Anthropology

Anthropology, a social science discipline, explores the multifaceted dimensions of human civilizations and is central to the modern way of understanding sex and gender in contemporary societies. During the nineteenth century, anthropology began to emerge as a separate academic discipline. By the mid-nineteenth century, social evolutionists argued that societies had evolved from the simple to the complex and from the chaotic to the orderly. Progress in society was desired, so simpler societies were seen as inferior. The most well-known evolutionary scheme used by social evolutionists, such as Edward Burnett Tylor (1832–1917), Herbert Spencer (1820–1903), and Lewis Henry Morgan (1818–1881), classified and ranked societies according to whether they existed in a primitive state or whether they had become civilized over time by virtue of the survival of the fittest. The evolutionary explanation was invoked to rationalize women's exclusion from the public realm and their subordinate position to men in Western society. Biological necessities rendered women physically and intellectually inferior to men. Male dominance was seen to have evolutionary origins grounded in the biological differences between the sexes.

EARLY-TWENTIETH-CENTURY ANTHROPOLOGY

By the beginning of the twentieth century, social evolutionary explanations of human social organization were replaced by the functionalist orientation, a leading school of thought in British anthropology. The functionalist orientation, espoused by Émile Durkheim (1858–1917), Bronis?aw Malinowski (1884–1942), and Alfred Reginald Radcliffe-Brown (1881–1955), viewed a society as a bounded whole with all of its practices and institutions working together harmoniously to fulfill individual needs or to sustain the society, and to ensure its continued existence over time. Although this approach to studying human behavior differed from social evolutionism, arguments about gender roles had not significantly changed. Edward E. Evans-Pritchard (1902–1973), a leading British functionalist, saw the differences between men and women to be based on "deep biological and psychological factors" (1965, p. 55). Anthropologists who used the functionalist point of view assumed that both women's exclusion from the public realm and male dominance were natural and necessary.

EARLY PIONEERS IN THE ANTHROPOLOGY OF WOMEN

American anthropology, when it established itself as a primary field of academic study, heavily emphasized culture instead of society. Therefore the two best known female anthropologists in the early twentieth century, Margaret Mead (1901–1978) and Ruth Benedict (1887–1948), focused on culture and personality. They both wrote about the crosscultural malleability of "natural" sex roles. Theoretical movements from the 1920s through to the 1960s ignored or naturalized sexual difference.

The early twentieth century brought about a rejection of generalizing theories such as social evolutionism and a desire for more critical systematic examination. Mead and Benedict, early pioneers in American anthropology, made significant contributions to the cross-cultural study of gender by using sophisticated ethnography and rigorous methodology. Mead was one of the first to discredit unsophisticated claims about the biological causes of sex differences with ethnographies, such as Coming of Age in Samoa (1928), about adolescent girls. She argued that individuals are born with the potential to develop whatever gender role society dictates. Mead and Benedict wrote about the cross-cultural malleability of "natural" sex roles. It was during this period of anthropological study up to the 1930s when cultural studies assumed that male dominance was natural and ignored sexual differences. Anthropologists such as Mead, Elizabeth Fernea, Susan Carol Rogers, and Annette Weiner claimed that the women being studied often enjoyed a higher status within their culture than was originally recorded, sometimes even higher than that of Western women. Mead's ethnography titled Sex and Temperament in Three Primitive Societies (1935) claimed that women in the Chambri tribe of Papua New Guinea were dominant with no specific effects on their society. This book became a cornerstone for the women's liberation movement. These figure's works, however, were not considered central to anthropology until feminist anthropologists of the 1970s established gender as pivotal to anthropological concerns.

Beginning in the 1950s an increasing part of academic literature and public discourse began using the term gender for the self-identified masculinity or femininity of a person. John Money first used the term in this context in 1955. In the late 1960s, the theory that the division of labor was based on sex/gender was put forward. Sherwood Washburn and Chet Lancaster (1968) advanced the "man-the-hunter" model of human evolution, stating that biology, psychology, and customs were what separated humans from apes. This model was used to explain gender roles, a biased model presuming that behaviors exclusive to men resulted in the evolution of all that is considered uniquely human. Sally Slocum (1975) seriously critiqued this model as problematic in its assumptions that emphasized hunting as the prime motivator in human evolution. The works of feminist archeologists such as Margaret Conkey and Janet Spector (1984) and Joan Gero (1985) have furthered Slocum's pioneering work by calling into question the traditional assumptions about prehistoric gender roles and pointing to the complexities involved in reconstructing gender relations in past societies.

