulo Freire's Pedagogy of the Oppressed. Hale questioned the appropriateness of importing a "Western feminist agenda of subverting the frame, unsettling the concepts, or blurring of the borders" into teaching situations in the Middle East where gender studies are more society- or community-orientated.

Hale noted that "Women's Studies in the West has become increasingly abstract and separated from community whereas Middle East gender studies may be more derived from community needs. What does this mean for the teaching strategies of the 'insiders/outsiders' or emic/etic approaches in our pedagogies, practice and, theory building?" Would a personalized, emotional, subject and non-authoritarian classroom be antithetical to the respect gender studies seeks to attain in the Middle East? Are techniques that empower the student and minimize or eliminate hierarchy (and thus the professor's authority position) problematic in the Middle East classroom? Hale comments that she was as concerned with the issues of racism as she was with those of class and gender: "[We need] to continue to develop various forms of liberatory pedagogy, but to develop ones that are appropriate/feasible/commendable/desirable for an 'outsider' like me to offer liberatory pedagogical strategies while in the Middle East?" Does "radical pedagogy" travel? Hale asked. Is "teaching as transgression" portable? "How revolutionary can we be when we are teaching other people's children?" "It is dangerous," she concluded, "for us to believe that the ultimate political and pedagogical goal is to raise consciousness about a person or a people's situation without contextualizing the 'condition.' So, if the ultimate goal is the 'emancipation' of women, for example, and we have failed to consider the question of emancipation from what, or the quality of that 'emancipation,' then our consciousness-raising strategies are culturally biased."

For historians, Doumato began, the insider vs. external observer is a false dichotomy: "no observer is wholly one or the other, and no observer is without a point of view." Both "outsider" narratives (e.g. Western travelers genres) and "insider" sources (e.g. court testimony) are multiple and may be skewed by legal fictions, proxies and gender bias. "The historian has to go with what there is," Doumato noted, "and there are simply very few narrative sources extant, especially pre- 20th century sources. The best the historian can hope is that all of what there is has been located, read, and weighted in relations to its time and context."

Holding no sources to be neutral, Doumato noted that in her experience, "the written work ultimately stands alone, apart from its authors." Using the example of the "orientalist" lens used by the authors of the 1911 Cairo Conference, she commented "indeed one can read the letters of, say, Eleanor Calverley, who was in Kuwait at the same time, and see the Cairo Conference as her blueprint, but if one only reads her husband's letters, or those of their contemporary Paul Harrison, one hears these authors' depth of knowledge and language facility, their sensitivity to, even empathy with, the people they are writing about…How does 'knowing where these people stand' help me to sift through their writings?" Doumato stated that historians need to focus their attention primarily on the written sources themselves and not the writer because trying to interpret what is written based on the writer's "positionality" presupposes, "first, that one can know what that is, and that people's positions don't change over time, and second, that his/her positionality so skews the writing that the reader must know where the author's coming from in order to decipher it."

Doumato's challenges to the insider/outsider binary generated a lively debate concerning the various ways in which "positionality" is central to intellectual work on women's lives. Among the issues raised were the idea that understanding positionality is crucial for those who lead hyphenated existences (e.g. "American-Muslim-Palestinian"); that historians' focus on the "material" is always framed by research questions, "based on their own training, orientation, and knowledge which differ from one location to another…. [Differences] may not always pertain to the reporter's power, but his/her vista;" that positionality or perspective is also central to the study of Muslim women because Islam is a world view, not just a religion: "Women who do not self-identify with Islam are also outsiders of Islam, even when we call them or they call themselves 'Muslim women.'"

Speaking of her research in Lebanon, Zuhur noted her struggles with "the center/periphery dilemma or rural/ urban divide." Because the historian who works with oral interviews is "an observer and recorder, and also an interpreter and creator of discourse concerning women," Zuhur pointed out that "one cannot faithfully represent subjects of study unless one enters into dialogue with them." That dialogue sometimes demands a shift of emphasis in accordance "with the respondents' perceptions." In her own research on women in Beka'a valley, Zuhur found that women's lives were much more hybrid than traditional frameworks had recognized: research agendas "often reflect (consciously or unconsciously) a bifurcation of the worlds of women-'pure,' rural, traditional women, supposedly cut off from the globalization process, and representing all that should be transformed according to the proponents of modernity. On the other side, we read about urban women living in cosmopolitan and often hybrid world…If all women are now hybridized and globalized to some common meeting point of their world…the structure of my research impels me to return to the village/ town vs. city divide." This dichotomy is useful not because it is "true," but because interrogating the dichotomy surfaces both new insights and old misconceptions.

