the erasure of women's writing in sociocultural anthropology

Writing, citation, and other canon‐setting patterns in the recent (1977–86) literature of sociocultural anthropology reveal the impact of gender relations. In this article, citation is treated as a social practice which, among other things, legitimizes the voice of the cited author. While women produce a substantial proportion of the work available for citation, the proportion of women authors cited is lower than would be expected on that basis, and it varies with the citing author's gender. Annual meetings programs also show a tendency for women to be extremely active, but the frequent focus on gender and feminism is not reflected in overviews of the field. Conclusions are drawn about the relative marginalization of women's work and about the relationship between the warranting of women's academic work and the public or private context of its evaluation.