24 Feminism in Anthropology II

Naila Ansari

epgp books

 

Table of Content

  • Introduction
  • Waves of Feminist Anthropology
  • Three Waves of Feminism
  • Radical Feminism
  • Models of Feminism
  • Liberal Feminism
  • Socialist-Marxist Feminism
  • Radical Feminism
  • Psycho Analytical Feminism
  • Existential Feminism
  • Individual Feminism
  • Cultural Feminism
  • Post-modern Feminism
  • Relative or Rational feminism
  • Points of Reaction
  • Leading Figures
  • Ruth Benedict
  • Margaret Mead
  • Eleanor Leacock
  • Louise Lamphere
  • Sherry Ortner
  • Margaret Conkey
  • Nancy Scheper Hughes
  • Gayle Rubin
  • Lila Abu Lughod
  • Principal Concepts
  • Methodologies
  • Contribution of Feminist Anthropology
  • Psychoanalysis and feminism
  • Criticisms
  • Summary

 

Learning Objective

  • To able to define the concept and characteristics Feminism anthropology
  • To probes into the Emergence of Feminist Anthropology
  • To able to define the major contemporary anthropological theories, which analyzes the status of women and men in society

 

Introduction

 

Feminism anthropology is a discipline developed from an organic integration of feminist analysis and anthropological pursuit, which aims to eliminate the insufficiency and the partiality of both. Feminism anthropology is not restricted within the women’s study but expanded to the study of gender, gender relationship, which includes men. This discipline, strives to construct a vision of humanity from the perspectives of men and women. It is perhaps ironic to highlight a dissonance between feminism and anthropology, for anthropology is sometimes singled out for the extent to which it has been affected by feminist thinking. Drawing on their perception that women, including themselves, had been silenced and subordinated in many cultural domains but, especially the realm of the public, early feminist anthropologists sought to make women visible in the ethnographic record and in their own worlds; the field has moved from being an anthropology of women to an anthropology of gender, and finally, in its present form, primarily a feminist anthropology.

 

Waves of Feminist Anthropology

 

There are three waves of feminist anthropology, just as there are multiple waves of feminism in general. However, these waves are not strictly chronological, with one ending as the other began. In fact, theories from second wave feminist anthropology are still relevant today despite theories from third wave anthropology.

 

Three Waves of Feminism

  • The history of feminism is often described in three temporal waves.
  • This concept originated with the Irish activist Frances Power Cobbe in 1884 who shared that movements “resemble the tides of the ocean, where each wave obeys one more uniform impetus, and carries the waters onward and upward along the shore”.
  • When viewing feminism through the metaphor of a wave, it is important to understand that this idea of uniform and monolithic waves is often reductive and ignores multiple and often simultaneous movements within and across race, ethnicity, nationality, class, etc. As such, it disregards bravery of women around the globe prior to the nineteenth century
  1. The first wave, from 1850 to 1920, sought primarily to include women’s voices in ethnography. What little ethnographic data concerning women that existed was often, in reality, the reports of male informants transmitted through male ethnographers.
  2. The second wave, from 1920 to 1980, moved into academic spheres and separated the notion of sex from that of gender, both of which previously had been used interchangeably. Gender was used to refer to both the male and the female, the cultural construction of these categories, and the relationship between them. The definition of gender may vary from culture to culture, and this realization has led feminist anthropologists away from broad generalizations. In addition, second wave feminist anthropologists rejected the idea of inherent dichotomies such as male/female and work/home. Trends in research of this wave developed along a materialistic perspective. Marxist theories about social relations made research about women, reproduction, and production popular. Several of the scholars who follow this perspective focus on gender as it relates to class, the social relations of power, and changes in modes of production.
  3. Contemporary feminist anthropologists constitute the theory’s third wave, which began in the 1980s. Feminist anthropologists no longer focus solely on the issue of gender asymmetry, as this leads to neglect in fields of anthropology such as archaeology and physical anthropology. Instead, feminist anthropologists now acknowledge differences through categories such as class, race, ethnicity, and so forth. Archaeology lags behind cultural anthropology, however, since the differences between sex and gender were not considered until the late 1980s and early 1990s.The focus of contemporary scholars in third wave feminist anthropology is the differences existing among women rather than between males and females.

