In this lecture, I'll be discussing anthropology and gender from McGee and Worms' Anthropological Theory. And as you'll note from reading through the text, there are, of course, several different theoretical perspectives that individuals look at when examining gender in the context of anthropological research. So what I'm going to do is first go through and give a general introduction to gender and anthropology, looking at some pre-feminist anthropology. in particular the work of Ingalls, Mead, and Benedict.
From there, I'll move on to discussing the feminist critique overall, which of course occurred not only in cultural anthropology, but also in biological anthropology as well as archaeology. We also see, and we'll go through some different works, some different turns in terms of feminist anthropology in the 1970s, 80s, and 90s, and examine some of the critics and influence. of gender and anthropology or feminist anthropology. So pre-feminist anthropology, Frederick Ingalls, The Origins of Private Property in the State, attributed the oppression of women to shifts in the mode of production at the time of the Neolithic Revolution.
According to Ingalls, once men had property in terms of land or herds, they desired to transmit them to their offspring via patrilineal inheritance. This was accomplished by the overthrow of matrilineal inheritance and descent systems leading to the world's historical defeat of the female sex, according to Frederick Engels. Margaret Mead is known for a number of works examining issues of gender and sexuality in particular, and her analysis of pervasive sexual asymmetry in Sex and Temperament in Three Primitive Societies from 1935, she explores the relationship between culture and human nature.
Culture is dealt with as a... primary factor in determining masculine and feminine social characteristics and behavior. In Male and Female from 1949, she looks at a study of the sexes in a changing world, first to bring to greater awareness the way in which the differences and similarities in the bodies of human beings are the basis on which all learning about our sex and our relationship to the other sex are built. Secondly, she draws on some of this knowledge we have of all human societies to see what has been attempted in what situations and what the results were. This is done in the hope that we might learn or be exposed to the idea that will leave us better for it.
Finally, she tries to suggest ways in which our civilization may make full use of both a man's and a woman's special talents. Her analyses concerning the differences between males and females influenced many of the discussions that were to follow in terms of gender and anthropology. Benedict was interested in seeing cultural systems as working to favor certain. personality types among different societies, so firmly rooted in culture and personality.
Along with Margaret Mead, she is one of the prominent female anthropologists in the first half of the 1900s. So in terms of the feminist critique, in the 1970s, women anthropologists began to question some of the male-centered assumptions within anthropology, and to focus their research on women's statuses and roles within societies around the world. Since that time, interest in the study of gender roles and the focus on gender and sexuality in cross-cultural perspective has increased. Failure of the discipline to fully explore the human experience failure of the discipline to fully explore human experience because it had neglected women and gender as significant dimensions of social life.
In anthropological literature, however, the discussion of women until recently has been restricted to the areas of marriage, kinship, and family. Feminist anthropologists believe that the failure of past research to treat issues of women and gender as significant has led to a deficient understanding of the human experience as a whole. There's also important use here in terms of a crossover with linguistic anthropology and the use of language in general. If you remember from earlier in the semester, we were talking about the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis or linguistic anthropology.
inquisitive relativity principle, what are the ramifications for the use of the word man to refer to the entire species as a whole? Lorenz published on aggression and Audrey published on African genesis. Both were popular texts that promoted the importance of aggression and evolutionary formations of humanity. So we see here what we're seeing is in part a response to some of these issues overall. And this starts to emerge with the man the hunter and the woman the gatherer hypothesis, which I'll get to in just a little bit.
Feminist research in the 1970s in anthropology was concerned with documenting women's lives and their roles in societies around the world. Virtually all of these studies assumed universal sexual asymmetry. So we certainly see this in Sherry Ortner's work.
Male is to culture, female is to nature. And the worldwide, what follows would be the worldwide subordination of women and sought to explain the situation along various theoretical perspectives. Friedel. in 1975 attempted to explain the position of women from a materialist perspective by focusing on women's subsistence roles.
Chaudreau, in 1974, looked at the issue of subordination from a psychological view, emphasizing the role of childhood socialization in the formation of sex roles. These were two of the definitive works in this era of feminist anthropology. Others include Rizzaldo and Lampierre's Women, Culture, and Society.
from 1974, Reader's 1975, Towards an Anthropology of Women. Rosaldo, together with Ortner, offered an integrated set of explanations, each at a different level, for the universal subordination of women. These were, in terms of social structure, culture, and socialization.
In every society women bear and raise children, women's socially and culturally defined role as mother provided the basis for the subordination. Rosaldo and Lampier, editors of Women, culture and society. In the 1971 meetings of the AAA, the American Anthropological Association, they brought up the issue of universal sexual asymmetry or female subordination.
In Writers Towards an Anthropology of Women, the ideas expressed in this collection were heavily focused towards the development of universal explanations and helpful dichotomies. Sherry Ortner constructed an explanatory model for gender asymmetry based on the premise that the subordination of women is universal. That is a cross-cultural phenomenon.
In the article published in 1974, Is Female to Male as Nature is to Culture? , she takes a structuralist approach to the question of gender inequality. She suggests that a woman's role as childbearer makes them natural creators, while men are essentially cultural creators. Frydell and Lampier emphasized the domestic power of women which manifested in individually negotiated relations based in the domestic sphere, but influencing and even determining male activity in the public sphere.
Feminist archaeologists and physical anthropologists also were challenging the notion of man the hunter during this time period. Particularly we see from our readings for this week, Sally Slocum's piece, 1975 piece on the woman to gather, male bias in anthropology. where she notes that women's role in evolution has been ignored because scholars focused on hunting rather than gathering.
