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What's Foreign and What's Familiar?

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 October 2020

Mary Louise Pratt*
Affiliation:
New York University

Extract

One of my favorite anthropological anecdotes is one Renato Rosaldo tells from his fieldwork among the Ilongots in the highland Philippines in the late 1960s. He was interviewing a very elderly woman about kinship and marriage and raised the topic of adultery. Did it ever happen, he wondered, that a married person became the lover of someone other than his or her spouse? The woman, uneasy and embarrassed, acknowledged that she did recall a few occasions when this had happened among the Ilongots:

At one point she stopped short in mid-tale and asked, “Does this kind of thing happen in your country?” I laughed. Hoping to reassure her, I said that Americans committed adultery much more often than Ilongots. […] A look of shock spread over her face as she asked, “You mean it's spread?” (101)

Type
Shaping Change
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 2002

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References

Works Cited

Geertz, Clifford. “Found in Translation: On the Social History of the Moral Imagination.” Local Knowledge. New York: Basic, 1983. 3654.Google Scholar
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Rosaldo, Renato. Culture and Truth: The Remaking of Social Analysis. Boston: Beacon, 1989.Google Scholar
Rothstein, Richard. “And So Just What Good Were the Good Old Days?New York Times 2 Feb. 2000, late ed.: B8.Google Scholar
Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. “Human Rights and the Humanities.” Stanford Presidential Lecture. Stanford U. 12 Feb. 2001.Google Scholar