Zuhur found that women she interviewed were perceptive about politics, but that it was difficult for them to understand her interest in the gendered aspects of their lives. The most articulate respondents were not more conservative than their urban counterparts. "These women don't see themselves as the 'oppressed' in the language of Hizbollah (although they admire the party) or as the lowest stratum in society. Their air is clean and fresh, their diet and human relations with neighbors are preferable to those of the city poor. Those with the least income or wasta, the political representatives of the district, and those experiencing downward mobility do see themselves as 'neglected' by the central government. In the end, their location in space and history which has simultaneously defined, and been defined by the Shi'a identity tribal roots, and peasant farmer base matters. They are less hybridized and less cosmopolitan than their sisters and cousins in Beirut-but those adjectives do not aid in formulation solutions for improving the quality of their lives."

Olmsted began a personal note: "Growing up as a US citizen (and a child of European Americans) in Beirut, Lebanon of course had a great influence on my world view and my identity. In my comments I would like to follow up on some of the issues raised earlier, while bringing in the perspective of a 'third culture kid' (or TCK), a label used by some sociologists studying children of 'ex-pats.' While such a label may be somewhat odd, suggesting a third culture, rather than the straddling of two cultures, which might be more accurate, I use it in part because this is the label chose by researcher working in this field…. I consider myself in many ways as an 'outsider' both in the US and the Middle East."

Olmsted returned to Doumato's question about "the value of investing energy into determining the personal background of the author of any particular source." Working in the field of economics where many of her colleagues "still believe that they can carry out 'value free' research," Olmsted focused on the importance of identifying the positionality of an author/ commentator, etc. She then expanded the discussion by noting that "while identifying someone's positionality may be used for various purposes-to provide context or reflection-but also to discredit or challenge someone's view-it can also be an act of empowerment. Her own experience serving as a researcher subject, being interviewed about her experiences as a TCK led to feeling "empowered, rather than marginalized." The researcher, who noted that TCKs had been seen as "abnormal" or traumatized by psychologists, found rather that TCKs often exhibit ability to emphasize, ability to pick up subtle cultural clues that others might miss, ability to be diplomatic.

Olmsted's opening up of a third space in the insider/outsider dynamic led many participants to share their own experiences of and observations about borders. Suad Joseph noted that the idea of the boundary was a hallmark "of western culture, of capitalism, of contractarian liberalism, of rational market, of private property…. Boundaries are everywhere in theses domains-boundaries around cultures, nations, states, institutions, cities, property and ultimately, and most profoundly, around the self. I have come to experience that not only is there nothing natural about boundaries, not only their invention and imposition constructed, in time and place [and thus always shifting], but also that boundaries must always do violence to invent and impose themselves. Whether that violence is symbolic, material, physical, emotional, -- there is a coercive process entailed. The outcomes of boundaries, we have come to accept, or hope, are, in many instances liberatory." Other respondents commented that bi-cultural people are like "double-exposed photographs." Whether or not the ex-pat experience led to increased multicultural awareness and encouraged an opening of mind was hotly debated. Many felt that ex-pat environments replicate colonial and neo-colonial attitudes. Others found that their own third space experience had led them to be more open-minded.

Rice began by framing the presentation with the fact of her everyday life: "I spend a good part of every year in Tunisia, dividing my time between working with colleagues and at Tunisian universities and living in a rural area where many women my age are not literate: I have learned more from the second context (in which I am an outsider who is an insider by marriage) than in the first (where I am an insider [academic] who is an outsider by nationality). The other part of the year, I teach comparative literature courses in the US, often focusing on gender and international cultural studies."

