Own or Other Culture challenges those anthropologists who suggest that fieldwork in the 'West' is easy or merely a reiteration of what is already 'known' to either Westerners or non Westerners. Revealing some pioneering articles in social anthropology written over a period of twenty years, Judith Okely discusses selected themes which include:
* questions of reflexivity and autobiography
* anthropology in Europe
* the cultural location of the anthropologist
* feminism in anthropology. Illustrated with photographs, Own or Other Culture covers subjects ranging from the author's own boarding school revealing a British exotica and colonial comparisons, to how Gypsies, who treat non-Gypsies as the 'other', act to create or manipulate cultural difference.
Feminist anthropology is developed in a reassessment of de Beauvoir and Kaberry while gender and bodily experience is explored in the face of popular demands by women readers for cross-cultural examples.