In October 2025, the Laboratory of Political Anthropology (LAP) launched its “Major Lectures series” by inviting Lila Abu-Lughod to deliver a talk entitled “The Awkward Relationship between Feminism and Anthropology, Revisited”. Prepared in collaboration with the LAP’s Feminist and Queer Anthropology workshop, this lecture is published here in its original English version and in French translation, followed by comments by Michela Fusaschi, also provided in both languages.
Lila Abu-Lughod, Professor at Columbia University, has cultivated a body of scholarship in which an ethical commitment to justice is synthesized with a rigorous interrogation of anthropology’s foundational epistemological tools.
The relationship between anthropology and feminism – and, more specifically, between ethnography and feminism – lies at the heart of Lila Abu-Lughod’s entire work. From her earliest research, she has explored the link between the production of knowledge and Western domination, and has proposed a rethinking of ethnographic method by placing the lives and experiences of women – as recounted by the women themselves – at its center. Her seminal question, “Can There Be a Feminist Ethnography?”, (Abu Lughod, 1990), marked a theoretical turning point: in the midst of critical debates on scientific objectivity, it opened up the possibility of feminist ethnography as a method in its own right. More than thirty years later, this text remains a key reference, as evidenced by its recent French translation in 2024.
This methodological commitment to feminist ethnography leads Abu-Lughod to challenge one of the pillars of the discipline: the very notion of culture. One of Abu-Lughod’s most significant contributions to anthropology lies in her radical critique of this notion. In the seminal text Writing Against Culture (1991), she elucidates how a term once mobilized to dismantle biological racism has increasingly functioned as a mechanism of hierarchical separation, reifying differences and facilitating the construction of a manufactured “artificial otherness.” To counteract the pervasive scholarly impulse toward essentialist generalization, Abu-Lughod advocates for an “ethnography of the particular.” This methodological intervention prioritizes the granular documentation of individual life trajectories within their historical singularity and everyday complexity, striving to dissolve the production of otherness rather than reinforce its conceptual permanence.
This methodological stance is particularly embodied in her major work Veiled Sentiments (1986). Drawing on her research among the Awlad ‘Ali Bedouins in Egypt, she employs a polyphonic style comprising narratives, songs and fragments of conversation. She refuses to treat her subjects as mere “informants”, recognizing them instead as the authors of their own worlds, capable of navigating between social constraints and personal aspirations. Through this “ethnography of lived life”, she demonstrates that the senses, emotions, desires and grief are not secondary considerations, but the very heart of political dynamics and resistance to hegemonic powers.
A key turning point in her career was marked by her critical analysis of resistance. In her article The Romance of Resistance (1990), she urges us to move beyond the mere celebration of revolt to avoid succumbing to a “romanticization” that would see in every challenge a sign of the human spirit’s invincible resilience. She argues that resistance must above all serve as a “diagnosis of power”: it is by observing where and how individuals resist that we discover the exact nature and complexity of the pressures they face. Drawing upon her ethnographic research among the Awlâd ‘Ali women, she demonstrates that their modes of resistance – whether expressed through oral poetry, song, or opposition to arranged marriages – are not merely autonomous acts of agency; rather, they illuminate transformations in power dynamics as these practices intersect with the institutional structures of the Egyptian state and the market economy.
According to Abu-Lughod, resistance to localized hierarchies (such as tribal patriarchy) frequently unveils a burgeoning entanglement with alternative configurations of power, thereby facilitating a diagnostic mapping of shifting mechanisms of domination rather than merely valorizing an illusory liberation.
Beyond the personal sphere, her work has shifted towards an uncompromising analysis of global power structures. In Do Muslim Women Need Saving? (2015), she deconstructed the ‘politics of rescue’ promoted by international institutions and certain forms of humanitarianism. She demonstrates that emancipation cannot be decreed from the outside, especially when it serves to validate civilizational hierarchies or security agendas.
Moreover, her recent scholarship, epitomized in the edited volume The Cunning of Gender Violence, represents a profound intensification of her critique regarding the intersections of gender and international geopolitics. Within this work, Abu-Lughod interrogates the manner in which feminist initiatives aimed at eradicating gender-based violence have been instrumentalized by the agendas of global governance, international legal frameworks, and regimes of securitization. She scrutinizes the conspicuous omissions inherent in the discourse of “feminist success” – a narrative that, through its obsessive preoccupation with “the Muslim question” and racialized populations, serves to reify civilizational hierarchies. Ultimately, her analysis elucidates a critical paradox: institutional mechanisms ostensibly designed to protect women frequently function to consolidate the very apparatuses of state power and violence that marginalize and endanger these same communities.
As a Palestinian-American anthropologist, Lila Abu-Lughod places the question of Palestine at the heart of her intellectual and professional commitments. Her work explores the daily realities of settler colonialism, often obscured by global feminist discourses that tend to “culturalize” the violence suffered by Palestinian women rather than recognizing its political roots. Her more recent research (2020, 2021) revolves around two fundamental themes that examine the links between culture, power and memory in Palestine: 1) Museum policies and cultural sovereignty, in which Abu-Lughod analyses how heritage and museum management become spaces of struggle for sovereignty in the face of colonial erasure. She has focused in particular on the Palestinian Museum in Birzeit (opened in 2016), describing it as a project of ‘counter-governance’ that asserts a national presence despite the constraints of the occupation. For her, these institutions are not merely nostalgic archives, but tools of active resistance that enable the imagination of political alternatives to settler colonialism. 2) Art and creative resistance. She studies how Palestinian artistic expressions function as vehicles for protest and the reaffirmation of a national identity. She demonstrates that contemporary cultural production, whether art biennials or NGO projects, enables the “performance” of the future state and maintains a living connection with the territory. Art thus becomes a form of activism capable of breaking the narrow political imagination imposed by the conflict.
Finally, her work on the Nakba — most notably through the co-edited volume Nakba: Palestine, 1948, and the Claims of Memory (2007) — explores how the collective memory of Palestinians constitutes a "counter-memory" in the face of hegemonic narratives. She examines how the memories of 1948, embedded in objects and oral testimonies, serve as a foundation for resilience and for the assertion of moral and historical accountability.
Ultimately, the work of Lila Abu-Lughod redefines the ethical demands of contemporary anthropology. By eschewing reductive culturalist generalizations in favor of a granular focus on “singular lives”, she transforms the discipline into a tool for the decolonization of knowledge. Whether through the study of Bedouin poetry, the critique of humanitarian policies, or the analysis of museums, her work reminds us that culture is never a fixed essence, but an ongoing terrain of struggle for sovereignty and memory. Her intellectual trajectory thus charts a rigorous path: that of a scholarship which does not settle for observing the world, but which seeks, through the rigor of inquiry and the sensitivity of narrative, to do justice to the complexity of human lives in the face of structures of domination.