« Veiled (male) ethnographers. Reflexive blind spots and gender segregation in Yemen »
Communication de juin 2007 à la Conference Ethnografeast III : ethnography and the public sphere, CEAS, Lisbonne.

Abstract : Doing fieldwork as a male foreigner in Yemeni cities often means working strictly whithin the social world of men. Hence male ethnographers may not feel legitimate to take position about the phenomena of gender-segregation, an issue more often labeled as that of “the condition of women”. This may lead them to priviledge other social issues such as economics and politics, more clearly associated with the world of men and in which they are legitimate to feel engaged ethnographically. Through this implicit repartition of work, researchers reproduce an enduring gap between human rights activism and local political strugles. I argue, what is more, that this asymetry maintains itself up to the very core of ethnographic techniques, in the operation of expliciting the place occupied by the researcher in the field. Female ethnographers are brought to read their experience as symptoms for a sexual status whose existence is postulated. On the contrary, male tend to conceive it as “pure” relations of power, hospitality or honnor, overlooking more easily the sexual idiom which is also used occasionnally to express them.