 

However, this also encourages considerations of what categories such as age, occupation, religion, status, and so on mean and how they interact, moving away from the issue of male and female. Power is a critical component of feminist anthropology analysis, since it constructs and is constructed by identity. Studies include those that focus on production and work, reproduction and sexuality, and gender and the state. This has resulted in a highly fragmented theoretical approach, which is necessary in its growth since it is based on a fragmented subject.

 

Radical Feminism

  • Radical feminism is the second most notable form of feminism.
  • Radical feminists think liberal feminist perspectives are not drastic enough to address the centuries of individual, institutional, and systemic oppression that have ensued.
  • This can be further deconstructed into two types:
  • Libertarian radical feminism focuses on personal freedom of expression but also turns to androgyny as an option.
  • Cultural radical feminism expressly argues that the root cause of the problem is not femininity, but the low value that patriarchy assigns to feminine qualities. If society placed a higher value on feminine qualities, then there would be less gender oppression. In this way, the volume should be ‘turned up’ on all forms of gender expression – androgyny, femininity, masculinity, and multiple forms of gender expression that is – or is not – congruent with biological sex.

 

Models of Feminism

  • Liberal Feminism: Men and women are equally rational. They are both therefore qualified to fulfil social and practical roles at any level. The following are the prominent writers:
  • Mary Wollstonecraft
  • Maria steward
  • The Grimke Sisters
  • Betty Friedan
  • Gloria Steinem
  • Molly Yard
  • Socialist-Marxist Feminism: They represent demarcation between private and public spheres of activity maintained by capitalists for their own interests. The writers are:
  • Marx
  • Engels
  • Gilman
  • Kollontai
  • Eisenstein
  • Radical Feminism: Here man is the source of all oppression all culture is male dominated: Patriarchal Separate women’s culture with separate set of values, which are different from that of man. Writers of the period are:
  • Mary Daly
  • Andrea Dworkin
  • Kate Millet
  • Juliet Mitchel
  • Psycho Analytical Feminism: Women should use different language for themselves based on there on their sensations of their bodies. It should be different from language of men. Women’s developmental process is a different that of man.
  • Existential Feminism: Women have to assert her autonomy in defining herself against any men. She has to define her own identity, dealing herself a past and creating for her solidarity for other women. Simon De Beauvoir (the Second Sex).
  • Individual Feminism: It speaks about frustrations of middle class women. It emphasis on liberating sexuality of women.
  • Cultural Feminism: There is dichotomy between mind and body, which is substantiated by mental capacities of women, stands point Epistemology.
  • Post-modern Feminism: Body is a ‘site’ at which important identity forming yet contradictory experiences occur by Alice Jar dine (Genesis configurations of women and Modernity.)
  • Relative or Rational feminism: Women’s rights of in terms of child bearing or nurturing capacities when compared to men.

 

Points of Reaction

 

Feminist anthropologists first reacted against the fact that the discussion of women in the anthropological literature had been restricted to the areas of marriage, kinship, and family. Feminist anthropologists believe that the failure of past researchers to treat the issues of women and gender as significant has led to a deficient understanding of the human experience. One criticism made by feminist anthropologists is directed towards the language being used within the discipline. The use of the word “man” is ambiguous, sometimes referring to Homo sapiens as a whole, sometimes in reference to males only, and sometimes in reference to both simultaneously. Second wave feminist anthropologists were reacting against Durkheim’s notion of a static system that can always too easily be broken down into inherent dichotomies. Instead, feminist anthropologists seek to show that the social system is dynamic. They base this dynamic theory on Marx’s idea that social relations come down to praxis, or practice. Poststructuralist feminist anthropologists also criticized the theory of cultural feminism, opposed by women. Feminist anthropologists argue that cultural feminism ignores the oppressive powers under which traditional values were created. A further point of reaction happened after the initial creation of the subfield.

