Anthropological Approaches to Gender Roles and Relations

Gender studies in anthropology begin with the late 19^th century, when anthropology emerged as a distinct academic discipline, and anthropological studies are pursued up to now (Marcia-Lees and Black 2000). By placing these approaches in historical perspective, Marcia-Lees and Black (2000) review the major anthropological orientations to gender studies. In this section, an attempt is made to review these theoretical orientations to gender relations and inequalities. Knowing the theoretical orientation out of which any particular knowledge arises is an important first step in analyzing it (Marcia-Lees and Black 2000:14-15). In order to review these orientations, terms such as gender, gender roles, behaviors, stratification, and asymmetry, according to Marcia-Lees and Black (2000:

xi-2), need to be conceptualized as follows:

• Gender, as a cultural construct, can be understood as the meanings that a particular society gives to the physical or biological traits that differentiate males and females. These meanings provide members of a society with ideas about how to act, what to believe, and how to make sense of their experiences. Since gender constructs are cultural interpretations of physical differences, they are open to change. This dynamic aspect of culture is not surprising because culture, as anthropologists define it, is a system of meaning that is learned and shared by members of a group. Culture organizes people’s behavior and thoughts in the context of their society’s history and environment. Since individuals learn cultural ideas within the context of their society, gender constructs and expectations can be unlearned and modified, although the process can be quite difficult. The significance of these interpretations can have major consequences for individuals. Defining gender as a cultural construct suggests that gender is largely due to nurture or cultural practices and ideas, not to “nature” or biological causes.

This nurture position is, however, somewhat controversial in some societies and within some academic fields because of the widespread belief that gender behaviors are inborn. As a result, there exists the nature/nurture controversy in defining gender roles or gender behaviors.

• Gender Roles and Behaviors refer to the social skills, abilities, and ways of acting thought appropriate to members of a society, depending upon whether they are male or female.

Anthropologists are particularly interested in uncovering the reasons for the differences in the roles assigned to men and women as well as in the relationship of these roles to the differential access men and women have to power and authority in their society.

• Gender Stratification connotes the system of unequal access of men and women to a society’s resources, privileges and opportunities, and the differential control over these resources and privileges accorded by sex. This hierarchical system reflects the expectations of a particular society or subculture. It arises from a group’s differential evaluation of males and females and their roles, and the status they are allotted based on that assessment.

• Gender Asymmetry refers to the situation in which men’s and women’s roles are not the same and their positions in society are not equal.

In the light of the above analytical concepts, the Evolutionary, Psychological, Materialist, Structuralist, and Critical-Reflexive approaches can be reviewed as follows.

Evolutionary Approach

While no one denies that men and women differ biologically, there is great variation in the importance placed on these differences by researchers interested in understanding gender roles and the existence of systems of gender stratification. Anthropologists who have focused on biological differences and biosocial explanations have tended to employ evolutionary models in their explanations. Finding explanations of gender differences in evolutionary factors has a long history within anthropology. This is because the first school of anthropological theory, known as social evolutionism, used an evolutionary model to explain all aspects of human social organization (Marcia-Lees and Black 2000:20). Social evolutionists (e.g. Tylor 1871; Morgan 1877; and Spencer 1884, in Marcia-Lees and Black 2000) argued that societies had developed from the simple to the complex, the chaotic to the organized, and the homogeneous to the heterogeneous. These theorists were immersed in beliefs about the desirability of progress, and since simpler societies were seen as less advanced, it made sense to them to view non-Western societies as inferior. Social evolutionists claimed that societies evolved through a fierce struggle for survival. They pointed to Western civilization’s political, economic, and cultural dominance over the rest of the world as evidence that it was the fittest form of social organization and, thus, the most highly evolved (e.g. Spencer 1884, in Marcia-Lees and Black 2000). They not only saw the social practices, customs, and institutions of non-Western societies as inferior and less evolved but also claimed that they represented earlier stages in Western society’s evolution. Non-Western societies were used, in other words, as living examples of the West’s “primitive” past, one that was left behind as it struggled for supremacy (Marcia-Lees and Black 2000:22). Spencer (1884, in Marcia-Lees and Black 2000) hypothesized that the earliest societies were promiscuous and lacked any institution to regulate sexuality. This situation meant that knowledge of paternity was obscured. Out of these chaotic conditions evolved societies that traced descent matrilinearily, inheriting a mother’s kinship group rights to her children. By contrast, any society that regulated paternity through monogamy or institutionalized it by tracing descent through the male line would increase the chances of its existence. In other words, institutionalized paternity would lead to institutionalized male protection, ensuring that vitality and survival of the entire society. A society that favored monogamy and accentuated the male line would be able to conquer those that did not, thereby increasing its size and strength. In the process, it would become more complex and evolve to a higher stage of development (Spencer 1884:611-31, in Marcia-Lees and Black 2000:22-23). To ensure that women had enough energy for their childbearing and child-rearing duties, it had to be channeled away from other functions, such as public, religious or political functions. The concentration of energy on reproductive functions was responsible for women’s supposed inferior mental capabilities, causing women to lack “the power of justice”

(Spencer 1884:374, in Marcia-Lees and Black 2000:24). Such inadequacies, which made women unsuited for important activities in the public realm, were seen as the natural outcome of the struggle for the “survival of the fittest”. Women’s attempts at the time to advocate for equal rights were, therefore, discounted and their demands were viewed as unnatural and perilous (Marcia-Lees and Black 2000:24).

