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12.6: New Directions in the Anthropology of Gender

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    More-recent research has been focused on improving the ethnographic and archaeological record by re-examining old material. Some have turned from cause-effect relationships to better understanding how gender systems work and focusing on a single culture or cultural region. Others have explored a single topic, such as menstrual blood, cultural concepts of masculinity and infertility across cultures.[86]

    Many American anthropologists “returned home,” looking with fresh eyes at the diversity of women’s lives in their own society: working-class women, immigrant women, women of various ethnic and racial groups, and women in different geographic regions and occupations.[87] Some ethnographers, for example, immersed themselves in the abortion debates, conducting fieldwork to understand the perspective and logic behind pro-choice and pro-life activists in North Dakota. Others headed to college campuses, studying the “culture of romance” or fraternity gang rape.[88] Peggy Sanday’s work on sexual coercion, including her cross-cultural study of rape-prone societies, was followed by other studies of power-coercion-gender relationships, such as using new reproductive technologies for selecting the sex of children.[89]

    Many previously unexplored areas such as the discourse around reproduction, representations of women in medical professions, images in popular culture, and international development policies (which had virtually ignored gender) came under critical scrutiny.[90] Others worked on identifying complex local factors and processes that produce particular configurations of gender and gender relations, such as the patrifocal (male-focused) cultural model of family in many parts of India.[91] Sexuality studies expanded, challenging existing binary paradigms, making visible the lives of lesbian mothers and other traditionally marginalized sexualities and identities.[92]

    The past virtual invisibility of women in archaeology disappeared as a host of new studies was published, often by feminist anthropologists, including a pioneering volume by Joan Gero and Margaret Conkey, Engendering Archaeology: Women and Prehistory. That book gave rise to a multi-volume series specifically on gender and archaeology edited by Sarah Nelson. Everything from divisions of labor to power relations to sexuality could be scrutinized in the archaeological record.[93]

    Some anthropologists argued that there are recurring patterns despite the complexity and variability of human gender systems. One is the impact of women’s economic contributions on their power, prestige, and autonomy.[94] Women’s work, alone, does not necessarily give them control or ownership of what they produce. It is not always valued and does not necessarily lead to political power. Women in many cultures engage in agricultural labor, but the fields are often owned and controlled by their husbands’ families or by a landlord, as in many parts of India and Iran.[95] The women have little authority, prestige, or autonomy.[96] Many foraging and some horticultural societies, on the other hand, recognize women’s economic and reproductive contributions, and that recognition may reflect relative equality in other spheres as well, including sexuality. Gender relations seem more egalitarian, overall, in small-scale societies such as the San, Trobrianders, and Na, in part because they are kinship-based, often with relatively few valuable resources that can be accumulated; those that exist are communally owned, usually by kinship groups in which both women and men have rights.

    Another factor in gender equality is the social environment. Positive social relations—an absence of constant hostility or warfare with neighbors—seems to be correlated with relatively egalitarian gender relations. In contrast, militarized societies—whether small-scale horticultural groups like the Sambia who perceive their neighbors as potential enemies or large-scale stratified societies with formal military organizations and vast empires—seem to benefit men more than women overall.[97] Warrior societies culturally value men’s roles, and warfare gives men access to economic and political resources.

    As to old stereotypes about why men are warriors, there may be another explanation. From a reproductive standpoint, men are far more expendable than women, especially women of reproductive age.[98] While this theme has not yet been taken up by many anthropologists, male roles in warfare could be more about expendability than supposed greater male strength, aggressiveness, or courage. One can ask why it has taken so long for women in the United States to be allowed to fly combat missions? Certainly, it is not about women not being strong enough to carry the plane.[99]

    Patriarchy . . . But What about Matriarchy?