 

Leading Figures

 

Ruth Benedict (18871948): Benedict, a student of Franz Boas, was an early and influential female Anthropologist, earning her doctorate from Columbia University in 1923; her fieldwork with Native Americans and other groups led her to develop the “configurationally approach” to culture, seeing cultural systems as working to favour certain personality types among different societies (Buckner 1997: 34). Along with Margaret Mead she is one of the most prominent female anthropologists of the first half of this century.

 

Margaret Mead (19011978): She was a key figure in the second wave anthropology, for her work distinguished between sex and gender. Her theories were influenced by ideas borrowed from Gestalt psychology, that subfield of psychology which analyzed personality as an interrelated psychological pattern rather than a collection of separate elements Her work separated the biological factors from the cultural factors that control human behaviour and personality development.

 

Eleanor Leacock (19221987): She uses a Marxist approach in her ethnographies, since she argues that capitalism is the reason for female subordination. She also challenged Julian Steward’s work on hunting and trapping. Leacock talked to English speaking informants to find out their pattern of hunting, subsequently mapped out the hunting pattern herself to avoid informant’s overgeneralization.

 

Louise Lamphere (1940): She worked along with Michelle Rosaldo to edit Woman, Culture, and Society. This was the first volume to address the anthropological study of gender and women’s status.

 

Sherry Ortner (1941): She is one of the early proponents of feminist anthropology, constructing an explanatory model for gender asymmetry based on the premise that the subordination of women is a universal, that is, cross cultural phenomenon.

 

Margaret Conkey (1943): Conkey was one of the first archaeologists to introduce feminist theory into archaeology, and is thus a pioneering figure in the subfields of gender archaeology and feminist anthropology. She is a professor of Anthropology at the University of California, Berkeley.

 

Nancy Scheper Hughes (1944): She is a feminist ethnographer whose work questions the idea of a universal definition for “man” and “woman.” Her book, Death without Weeping: The Violence of Everyday Life in Brazil, criticized the concept of innate maternal bonding, as women were forced to favour infants who would survive due to harsh living conditions.

 

Gayle Rubin (1949): An activist and influential theorist of sex and gender politics. She introduced the “sex/gender system,” which distinguished biology from behaviour in the same way Mead did with her work. She shaped her ideas from works by Marx, Engels, Levi Strauss and Freud.

 

Lila Abu Lughod: She seeks to demonstrate that culture is boundless. In Writing Women’s Worlds, she shared Bedouin women’s stories and shows that they find advantages in a society which separates gender. Her works, like many others, dispel the misunderstandings many western feminists have about Islam and Hinduism.

 

Principal Concepts

 

Subordination of women: Initially, feminist anthropology focused on analysis and development of theory to explain the subordination of women, which seemed to be universal and cross cultural. Several theories were developed to understand this idea, including Marxism and binary oppositions.

 

Marxism: Marxist theory appealed to feminist anthropologists in the 1970s because “there is no theory which accounts for the oppression of women in its endless variety and monotonous similarity, cross culturally and throughout history with anything like the explanatory power of the Marxist theory of class oppression”. The Marxist model explains that the subordination of women in capitalist societies, both in terms of their reproductive role, “the reproduction of labour,” as well as their value as unpaid or underpaid labour, arises from historical trends predating capitalism itself

 

Universal binary opposition: Anthropologists such as Rosaldo, Edholm, and Ortner used dichotomies such as public/domestic, production/reproduction, and nature/culture (respectively) to explain universal female subordination. Ortner’s use of the dichotomy to explain the universal subordination of women is built upon Levi Strauss’s conclusion that there is a universal binary opposition between nature and culture. He also argued that cross culturally women were represented as closer to nature because of their role in reproduction. In the late 1970’s many feminist anthropologists were beginning to question the concept of universal female subordination and the usefulness of models based on dichotomies. Some anthropologists argued that there existed societies where males and females held roles that were complementary but equal. The work done by A. Schlegal and J. Briggs in foraging and tribal societies is an example of this.

