Woman, Culture, and Society - Softcover

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0804708517 ISBN 13: 9780804708517

Verlag: STANFORD UNIV PR, 1974

Inhaltsangabe

Sixteen women anthropologists analyze the place of women in human societies, treating as problematic certain questions and observations that in the past have been ignored or taken for granted, and consulting the anthropological record for data and theoretical perspectives that will help us to understand and change the quality of women's lives.

The first three essays address the question of human sexual asymmetry. Recognizing that men's and women's spheres are typically distinguished and that anthropologists have often slighted the powers and values associated with the woman's world, these essays examine the evidence for asymmetrical valuations of the sexes across a range of cultures and ask how these valuations can be explained. Explanations are sought not in biological "givens" of human nature, but in universal patterns of human, social, psychological, and cultural experience-patterns that, presumably, can be changed.

The remaining papers explore women's roles in a wide variety of social systems. By showing that women, like men, are social actors seeking power, security, prestige, and a sense of worth and value, these papers demonstrate the inadequacies of conventionally male-oriented accounts of social structure. They illuminate the strategies by which women in different cultures achieve a surprising degree of political power and social recognition; and investigate, from case-oriented and comparative perspectives, the social-structural, legal, psychological, economic, ritual, mythological, and metaphorical factors that account for variation in women's lives.

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Michelle Zimbalist Rosaldo is Assistant Professor at Stanford University.Louise Lamphere is Assistant Professor at Brown University.

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Sixteen women anthropologists analyze the place of women in human societies, treating as problematic certain questions and observations that in the past have been ignored or taken for granted, and consulting the anthropological record for data and theoretical perspectives that will help us to understand and change the quality of women's lives.

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Woman, Culture, and Society

Stanford University Press

Copyright © 1974 Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8047-0851-7

Contents

Introduction MICHELLE ZIMBALIST ROSALDO AND LOUISE LAMPHERE...................................................1Woman, Culture, and Society: A Theoretical Overview MICHELLE ZIMBALIST ROSALDO................................17Family Structure and Feminine Personality NANCY CHODOROW......................................................43Is Female to Male as Nature Is to Culture? SHERRY B. ORTNER...................................................67Women in Politics JANE FISHBURNE COLLIER......................................................................89Strategies, Cooperation, and Conflict Among Women in Domestic Groups LOUISE LAMPHERE..........................97Sex Roles and Survival Strategies in an Urban Black Community CAROL B. STACK..................................113Matrifocality in Indonesia and Africa and Among Black Americans NANCY TANNER..................................129Chinese Women: Old Skills in a New Context MARGERY WOLF.......................................................157Madam Yoko: Ruler of the Kpa Mende Confederacy CAROL P. HOFFER................................................173Female Status in the Public Domain PEGGY R. SANDAY............................................................189Engels Revisited: Women, the Organization of Production, and Private Property KAREN SACKS.....................207Women in Groins: Ijaw Women's Associations NANCY B. LEIS......................................................223Sex and Power in the Balkans BETTE S. DENICH..................................................................243The Myth of Matriarchy: Why Men Rule in Primitive Society JOAN BAMBERGER......................................263The Mastery of Work and the Mystery of Sex in a Guatemalan Village LOIS PAUL..................................281Mediation of Contradiction: Why Mbum Women Do Not Eat Chicken BRIDGET O'LAUGHLIN..............................301References Cited...............................................................................................321Index..........................................................................................................343

Chapter One

Woman, Culture, and Society: A Theoretical Overview

As anthropologists looking at the roles and activities of women, we are confronted, from the outset, with an apparent contradiction. On the one hand, we learn from the work of Mead and others of the extraordinary diversity of sex roles in our own and other cultures. And on the other, we are heirs to a sociological tradition that treats women as essentially uninteresting and irrelevant, and accepts as necessary, natural, and hardly problematic the fact that, in every human culture, women are in some way subordinate to men.

