"A crucial task for feminst scholars," wrote Michelle Rosaldo over two years ago in "Signs," "emerges, then, not as the relatively limited one of documenting pervasive sexism as a social fact-or showing how we can now hope to change or have in the past been able to survive it. Instead, it seems that we are challenged to provide new ways of linking the particulars of women's lives, activities, and goals to inequalities wherever they exist."
"Feminist Theory: A Critique of Ideology" meets that challenge. Collected from several issues of "Signs-Journal of Women in Culture and Society,"...

Michelle Rosaldo presents an ethnographic interpretation of the life of the Ilongots, a group of some 3,500 hunters and horticulturists in Northern Luzon, Philippines. Her study focuses on headhunting, a practice that remained active among the Ilongots until at least 1972. Indigenous notions of "knowledge" and "passion" are crucial to the Ilongots' perceptions of their own social practices of headhunting, oratory, marriage, and the organization of subsistence labor. In explaining the significance of these key ideas, Professor Rosaldo examines what she considers to be the most important...

Sixteen women anthropologists analyze the place of women in human societies, treating as problematic certain questions and observations that in the past have been ignored or taken for granted, and consulting the anthropological record for data and theoretical perspectives that will help us to understand and change the quality of women's lives. The first three essays address the question of human sexual asymmetry. Recognizing that men's and women's spheres are typically distinguished and that anthropologists have often slighted the powers and values associated with the woman's world, these...