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What's Foreign and What's Familiar?

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 October 2020

Mary Louise Pratt
Mary Louise Pratt*
Affiliation:
New York University
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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
Information
PMLA , Volume 117 , Issue 5 , October 2002 , pp. 1283 - 1287
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. 36–54.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