The purpose of this paper is to develop a perspective that at once incorporates earlier observations while at the same time suggesting systematic dimensions within which the social relations of the sexes can be investigated and understood. After a brief discussion of variation, I attempt to document aspects of what I take to be a universal asymmetry in cultural evaluations of the sexes. Women may be important, powerful, and influential, but it seems that, relative to men of their age and social status, women everywhere lack generally recognized and culturally valued authority. The secondary evaluation of women can be approached from a number of perspectives. Here, rather than put forth a single causal explanation, I propose a structural model that relates recurrent aspects of psychology and cultural and social organization to an opposition between the "domestic" orientation of women and the extra-domestic or "public" ties that, in most societies, are primarily available to men. This approach, developed further in some of the other papers in this volume, enables us to make sense of a number of very general characteristics of human sex roles and to identify certain strategies and motivations, as well as sources of value and power, that are, available to women in different human groups. As such, it provides an introduction to the various "sources of power" for women that are treated in detail later in this book.

Asymmetries in Cultural Evaluations of the Sexes

The fact that what Westerners take to be the "natural" endowments of men and women are hardly necessary, natural, or universal (as an ethnocentric perspective might lead one to expect) was first emphasized in the work of Margaret Mead. In her words, "If those temperamental attitudes which we have traditionally regarded as feminine-such as passivity, responsiveness, and a willingness to cherish children-can so easily be set up as the masculine pattern in one tribe, and, in another, be outlawed for the majority of women as for the majority of men, we no longer have any basis for regarding aspects of such behavior as sex linked" (1935: 279-80). And to some extent Mead was right. There are, in fact, groups like the New Guinea Arapesh, in which neither sex shows much aggression or assertiveness, and there are societies like our own, in which children of both sexes are more egoistic than boys in other parts of the world (Chodorow, 1971). The same sort of variability attaches to almost every kind of behavior one can think of: there are societies in which women trade or garden, and those in which men do; societies where women are queens and those in which they must always defer to a man; in parts of New Guinea, men are (like Victorian women) at once prudish and flirtatious, fearful of sex yet preoccupied with love magic and cosmetics that will lead the maidens-who take the initiative in courtship-to be interested in them.

But there are also limits to variation. Every known society recognizes and elaborates some differences between the sexes, and although there are groups in which men wear skirts and women wear pants or trousers, it is everywhere the case that there are characteristic tasks, manners, and responsibilities primarily associated with women or with men. Cross-cultural studies of child rearing (Barry, Bacon, and Child, 1957) reveal certain temperamental differences between the sexes, and studies of adults indicate that it is women, and not men, who have the primary responsibility for raising children; this fact seems to make it unlikely that women will be a society's hunters, warriors, or the like (Brown, 1970b). Differences in physical constitution, and especially in endurance and strength, may also lead to characteristic differences in male and female activities.

But what is perhaps most striking and surprising is the fact that male. as opposed to female, activities are always recognized as predominantly important, and cultural systems give authority and value to the roles and activities of men. Contrary to some popular assumptions, there is little reason to believe that there are, or once were, societies of primitive matriarchs, societies in which women predominated in the same way that men predominate in the societies we actually know (see Bamberger, this volume). An asymmetry in the cultural evaluations of male and female, in the importance assigned to women and men, appears to be universal. Mead recognized this in observing that "whatever the arrangements in regard to descent or ownership of property, and even if these formal outward arrangements are reflected in the temperamental relations between the sexes, the prestige values always attach to the activities of men" (1935: 302)

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Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: STANFORD UNIV PR
• Erscheinungsdatum: 1974
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0804708517
• ISBN 13: 9780804708517
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 366
• Herausgeber: Rosaldo Michelle Zimbalist, Lamphere Louise
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Mare Nostrum Group B.V.; gpsr@mare-nostrum.co.uk; ; Doelen 72; Breda; 4831 GR; Niederlande