Given this context, Rice questioned the way women's rights and secularism are linked in the US and perhaps in the larger discourse of human rights, and the ways women's issues can sometimes serve as a smoke screen for other less palatable agendas: "Books like Geraldine Brooks' Nine Parts of Desire are sometimes seen by liberals as supportive of women's rights in the Middle East. My own reading is that this book is rather nine parts of deceit, a thinly veiled attack on Islamic culture in general. Each chapter begins with a warm heart-felt scene between the journalist Brooks and the locals only to end with some ridiculous or awful revelation about the culture."

While an advocate of global human rights, and secular in her own life, Rice suggested that we need to look more carefully at how the discourse of human rights, based on Enlightenment notions of decontextualized, disembodied reason and embodied secular individuals, creates insider and outsiders, disguised by false universalism of what the French call laicite. Civilizational identities that extend far beyond the boundaries that states set up are central to our lives; looking for "universals" is now less intellectually, politically and emotionally interesting than is understanding the ways the local and the global are articulated. Rice suggested that "as part of the deconstruction of the insider/outsider binary, the articulation of gender with a world that is in some ways 'statist' and in others 'global' should be considered. Perhaps we should interrogate the concept of the 'secular' not merely as it refers to the relation between religion and state, but also as it describes how a society or culture thinks itself and expresses itself. The need is for a discourse of human rights that does not privilege one civilizational ethos while excluding conceptions of those rights. Extremists can act as oppressors, but laicite does it damage, too."

Nelson noted that as an anthropologist interested in biography, she would look at the insider/outsider theme as it applies to the biography. Rather than sticking to a logical, systematic, academic approach, she would approach the world of biography in the spirit of Walt Whitman: "Life is being in and out of the game, both watching and wondering at it." In this context, she began by questioning the title of the session: "Insider/Outsider-Emic/Etic Study of Women and Gender in the New Millennium." She suggested the idea that "emic/etic" and "insider/outsider" were not equivalent conceptual frameworks. In her opinion, emic/etic, metaphors borrowed from the linguistics and put into operation in the theoretical mold of structuralism, referred to how you analyzed things. In her experience researching and writing biography, she found the emic/etic and insider/outsider frameworks were not as useful as the hermeneutic circle which allowed her to describe how we discover ourselves.

Her connection with Doria Shafik illustrated the way various kinds of insider/outsider positions occurred, each as the center of an hermeneutic circle. Nelson's discovery of Doria Shafik involved both 20 years before she became aware of Doria Shafik and the 13/14 years research she did on Shafik. One could say that they met in the interstice called "marginalization." In her time and place, Shafik was displaced in doing something different from other women of her class. For Nelson, a subjective tie of friendship with Shafik's daughters preceded Shafik's becoming an object of research; in fact, it led to it. Telling Nelson "We have been waiting for you," Shafik's daughters made available to her three impressionistic, unpublished, sometimes contradictory memoirs-papers they had not chosen to share with others who had approached them from the position of official researchers. The hermeneutic circle of Shafik's biography expanded out from the moment of Nelson's acquaintance with her daughters, to Shafik's memoirs, to her life (1908-1975), to network of Nelson's colleagues who shared with Shafik the experience of a given society and time.

The 1996 publication of Doria Shafik, Egyptian Feminist: A Woman Apart by Nelson, in English, provides us with another emblematic instance of the insider/outsider dynamic. Nelson found herself facing the problem of writing simultaneously for different audiences. Was she writing for herself, or writing for Doria Shafik? What were the clues of Shafik's intentionality? One might take the issue of language as central, here. She wrote books in both French and Arabic. Nelson is writing in English. Alternatively, there is the issue of voice and genre: Shafik wrote poetry, essays and feminist tracts. What were her alternative voices? What are ours? Who has Doria Shafik become of us? Is she being co-opted as an Arab woman activist and human rights worker in ways she never countenanced?

The discussion following the round table centered on the positionality of the researcher, the definition and context of secularism, the importance of the "reciprocal ethnography," and the examination of the ways established disciplines create and sustain power-based insider/outsider positions. The emic/etic distinction was found useful as a heuristic tool, because it often led to the deconstruction of insider/outsider binary.

Laura Rice is an associate professor of comparative literature in the Department of English at Oregon State University, USA.