Second-wave feminist Simone de Beauvoir (1908–1986), in The Second Sex (1949), argued that woman is the essential "other" to the male "self": "woman is made, not born," which both reinforces and reflects male power. Her social constructionism helped create the sex/gender dichotomy. Betty Friedan (1921–2006), in her best-selling book The Feminine Mystique (1963), was influential in igniting many women's awareness of inequality through the societal definitions of gender roles that restricted women to the home. Over the next few decades, North American society was questioned in terms of its assumptions about the biological differences between men and women that limited women's prospects. The discipline of anthropology, which had traditionally ignored the importance of gender, began to recognize its negligence regarding women in traditional social science investigations.

THE RISE OF FEMINIST ANTHROPOLOGY

When insights about gender roles and inequality arose in the 1970s, the discipline of "feminist anthropology" was born. The term gender as a category of analysis was introduced. Feminist research had demonstrated that what were then called sexual roles varied widely across cultures and therefore challenged the essentialist pronouncement that biology is destiny. Behaviors could not be reduced simply to the inevitable natural and universal fact of sex differences. Gender analysis transcends biological reductionism by interpreting the relationships between men and women as cultural constructs that result from imposing social, cultural, and psychological meanings on biological sexual identities. As a consequence it became necessary to distinguish between "gender" as a symbolic creation; "sex," which refers to the biological fact of being male or female; and "sexuality," which concerns sexual preferences and behavior. But the development of gender theory has not led to an agreement on the concept of gender itself. Although gender stands for socially defined relationships between men and women, its political meaning and implications are not always clear.

The early phase of feminist anthropology produced a wide range of studies that concentrated on identifying the position and status of women cross-culturally. By looking at how traditional anthropology viewed women, feminist anthropologists uncovered a wide range of variation in gender roles, in the values placed on activities performed by men and women, and in men's and women's access to important societal resources. As a result, they were able to expose biases in earlier anthropological studies and expose how male-centered perspectives had helped create a distorted depiction. Feminist anthropologists not only corrected ethnographic records but also questioned biological determinist accounts of gender. They argued that variation in the roles and status of men and women uncovered by their studies suggested that gender might not be determined by biology. As a result, assumptions about gender differences that underpinned women's inequality in their own society began to be questioned.

Feminist anthropologists write about the variation in gender roles to symbolize their concerns with both sexes and the culturally and temporally changeable relationships of gender roles between men and women. Gender can be understood as the meanings that a particular society gives to the physical or biological traits that differentiate males from females. These meanings provide the individuals of a society with views about how to act, what to believe, and how to make sense of their experiences. Feminist anthropology has made important contributions to assessing the validity of the notions about the inherent differences between men and women that prevail in the United States and other Western societies. Because gender constructs are cultural understandings of physical differences, they are open to alteration.

Although the focus of gender as a cultural construct had begun, there was little agreement among feminist anthropologists as to the best way to conceptualize and understand gender roles and inequality. By 1974 a new school of thought emerged, put forward by Nancy Chodorow, Sherry B. Ortner, Michelle Zimbalist Rosaldo, and Louise Lamphere, which held that gender was constructed by social and cultural factors. Ortner argued that the subordination of women was based on cultural ideologies and symbols. Rosaldo researched the notion that women frequently participate in behavior that limit them, and therefore, one must look at the overall system. Rayna R. Reiter (1975) found that at least some of the time the sexes were treated equally in primitive cultures that were free of Western bias, and that the universal subordination of women was not necessarily a social structure. She concluded that the gender asymmetry that does exist in many societies is caused by differences in power, class, and production. In 1975 Betty Freidl founded another school of thought known as comparative analysis. Freidl argued that women's roles changed to adapt to changes in the technology within society such as agriculture and industry as well as to specializations in the labor force.