    The rise of stratified agriculture-intensive centralized “states” has tended to produce transformations in gender relations and gender ideologies that some have called patriarchy, a male-dominated political and authority structure and an ideology that privileges males over females overall and in every strata of society. Gender intersects with class and, often, with religion, caste, and ethnicity. So, while there could be powerful queens, males took precedence over females within royal families, and while upper-class Brahmin women in India could have male servants, they had far fewer formal assets, power, and rights than their brothers and husbands. Also, as noted earlier, families strictly controlled their movements, interactions with males, “social reputations,” and marriages. Similarly, while twentieth-century British colonial women in British-controlled India had power over some Indian men, they still could not vote, hold high political office, control their own fertility or sexuality, or exercise other rights available to their male counterparts.[100] Of course, poor lower-class lower-caste Indian women were (and still are) the most vulnerable and mistreated in India, more so overall than their brothers, husbands, fathers, or sons.

    Definition: patriarchy

    A male-dominated political and authority structure and an ideology that privileges males over females overall and in every strata of society.

    On the other hand, while a form of matriarchy exists, we have yet to find female-dominated societies in which the extent and range of women’s power, authority, status, and privilege parallel men’s in patriarchal societies. In the twentieth century, some anthropologists at first confused “matriarchy” with matrilineal. In matrilineal societies, descent or membership in a kinship group is transmitted from mothers to their children (male and female) and then, through daughters, to their children, and so forth (as in many Na families). Matrilineal societies create woman-centered kinship groups in which having daughters is often more important to “continuing the line” than having sons, and living arrangements after marriage often center around related women in a matrilocal extended family household. Female sexuality may become less regulated since it is the mother who carries the “seed” of the lineage. In this sense, it is the reverse of the kinds of patrilineal, patrilocal, patrifocal male-oriented kinship groups and households one finds in many patriarchal societies. Peggy Sanday suggested, on these and other grounds, that the Minangkabau, a major ethnic group in Indonesia, is a matriarchy.[101]

    Ethnographic data have shown that males, especially as members of matrilineages, can be powerful in matrilineal societies. Warfare, as previously mentioned, along with political and social stratification can alter gender dynamics. The Nayar (in Kerala, India), the Minangkabau, and the Na are matrilineal societies embedded in, or influenced by, dominant cultures and patriarchal religions such as Islam and Hinduism. The society of the Na in China is also matrifocal in some ways. Thus, the larger context, including contemporary global processes, can undermine women’s power and status.[102] At the same time, though, many societies are clearly matrifocal, are relatively female-centered, and do not have the kinds of gender ideologies and systems found in most patriarchal societies.[103]