This challenges the popular idea that hunting by men, because it implied toolmaking, also was associated with communication and development of complex cognitive skills, which played a pivotal role in our evolutionary past. Rather, evidence indicates that gathering child care also demanded complex communication, cooperation, as well as toolmaking. Evidence indicates that forging, not hunting, was the principal economic strategy through most of human evolutionary history.
And indeed, we see this in the context of behavioral observation studies and time allocation studies in which the caloric requirements are also recorded and very high caloric requirements are noted for gathering items versus items that are are hunted for. And again with the Byrd et al. piece we see a differentiation in terms of status associated with this as well that is not necessarily tied in with optimal forging theory or the amount of calories that are consumed overall. In the 1980s there was a move away from the previous decade's blanket assumptions about gender asymmetry. Three principal trends emerged in the 1980s.
The social construction of gender. This is Sandes and Gounouf's 1990 book. beyond the second sex, and they noted the social construction of gender as it is expressed in the roles of motherhood, kinship, and marriage. Gender is an important analytical concept with popular use in the 1980s. It was often found in the writings of social and cultural anthropologists and was used to refer to both male and female, the cultural construction of these categories, and the relationship between them.
The definition of gender may vary from culture to culture, and this realization has left feminist anthropologies away from broad generalizations. The focus of contemporary scholars in this area was on the differences existing among women rather than between males and females. We also see during the 1980s the materialist perspective, where materialist feminists use cross-cultural analysis to explain differences in women's status, roles, and power.
They analyze gender-related activities, measures of social, economic, and political power, the focus on gender as it relates to class, the social relations of power, the changes in mode of production, particularly Eleanor Leacock's work looking at integrating the problems of gender and inequality, conceptual and historical problems. We also see oppression of women from Marxist perspective in societies prior to Western contact. Gender relations were typically egalitarian because men and women participated equally in the processes of production.
The unequal place of women in societies today is the result of subjugation of these societies by Europeans and the imposition of capitalist forms of production. To explain the subordination of women, which seemed to be universal and cross-cultural, Marxist theory was appealing to feminist anthropologists in the 1970s because ... There is no theory which accounts for the oppression of women and its endless variety and monotonous similarity, cross-culturally and throughout history.
With anything like the explanatory powder of Marxist theory of class oppression, the Marxist model explains the subordination of women in capitalist societies, both in terms of their reproductive role, the reproduction of labor, as well as the value of unpaid or underpaid labor that arises from historical trends predating capitalism itself. Third, the cultural specificity of women's identities. Overall feminist anthropology of the 1980s demonstrated that gender is an important analytical concept. That definition of gender changes historically and cross-culturally.
DiLeonardo notes that feminist scholars were forced to confront the question of difference, the multiple racial, ethnic, class, sexual, age, regional, and national identities of women as they restricted their own demographic representation of research interests. Focus on... the different ways in which race, class, and gender structure cultural institutions.
Stoller's work, Making Empire Respectable, The Politics of Race and Sexual Morality in the 20th Century Colonial Cultures in 1989, notes sexual behavior rules sanctioning or forbidding sexual relationships and marriage between colonialists and indigenous women, as well as laws prohibiting immigration of European women, were used to define and enforce class and racial boundaries in European colonies of Africa and Asia. In the 1990s, we see much greater multicultural focus with current feminist writing with three new trends or the third wave of feminists. Feminist theorists have called into question the anthropological canon as overall.
Why is what is taught the men rather than the women? Ruth Baer's Women Writing Culture in 1995. Some feminist anthropologists have led the discipline in emphasizing multivocality. That is giving. a voice to different points of view in ethnographic writing.
They question the objectivity of science and argue that anthropologists are not uniquely qualified interpreters of culture. Traditional anthropological writing distance authors from their subjects, and so they sought to remedy this. They encourage women of color to write about the cultures for themselves and challenge anthropologists to take into account the discriminations of racism, homophobia, sexism, and classism they claim are a part of the traditional ethnography.
African-American anthropologist Audre Lorde, who in a letter to Mary Daly wrote, I feel you celebrate the differences between white women as a creative force towards change, rather than the reason for misunderstanding and separation. But you fail to recognize that, as women, those differences expose all women to various forms and degrees of patriarchal oppression, some of which we share, some of which we do not. The oppression of women knows no ethnic or racial boundaries true, but that does not mean it is identical within those boundaries. Two, in the 1990s, some emphasized the experimentation with nontraditional forms of anthropological writing, claiming that all ways of knowing are subjective. Some authors offer works of poetry and fiction as new forms of ethnography.
We also see the emergence of autoethnography, works that take a combined approach to autobiographical information along with anthropological analysis. Eleanor Leacock was one of the primary scholars in the 1980s who looks at Marxist ideas, borrows heavily from Engels. She received her doctorate in 1952 from Columbia, was the chair at City College in New York, did work in Labrador in 1950 studies, and looked at how life was changed fairly dramatically due to the fur trade introduction.
She draws from Engels' The Origins of Private Property and Estate in her 1978 piece, Women's Status in Egalitarian Society, as well as implications. for social evolution. Again, Ingalls attributed the oppression of women to shifts and modes of production at the time of the Neolithic revolution.
According to Ingalls, once men had property, they desired to transmit them to offspring via patrilineal inheritance. Some of the critics and influence, the issue of non-white females, the issue of the focus on women, now gender in association with the feminist movement, the aura of radicalism, politics before impartial inquiry, so the issue of science, influence many things within Anthropology's day.