Jane Fishburne Collier and Sylvia Junko Yanagisako (1987) expanded Rosaldo's work by analyzing gender forming through hierarchy. Henrietta L. Moore (1988) attempted to compose a theoretical understanding of previous work done in anthropology. Moore outlined three types of male bias that flawed previous anthropological research and theory: the bias inherent in the anthropologist's own beliefs, the bias inherent in the culture being studied, and the bias brought about by the anthropologist's tendency to theorize from Western standards. Anthropologists often take for granted that the asymmetrical relationships of men and women in other cultures are similar to the hierarchical nature of gender relations in Western society. Thus male biases cause the anthropologist to overlook important social structures in which women play a role. Moore asserts that feminist anthropology has made an outstanding contribution to anthropology by developing theories relating to gender identity and the cultural construction of gender.

THE EMERGENCE OF THE ANTHROPOLOGY OF GENDER

The early feminist approach to the anthropological study of women, concerned with the revision of Western cultural assumptions, was put aside by certain women who considered it exclusionary because they did not feel that the category of woman represented them. The issue of race is subsumed within the argument of gender difference. The new phase of feminist anthropology focuses on gender and culture, but also places gender in relation to the historical and material circumstances in which gender, race, ethnicity, class, religion, and socioeconomic status interconnect and interact on a daily basis. The anthropological study of gender challenges the earlier arguments of biological essentialism and surpasses it by analyzing the ways cultures construct differences between women and men.

This new anthropological approach includes critiques regarding white middle-class feminism by women of color and lesbians, who began focusing on social inequalities. The anthropological publication This Bridge Called My Back (first published in 1981), has demanded that feminist anthropologists reevaluate the ways in which First World women have unselfconsciously constructed a cultural other in their images of "Third World" or "minority" women. It underscored the importance of creating new alliances among women that would acknowledge differences of race, class, sexual orientation, educational privilege, religion, and nationality. This new approach recognizes the inextricable relationship of culture to politics, economics, and history. Roger N. Lancaster and Micaela di Leonardo (1997) argue that sexuality and gender are intimately connected to the social construction of race and political economy. This reexamination has led feminist anthropologists to uncover the fact that ethnography is itself deeply gendered and situated within relations of power and subordination. It has raised the question of who has the right to write culture (portraying people through the process of cultural representation, which has now become contestable) for whom. It was also during this time that men, within what became known as the "anthropology of men," began to look at the term man in a similar manner as feminists had been evaluating woman.

The anthropological study of gender has become much more sophisticated and diversified since the 1970s with the development of gender studies, expanding to include such theoretical orientations as postmodernism, poststructuralism, and postcolonialism. di Leonardo's edited work Gender at the Crossroads of Knowledge (1991) investigates gender and power in terms of how relations of production and reproduction are organized in a society and programmed into cultural categories. She states that some feminist scholars have a tendency to define feminist theory as a totality in literary poststructuralist terms, which in turn ignores all of material, social life and leaves out of the equation any means for justifying a feminist-theoretical stance. Although feminist anthropology has itself been critiqued for mirroring the andocentric bias derived from male ethnographers studying men, the field has attempted to address the issue by focusing more broadly on the issue of gender and moving away from an exclusive "anthropology of women."

Research in the "anthropology of gender" in the United States has put an emphasis on the body. Peggy Reeves Sanday (1990) looked at power relationships through rape and argued that the relationship between the sexes had to be explored in terms of conflict and tension, which are at the heart of daily life in many societies. Emily Martin (1997), in a somewhat separate manner, investigated physical science's stereotypes in both its research and its discourse to illustrate how women's biological processes were considered less worthy than those of men. Contemporary research goes beyond including the female voice—it analyzes current and pressing issues such as gender divisions in the labor force, child care, reproductive rights and technologies, pornography, the politics of family values, identity politics, violence and aggression, female genital modification, and motherhood, to name just a few.

Cultures are no longer bounded entities, and cultural entities cannot be mapped onto geographical territories without problems ensuing. Because of globalization and growing relationships between societies, the anthropology of gender's concerns with diversity and difference will continue to steadily develop in the next few decades. As Lancaster and di Leonardo so eloquently express it, "feminism, gay studies, race research, and historical political economy, working together on global materials, enable us to unfasten the intellectual straitjackets binding us as we rethink carnal knowledge, as we work to embody liberatory meanings for all humanity" (1991, p. 7).

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                                            Rubina Ramji