    NOTES

    1. See for example, Evelyn Blackwood. Webs of Power. Women, Kin, and Community in a Sumatran Village (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield. 2000); Marcia Inhorn, Infertility and Patriarchy: The Cultural Politics of Gender and Family Life in Egypt (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1996); Thomas Buckley and Alma Gottlieb, ed. Blood Magic. The Anthropology of Menstruation. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988); Marcia Inhorn, and Frank Van Balen, eds. Infertility around the Globe: New Thinking on Childlessness, Gender and Reproductive Technologies (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002).
    2. Johnnetta Cole, ed. All American Women: Lines That Divide, Ties That Bind (New York:Free Press, 1986).Louise Lamphere, Helena Ragone and Patricia Zavella, eds. Situated Lives: Gender and Culture in Everyday Life. (New York: Routledge, 1997).
    3. See for example, Faye Ginsburg. Contested Lives: The Abortion Debate in an American Community (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989); Dorothy Holland and Margaret Eisenhart. Educated in Romance. (Chicago: University of Chicago, 1990); Peggy Sanday, Fraternity Gang Rape: Sex, Brotherhood, and Privilege on Campus. (New York: New York University Press, 2007).
    4. Peggy Sanday, “The Socio-cultural Context of Rape: A Cross-cultural Study” Journal of Social Issues 37 no. 5 (1981): 5-27. See also Conrad Kottak, Cultural Anthropology. Appreciating Cultural Diversity (New York: McGraw Hill, 2013); Veena Das, Violence, Gender and Subjectivity, Annual Reviews of Anthropology 37 (2008):283-299; Tulsi Patel, ed. Sex-Selective Abortion in India. Gender, Society and New Reproductive Technologies (New Delhi, India: Sage Publications, 2007).
    5. Eleanor Leacock and Helen I. Safa, eds., Women's Work: Development and the Division of Labor by Gender (South Hadley, MA: Bergin & Garvey, 1986); Nandini Gunewardena and Ann Kingsolver, eds. The Gender of Globalization: Women Navigating Cultural and Economic Marginalities (Santa Fe, NM: School for Advanced Research Press, 2008); Kay B.Warren and Susan C. Bourque, “Women, Technology, and Development Ideologies. Frameworks and Findings,” in Sandra Morgen, ed. Critical Reviews for Research and Teaching (Washington, DC: American Anthropological Association Publication, 1989), 382-410.
    6. Carol C. Mukhopadhyay and Susan Seymour, ed. Women, Education and Family Structure in India (Boulder: Westview Press, 1994).
    7. Ellen Lewin, Lesbian Mothers: Accounts of Gender in American Culture (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. 1993).
    8. See Joan Gero and Margaret Conkey, ed. Engendering Archeology. Women and Prehistory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991); Sarah M. Nelson, Worlds of Gender. The Archeology of Women's Lives Around the Globe. (Lanham, MD: Altamira, 2007). See also earlier volumes. Rosemary A. Joyce, Ancient Bodies, Ancient Lives: Sex, Gender and Archeology (New York: Thames and Hudson, 2008); Barbara Voss, “Sexuality Studies in Archeology,” Annual Review of Anthropology 37 (2008): 317-336.
    9. The following analysis was developed by Mukhopadhyay in scholarly papers and in lecture notes.
    10. Mary E. Hegland, Days of Revolution: Political Unrest in an Iranian Village (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2015).
    11. This analysis was developed by Mukhopadhyay in scholarly papers and in lecture notes. An example of this pattern from Iran is Mary E. Hegland, Days of Revolution.
    12. Conrad Kottak, Cultural Anthropology. Appreciating Cultural Diversity.15th ed. (McGraw Hill, 2013).
    13. E. Friedl, Women and Men: An Anthropologist’s View; C. Mukhopadhyay and Patricia Higgins, “Anthropological Studies of the Status of Women Revisited: 1977–1987.” Annual Review of Anthropology 17 (1988): 461–495.
    14. One 1970s male pilot, when asked about why there were no women pilots, said, without thinking, “Because women aren’t strong enough to fly the plane!” He then realized what he’d said and laughed. From Mukhopadhyay, field notes, 1980.
    15. Ann Stoler, “Making Empire Respectable. The Politics of Race and Sexual Morality in Twentieth-century Colonial Cultures,” in Situated Lives. Gender and Culture in Everyday Life, ed. Louise Lamphere, H. Ragone, and P. Zavella, 373–399 (New York: Routledge, 1997).
    16. Peggy Sanday, Women at the Center: Life in a Modern Matriarchy (Cornell: Cornell University Press, 2002).
    17. Mukhopadhyay, lecture notes, Gender and Culture.
    18. See for instance Annette B. Weiner, The Trobrianders of Papua New Guinea; Martha Ward and Monica Edelstein, A World Full of Women; Carolyn B. Brettell and Carolyn F. Sargent, eds. Gender in Cross-Cultural Perspective.

    Adapted from

    "Gender and Sexuality" by Carol C. Mukhopadhyay, San Jose State University and Tami Blumenfield, Yunnan University with Susan Harper, Texas Woman’s University, and Abby Gondek. In Perspectives: An Open Invitation to Cultural Anthropology, 2nd Edition, Society for Anthropology in Community Colleges, 2020, under CC BY-NC 4.0.


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