We've been had Book

I have just had to buy a replacement copy of Toward an Anthropology of Women - there is only so many times a book can be stuck back together and after over 25 years of regular consultation, use, reading and all, the time has finally come. Originally published in 1975, the book remains for me a fine example of critical scholarship and contains some superb and now classic pieces of Marxist feminist analysis and feminist anthropology. The essays cover both physical and social anthropology - although reflecting the balance of the discipline and emphasis of feminist scholarship there is more social/cultural analysis than there is physical anthropology.

There are two papers I keep finding myself going back to - Gayle Rubin's outstanding (if flawed) 'The Traffic in Women: Notes on the "Political Economy" of Sex': a challenging critique of Engels' Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State that critically explores the text and its usefulness (or otherwsie) in the light of functionalist anthropology, psychoanalysis and radical feminist theory. Alongside this there is Karen Sacks' 'Engels Revisited: Women, the Organisation of Production, and Private Property' - more sympathetic to Engels' overall view but no less critical of both his analysis and his use of anthropological evidence in making his case.

These are just the two papers that I keep drawing on, more a sign of my areas of work than weaknesses elsewhere in the collection. That after so many years a scholarly book remains so important (and so widely cited by others) is itself a sign.