Sex, Gender and the Body: Cross-Cultural Approaches to
the Body, Gender, Sexuality and Kinship
ANTH2170 – Fall/Winter 2011/2012 – Karen McGarry
Lecture 2 – Evolutionary Myths – Sept 14
Introduction to Anthropology
- Only dates to the late 1800s in Europe and North America.
- The study of humanity across time and space.
o Across time – human behaviour and ways of life.
- Humanity – interested in human-like ancestors – from apes and monkeys to
Homo sapiens.
- This course is in the social/cultural anthropology field.
- There are four sub-category fields: archeology, physical/biological anthropology,
linguistic and socio/cultural anthropology.
Archaeologists
- Study past human societies, primarily through analyzing material culture
(artefacts, architecture).
o Material culture – things that are made or modified by humans.
 Artefacts are portable material culture.
 Food.
o Examine things that get left behind – your trash – from past societies.
o If they are examining a society where documents are available, they will
use those forms to get information alongside artefacts.
Physical/Biological Anthropology
- Study human and animal bodies as physical entities. They are interested in
things such as:
o Human evolution – hominids.
 Hominids include humans and their bipedal ancestors.
 E.g. Neanderthals.
o Primatology – e.g. Jane Goodall
 Interested in studying chimps, monkeys, etc.
 In an effort to reconstruct human evolution.
o Forensic analysis of skeletal material
 Study bones.
 Able to confer the sex of an individual, the sex of the individual and
when they passed away.
o Disease patterns in past societies.
 Cultural behaviours that might influence disease in a particular
society.
 Compare patterns in different levels of a population – elite vs.
working class.
Linguistics
-
Study language in the past and present societies. They are interested in such
issues as:
o Language acquisition.
o Language evolution and change.
 What historical influences can cause a language to change over
time?
o Identity and language
 How is it a marker of gender in some cases?
 Do men and women speak differently in a society?
 How is class manifested in language?
Socio/Cultural Anthropology
- Study of contemporary human societies throughout the world.
o Politics, economics, religion, identities (gender, class, race), globalization,
etc.
o Tend to specialize.
o Ethnographic fieldwork.
 Emerging yourself within the culture you are studying.
 Participant observation – living with a particular group of people
and participating in daily tasks or chores.
 Long term interaction in engagement with a group of people.
 Usually a year or more. Minimum 1 year in the field is
considered norm.
o In this course:
 We are going to study anthropologists that study the body and
issues of the family.
Vocabulary:
- Culture – Sets of learned behaviours acquired by people as members of the
society. These behaviours are transmitted by various agents of enculturation.
o Thus, culture is shared, learned and dynamic.
 Not something you are born with.
 Includes learned behaviours such as table manners, issues of
religion, how we adorn our bodies, food, politics.
 Dynamic in the sense that it’s constantly changing. We learn culture
through different mechanisms.
 We learn about it through media, parents, family members, school
system, etc.
- Cultural relativism – the process of understanding another culture or another
group of people from their own perspective.
o Cultural relativism to battle pervasive ethnocentric attitudes in society.
o Trying to avoid the tendency to view your culture as the ‘right way’ or a
superior way to someone else’s.
o Trying not to pass judgement on other people’s belief system.
- Ethnocentrisms – the belief that your way of life or way of thinking is superior to
someone else’s/another person’s/a group’s.
-
o The period from 1492 onward – when the Europeans thought that the
natives were below them.
o Racism
Ethnographic fieldwork – based primarily on long term, qualitative research.
Nature vs. Nurture
- Scholars who argue that behaviours are the result of nurture or environmental
factors.
- In later 1800’s science and social scientists, the nature vs. nurture began and is
still on-going.
- The idea that our behaviours can be result of nature or nurture.
- It’s possible and probably that many human behaviours are the result of these
two (nature and nurture).
Nature
- The idea that biological, genetics and hereditary factors are the principle factors
that shape who we are.
- This is obviously the case for many phenotypic variations (physical traits like hair,
eye and skin colour).
o Nurture – abstract traits – sexual orientation, personality, etc.
- Sociobiology
o Scientists who claim that nature or genes control most of our human
behaviours.
o Theoretical orientation.
Problems with ‘Nature’:
- Eugenics: manipulating human genes to ‘improve’ a population’s gene pool.
- Sir Francis Galton, 1873.
Anthropological Positions:
- While most anthropologists tend to be sceptical of sociobiology and place more
emphasis upon cultural/environmental explanations, our goal is NOT to prove
that behaviours are natural or cultural. Rather, we are interested in the politics of
sociobiology. What are people so interested and motivated to seek scientific
explanations for human behaviour?
Nurture:
- The idea that cultural factors and learned phenomena, via processes of
enculturation, are the primary determinants of who we are.
- Sex vs. gender – source of many heated debates surrounding nature/nurture
issues.
o Sex – referring to biological attributes. Born with.
o Gender – is something we learn. How we learn culturally appropriate
behaviours according to our sex.
-
Gender is not universal. Men and women in our culture vs. other societies, may
have different patterns of dress and they have different expectations onto what
constitutes appropriate behaviours.
o Example:
 Are men/women hardwired/programmed to act in certain ways and
take on certain roles in society?
 Early 1900 – the ideal in North American society, the men bring
money home and women cook and clean and look after women.
Margaret Mead, 1901-1978
- Wrote ‘Sex and Temperament’ based upon her ethnographic study of gender
roles in three societies along Sepik River, Papua New Guinea.
o Gender expectations were different than in the expectations of the
American society.
o Society 1 – the ideal was that men stay home, look after children, cook
food, and women were responsible for attending to crops and hunting
small animals.
o She claims that nature plays roles in gender and in society. Gender is
learned.
- Are gender roles the result of ‘nature’?
Evolutionary Theories:
- Are often appropriated/misappropriated to justify the ‘naturalness’ of human
behaviour or gendered systems.
Evolution and the Nature/Nurture Debate
- Charles Darwin – ‘origin of species’ in 1859 based upon his voyage on HMS
beagle.
- Natural selection – most ‘fit’ organisms, those best adapted to their environment,
survive and pass on genes.
- Lead to the problematic assumption that: some groups of people (not organisms)
are most ‘fit than others; some are more evolved than others’.
Lewis Henry Morgan
- Ethnocentrically positioned all human societies into one of three categories:
o Savagery – societies that did not have agriculture, societies that moved
around in search of food.
o Barbarism – held by the advent of agriculture – he saw this progressive
because it meant that people were more like his society – it meant that
they stayed in the same spot for a long time to develop houses and
storage systems.
o Civilization – marked by writing and art and technology.
Herbert Spencer
- Patrilineal, patriarchal societies were ‘more evolved’ than others.
-
o Patrilineal – society ruled mostly by men – followed in the male family line
– everything is descendent through the male line – e.g. If a male died, it
would only be acceptable for him to leave his things to a male in the family
(i.e. son).
o Patriarchal – male dominanted, men were in control.
British society versus Iroquois (NE North America) – matrilineal.
o Matrilineal – inheritance is passed down through the female line, men are
continued to take an active part in their mother’s households. Women
have a lot of political control.
Criticism:
- Franz Boas
- Supporter of ‘nurture’ paradigms and cultural relativism.
Washburn and Lancaster Argued:
- That bipedalism led to:
o Hands free
o Tools can be made, which increased brain size.
o Large animals can be hunted/slaughtered.
o Hunting parties – needed language to communicate as a group.
More:
- We live in a culture that naturalizes culture. We think that our behaviour is natural
as opposed to learned. We think our behaviours have a biological basis to them.
- Why are we so attracted to natural/biological/genetic models to explain
behaviour?