Gender and Social Stratification
Gender and Anthropology
• interest in hierarchical relations between
men and women has been a feature of
anthropology since its earliest days
• 19th century evolutionists and their
explanations for the rise of culture
• promiscuous horde gives way to socially
organized marriage and kinship, for
example
Gender and Anthropology
• anthropology of gender has been key in
establishing that sexual inequality is not a
biological fact but instead and cultural and
historical one
development of the study of sex,
sexuality and gender in
anthropology
• Anthropology of Women early 1970's attention
to the lack of women in standard ethnographies
• Anthropology of Gender challenged the basis
for understanding social roles of male and
female
• Feminist Anthropology challenged the
biological basis of sex and sexuality
– and the foundations of anthropology as it had been
done
SEX, SEXUALITY, GENDER
• not the same thing
• all societies distinguish between males
and females
• a very few societies recognize a third,
sexually intermediate category
SEX
• differences in biology
• Socially & culturally marked
• the body is "simultaneously a physical and
symbolic artifact, both naturally and
culturally produced, anchored in a
particular historical moment" (ScheperHughes & Lock)
The “Four Bodies”
•
•
•
•
Individual body
The social body
The body politic
The mindful body
The Individual Body
• lived experience of the body-self, body,
mind, matter, psyche, soul
The Social Body
• representational uses of the body as a
natural symbol with which to think about
nature, society, culture
The Body Politic
• regulation, surveillance, & control of
bodies (individual & collective) in
reproduction & sexuality, in work & leisure,
in sickness & other forms of deviance
The Mindful Body
• the most immediate, the proximate terrain
where social truths and social
contradictions are played out
• a locus of personal and social resistance,
creativity, and struggle
• emotions form the mediatrix between the
individual, social and political body, unified
through the concept of the 'mindful body.'
SEXUALITY (reproduction)
• all societies regulate sexuality
– lots of variation cross-culturally
• degree of restrictiveness not always
consistent through life span
– adolescence vs. adulthood
• Varieties of “normative” sexual orientation
– Heterosexual, homosexual, transexual
• Sexuality in societies change over time
GENDER
• GENDER - the cultural construction of
male & female characteristics
– vs. the biological nature of men & women
• SEX differences are biological - GENDER
differences are cultural
• behavioral & attitudinal differences from
social & cultural rather than biological
point of view
GENDER ROLES, STEREOTYPES,
STRATIFICATION
• gender roles - tasks & activities that a culture
assigns to sexes
• gender stereotypes - oversimplified strongly
held ideas about the characteristics of men &
women & third sex-third gender
• gender stratification - unequal distribution of
rewards (socially valued resources, power,
prestige, personal freedom) between men &
women reflecting their position in the social
hierarchy
universals versus particulars
• universal subordination of women is often
cited as one of the true cross-cultural
universals, a pan-cultural fact
– Engels called it the “world historical defeat of
women”
• even so the particulars of women’s roles,
statuses, power, and value differ
tremendously by culture
Friedl and Leacock argument
• variation among foragers
• male dominance is based on exchange,
public exchange
• versus that exchanged privately by women
• Exchange of scarce resources in
egalitarian societies, gender stratification,
and universal subordination of women
DOMESTIC - PUBLIC
DICHOTOMY (M. Rosaldo)
• opposition between domestic (reproduction)
& public (production) provides the basis of a
framework necessary to identify and explore
the place of male & female in psycho,
cultural, social and economic aspects of life
• degree to which the contrast between public
domestic (private) sphere is drawn promotes
gender stratification-rewards, prestige, power
domestic sphere
• clearly drawn in societies where division of
labor encompasses more than age & sex
differentiation (complex societies)
• inequality in material rewards for labor
• less clearly drawn in societies where
division of labor beyond age & sex is
minimal (egalitarian)
• rewards are highly valued social roles with
prestige rather than material goods
Domestic : Public Spheres
• mobility & gender
• Domestic : public dichotomy not only
distinguishes activities, but culturally
encodes space
M. Rosaldo and the Ilongot of the
Philippines
• positive cultural value placed adventure,
travel, knowledge of & experience with the
outside world
• Ilongot men as headhunters visited distant
places, amassed experiences & returned
to express their knowledge-receive
acclaim
• Ilongot women - these activities not
available to them
Mobility, Public : Domestic
(Private), and Gender Straitification
• mobility not just through geographic space
