Resumen de Women’s Work and Anthropology: Altering Social Hierarchy in Mauritania and the Ethics of Research
As a discipline, anthropology and its grounding in long-term fieldwork provides an opportunity to study how people alter their lives and larger social structures on a daily basis. Slavery was legally abolished in Mauritania in 1981 and, despite continued discrimination, Ḥarāṭīn women harness their work to create meaningful lives for themselves. Drawing upon twelve months of ethnographic research, this article argues that women use their labor and earnings to assert their power, claim improved social rank, and shift societal values that inform the hierarchy. Through these processes, they challenge, alter, and sometimes reproduce the broader social hierarchy and their positions within it. While anthropology can lead to meaningful insights, this article also explores ethical challenges that arose during this research, including the impact of the researcher on events, the question of who such research ultimately benefits, and the difficulty of obtaining truly informed consent. It is imperative that researchers, teachers, students, and readers prioritize engaging with these issues to help make the discipline and its practitioners more just.
