Ruth Landes and the remaking of the anthropological canon

Abstract

This article analyses Ruth Landes’ contributions to social anthropology based on a series of feminist, queer and postcolonial insights. Landes’ academic trajectory and her biography are used to understand her unique form of writing ethnographies. I try to show that “The City of Women” (originally published in 1947) does not follow classic anthropological tropes present in ethnographies in the 1930s and 1940s. Her rejection of canonical ways of writing is not only a stylistic choice but a result of Landes’ social trajectory. For this reason, “The City of Women” is an essential work in the effort to understand the ever-present challenges posed by writing ethnographic texts.