but social space (forms of association)
• veiling & Islamic women
• factory women in Malaysia
• US & Canada - WW2 & factory women for
war effort
• 1960s, 70s, 80s - changing gender
composition of economy
persistence of dualisms in
ideologies of gender
• a particular view of men and women as
opposite kinds of creatures both
biologically and culturally
• nature/culture
• domestic/public
• reproduction/production
Reproduction and Social Roles
• roles - those minimal institutions and
modes of activity that are organized
immediately around one or more mothers
and their children
• women everywhere lactate & give birth to
children
• likely to be associated with child rearing &
responsibilities of the home
Production and Social Roles
• roles - activities, institutions, and forms of
association that link, rank, organize, or
subsume particular mother-child groups
a long running controversy in
anthropology
• Sherry Ortner’s famous article “Is
Female to Male as Nature is to Culture”
• argument is that across cultures, women
are more often associated with nature and
the natural and are therefore denigrated
• Ortner - in reality women are no further nor
closer to nature than men - cultural
valuations make women appear closer to
nature than men
The “Third Gender”
• essentialism of western ideas of sexual
dimorphism - dichotomized into natural & then
moral entities of male & female that are given to
all persons, one or the other
• committed western view of sex and gender as
dichotomous, ascribed, unchanging
• other categories - every society including our
own is at some time or other faced with people
who do not fit into its sex & gender categories
The “Third Gender”
• a significant number of people are born
with genitalia that is neither clearly male or
female
– Hermaphrodites
• persons who change their biological sex
• persons who exhibit behavior deemed
appropriate for the opposite sex
• persons who take on other gender roles
other than those indicated by their genitals
Third Gender: Western Bias
• multiple cultural & historical worlds in which people
of divergent gender & sexual desire exist
– margins or borders of society
• may pass as normal to remain hidden in the official
ideology & everyday commerce of social life
• when discovered - iconic matter out of place "monsters of the cultural imagination“
• third gender as sexual deviance a common theme
in US
– evolution & religious doctrine
– heterosexuality the highest form, the most moral way of
life, its natural
Third Gender Cross-Culturally
• provokes us to reexamine our own
assumptions regarding our gender system
• emphasizes gender role alternatives as
adaptations to economic and political
conditions rather than as "deviant" and
idiosyncratic behavior
• rigid dichotomozation of genders is a means
of perpetuating the domination of females by
males and patriarchal institutions.
THEORIES OF GENDER
INEQUALITY
F. Engels
• theory of the origin of female subordination
• tied to the male control of wealth
• built on 19th cent. assumption of communal
societies as matrilineal
• men overthrew matrilineality & formed
patriarchal family leading to monogamous family
• differential ownership of wealth led to inequality
within the family & thus between the sexes
• gender differences arose from technological
developments that led to changes in relations of
production
E. Leacock - (expands on Engels)
• subjugation of women due to breakdown of
communal ownership of property & isolation of
individual family as economic unit
• transformation of relations of production
– Association of female labor with domestic unit or
private sphere
• male production directed towards distribution
outside the domestic group (public sphere)
• occurs with development of private property &
class society
K. Sacks
• political power that results from the ability
to give & receive goods in exchange
(redistribution)
• allows for sexual stratification in non-class
societies
Sanday Reeves
• female status dependent on degree to
which men & women participate in
activities of reproduction, warfare,
subsistence
Friedl and Leacock
• not rights & control over production but
rights of distribution & control over
channels of distribution critical for gender
stratification
RETHINKING SUBORDINATION
• Ardener - muted models that underlie male
discourse
• diversity of one life or many lives
• gender roles, stereotypes, stratification
– changes over time
– changes with position in lifecycle
– status of men & women i.e. in male dominant
societies
• decision making roles belong to men but as
women reach menopause; change with marriage
status, virgins, wives, widows (and men)
RETHINKING SUBORDINATION
• women, like men, are social actors who work in
structured ways to achieve desired ends
• formal authority structure of a society may
declare that women are impotent & irrelevant
• but attention to women's strategies & motives,
sorts of choices, relationships established, ends
achieved indicates women have good deal of
power
• strategies appear deviant & disruptive
– actual components of how social life proceeds