 

Domestic power of women: E. Friedl and L. Lamphere believe that, although females are subjected to universal subordination, they are not without individual power. These two anthropologists emphasize the domestic power of women. This power, according to this theoretical framework, is “manifested in individually negotiated relations based in the domestic sphere but influencing and even determining male activity in the public sphere”.

 

Sex/Gender system: The use and development of the concept “gender” has helped to further separate feminist anthropology from the use of dichotomies and the search for universals. Gender, as it came to replace the term woman in the anthropological discussions, helped to free the issue of inequality from biological connotations. These new discussions of gender brought with them more and individual action, and between ideology and material conditions.

 

Identity: Focus on identity and difference has become the merging focus of feminist anthropology. This means that there is a focus on social categories such as age, occupation, religion, status, and so on. Power is an important component of analysis since the construction and enactment of identity occurs through discourses and actions that are structured by contexts of power

 

Queer Theory: Queer theory is the most recent poststructuralist reaction against the notion of “normalcy” and focuses on gender and sexuality. Specifically, queer theory challenges heteronormativity, or the assumption that heterosexuality and the resulting social institutions are the normative sociosexual structures in all societies.

 

Queer theory challenges the idea that gender is part of the essential self and that it is instead based upon the socially constructed nature of sexual acts and identities, which consist of many varied components

 

Methodologies

 

The unifying aspect of feminist anthropology is that it focuses on the role, status, and contributions of women to their societies. Within this framework, individual anthropologists explore a wide range of interests and employ a wide range of theoretical models to interpret data. It would, consequently, be problematic to characterize any one approach or model as predominant within the field at present. That observation aside, however, one should note that the field was more unified during its early development in the 1970s, when the interest was on developing models to explain the universal subordination of women.

 

Marxist analysis: Apparently, the preferred theoretical framework to analyze this state of affairs was Marxist. This preference stemmed both from the utility of the Marxist model for the analysis of gender asymmetry, as well as from the early foundational writings of Marx and Engels concerning the status of women in capitalist economic systems. Within the Marxist framework, the oppression of women is carried out by men in support of the capitalist system. They maintain that the oppression of women supports capitalism on two levels: first of all, women serve as the means of reproducing the labour force. Additionally, however, women’s unpaid or underpaid labour serves to help defray and conceal the overall cost of operating a capitalist economy, thereby elevating profit margins for the bourgeoisie.

 

Structuralist approach: Initial explanatory models to account for female oppression also took a structuralist approach. Within these models, the roles of men and women were seen as being culturally constructed. The reproductive functions of women and men historically led to the association of women with lower status, but relatively safer, activities within the domestic sphere, the village, or other setting. At the same time, men’s role in reproduction allowed them (or forced them) to operate outside of “safe” spatial areas. These dichotomous orientations managed to outlive the environmental pressures which originally prompted their adoption.

 

Both the Marxist model and the structuralist model reject the notion that the oppression of women is associated with something innate and biological about the human species. Sexual dimorphism in humans is a biological feature of the species but serves only to facilitate the possible oppression of women, not to mandate it or program such behaviour into humans.

 

Contribution of Feminist Anthropology

 

The most obvious contribution of feminist anthropology has been the increased awareness of women within anthropology, both in terms of ethnographic accounts and theory. This emphasis has challenged a number of enshrined beliefs, for instance concerning models of human origins where in the “man the hunter” model was seen as being the driving force in human evolution, ignoring the role that women’s productive and reproductive roles in the evolution of Homo sapiens sapiens. Feminist anthropology has been intimately tied to the study of gender and its construction by various societies, an interest that examines both women and men.

