The article deals with the questions of the (in)visibility of women in Slovak political life. The material presents statistical data on women's participation in Slovak national, regional and local politics with the support of qualitative data from interviews with women politicians and activists. The author looks at the reasons for the low political representation of women and the unsuccessful attempts to increase it by introducing positive mechanisms such as quotas. The primary focus is put on the representation of women in municipal politics. The author analyses the main reasons why women are more successful in local politics than in 'high' politics.
The paper discusses the history of the relation between feminist scholarship and cultural anthropology as two ways of thinking about culture and social relationships. It focuses in particular on the feminist critique of the anthropological theory and ethnographic research. In points out the different epistemological and political standpoints of feminism and anthropology as the sources of the tensioned relationship between these two traditions of thinking about culture.