 

Psychoanalysis and feminism

 

Psychoanalytic feminism Psychoanalytic theory emerged during the debate on kinship, and kinship and gender relations form the core of the theoretical writings, and has been portrayed as one of the elements containing feminism. It origins can be found in the Romantic, and in particular Bachofen’s representation. The matriarchy-patriarchy conflict is central to Sigmund Freud’s work, and to the schism that followed between him and Carl Jung.

 

Freud’s theories can be seen to be centred around the triangular Oedipus complex, the patricidal relation between child and father, and incestuous desire for the mother, as a model for the development of each individual’s personality. The correspondence between Freud and Jung reveals their conflicting concepts of universal patriarchy on the former’s part, and the yearning for liberation and return to matriarchy of the latter. Freud disliked feminist sexual radicalism, but echoed some of it “Mother-right should not be confused with gynaecocracy”. The centrality of Oedipal desire is best expressed in Totem und Tabu (1913). He based his anthropological speculation on the work of ,who in turn was influenced by Darwin. Freud proceeded to layer Greek myth onto the Darwinian ethology of the herd and the polygamous dominant male, challenged by its male offspring, a position challenged by anthropologists, but which became influential in 20th-century culture. Freudian analysis, Bachofen’s world is now seen as the story of individual psychological evolution, a psychic recasting of ontogeny mirroring phylogeny

 

Feminism in the Indian Context

 

To understand and sympathizes the sensibility of feminism it is important to observe that Indian feminist present altogether different picture sequence.The long and painful suffering of women, the bitter struggle for the exception of the idea of equal pay for equal work, the continuing battles on behalf of woman’s right to abortion and to practice of birth control are some of the visible marks of the gender inequality that has persisted and that woman had to fight for inspire of the commitments they were made under circumstances. The feminist thought and feminist movement in the west have some influence on the woman’s movement in the developing country like India. Yet, feminism as it exists today in India has gone beyond its western counter parts. Uma Narayan rightly puts it third world feminism is not mindless mimicking of western agenda in one clear and simple sense. Due to historical and cultural specifications of the region in India has to think in terms of its agenda and strategies. In the Indian context several feminist have realized that the subject of women’s invasion in India should not be reduced to contradiction between men and women.

 

Criticisms

 

Feminist anthropology has been criticized for a number of issues since its emergence in the 1970s; assert that many criticisms have been a vital part of feminist anthropology, since it has a postmodernist basis of questioning assumptions. Without critique, the biases and assumptions that feminist anthropologists try to reject cannot be changed.

  • One early criticism, noted above, was made by female anthropologists belonging to ethnic minorities. Their criticism was that white, middle class female anthropologists were focusing too intensely on issues of gender. Consequently, the subfield was ignoring social inequalities arising from issues such as racism and the unequal distribution of wealth.
  • This criticism has been redressed both by a heightened awareness of such issues by the aforementioned white, middle class feminist anthropologists, as well as the entry of large numbers of minority anthropologists into the field. Additionally, feminist anthropology has been accused of mirroring the situation they originally criticized.
  • Finally, the field has always been intimately associated with the Feminist Movement and has often been politicized. This practice is problematic on a number of levels. For one, it alienates many from the field by projecting an aura of radicalism. For another, putting politics before attempts at impartial inquiry tends to lead to research of questionable merit.

 

Summary

 

In the past several years, feminist anthropologists, sociologists, and social historians have produced a new literature on women’s work outside the home. The literature on women – both feminist and anti-feminist – is a long rumination on the question of the nature and genesis of women’s oppression and social subordination. The question is not a trivial one, since the answers given it determine our visions of the future, and our evaluation of whether or not it is realistic to hope for a sexually egalitarian society. Feminist anthropology has made its mark in a number of domains, but its impact on the discipline has been perhaps nowhere as distinctive as in the emphasis it has placed on reflexivity. The field began as a critique of the andocentric bias deriving from men (male ethnographers) studying men (male informants). However, it has often been the case that feminist anthropology consists of women studying women in the same arrangement. The field has attempted to address this issue by focusing more broadly on the issue of gender and moving away from the “Anthropology of Women”.

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