The Psychological Orientation: The Social-Learning Approach

The social-learning approach to gender draws psychological and anthropological cross-cultural studies of gender roles and relations (Pine 1996). A major focus of psychologically oriented anthropological literature concerned with gender stresses on explanations of the differences that characterize male and female personality types. Anthropologists have been particularly concerned

with identifying the cultural factors that shape the development of these traits, and which underlie sex role behaviors (Marcia-Lees and Black 2000:40).

A social learning orientation focuses, among others, on how cultural learning shapes male and female personality types. The interest in defining and specifying the exact nature of the personality differences between the sexes has its roots in Freudian psychology. According to Freud, women are

“naturally dependent and passive”. For Freud, “anatomy is destiny”. Nancy Chodorow (1974), on the other hand, argues that the consequences of male and female personality traits depended upon a society’s particular interpretation of them. Indeed, her work has been an important impetus for research in feminist anthropology on the socio-cultural factors influencing psychological development and gender identity. Gender identity is psychosocially and culturally determined.

Gender roles are practices and activities carried out by men and women, which lead to an economically and socially constructed division of labor (Hirut Terefe 2000:72).

According to Chodorow (1974), early gender socialization proceeds in universally similar ways and establishes certain basic differences in the psychological (interpersonal) orientations of male and female children. This is, of course, questionable because many other researchers have observed that socialization differs from culture to culture, as each culture is unique (Hirut Terefe 2000:36). Hirut Terefe (2000:37) notes that a growing body of ethnographic literature attests the specifics of these differences. Anthropologists have long understood that normative “sex roles” vary considerably from culture to culture (Brown 1970; Friedl 1975:3, in Hirut Terefe 2003:37). The degree and character of social asymmetry between the sexes are highly variable both between cultures and between different domains within a single culture (Whyte 1978:9; Collier and Rasaldo 1980:18-19; Leakock 1981:18, in Hirut Terefe 2000:37). Thus, the contests of and relations between gender categories that inform and reproduce particular gender identities are socially and culturally relative. This is because gender socialization is a process whereby humans in the course of interaction are molded and continuously shaped to appropriate images of femaleness and maleness (Hirut Terefe 2000:37).

The Materialist Orientation: The Marxist-Approach

The social evolutionists were not the only social anthropologists to employ an evolutionary framework to explain gender differences. The social philosophers Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels gave many impulses. While Marx is best known for his analyses of class oppression, Engels is best recognized for his treatment of gender oppression in his classical study: “The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State” (1884). Engels’ focus on how the material conditions of life and economic factors affect gender stratification is still a starting point for materialist researchers today (Marcia-Lees and Black 2000: 47).

Engels ([1848] 1967, in Marcia-Lees and Black 2000) postulated that as the production of wealth increases, private property ownership emerges and men became more important within the family.

They used their strengthened position to overthrow “mother right” and matrilineality in favor of patrilineality and to replace pre-existing marriage forms with monogamous ones. Monogamy was instituted to ensure that a man’s wealth and property would be passed only to his own children. This practice was enforced through patriarchal control of the family. Engels claimed that under such conditions, women became degraded and mere instruments for breeding children ([1848] 1967: 746, in Marcia-Lees and Black 2000:50).

In line with Engels’ view, many materialist theorists argue that with the development of class society, women’s status, defined in terms of their rights, declined. The new social relations, according to materialist theorists, result from economic patterns based on private property ownership and the

accumulation of wealth; which were supported by state structure, and rendered women economically and politically powerless and socio-culturally undervalued (Marcia-Lees and Black 2000:51).

The Structuralist Orientation: Lévi-Strauss’ Approach

The structuralist anthropological theories emphasize the ideas that members of a society hold and analyze the way these ideas are represented in language, myths, or symbols. Unlike materialist theorists, the structuralists’ approach rejects the premise that the material conditions of life determine other aspects of social organization. They view the ideational realm of culture not as a super-structural outgrowth of underlying economic relations, but as having an independent reality. Ideas are understood as distinct and autonomous factors that not only exert an influence over the behavior of individuals but also constitute an individual’s very sense of self (Marcia-Lees and Black 2000:68).

One of the most influential structuralist approach for explaining gender relations and asymmetry is Lévi-Strauss’ approach. He focused not only on the importance of ideas but also on how the mind is structured to organize them. For him, myths, rituals and even aspects of social organization, such as kinship systems, can be understood like language. All are reflections of the underlying structure of the human brain. This structure, according to Lévi-Strauss, is binary: all human thought is dualistic, dividing the world into sets of oppositional categories like black and white, male and female, nature and culture. He viewed cultural expressions like myth and kinship as cognitive efforts to resolve fundamental paradoxes set up by such binary categorizations. One such paradox, for him, is the one produced by the recognition that humans are both natural and cultural animals. While Lévi-Strauss drew on linguistic models in his analyses and focused on symbolic systems, he also assumed that biological structures in the brain explain cultural forms (Marcia-Lees and Black 2000:68-69).

Lévi-Strauss explains the universal subordination of women not through biological factors per se but through focusing on the cultural interpretations of biological attributes. For Lévi-Strauss, women’s universal subordination is grounded in the role women play as signs in a system of exchange. Men are more highly valued than women, not because of some innate superiority that is genetically grounded or based on some physical characteristic such as speed or strength, but because of the very way the human mind organizes the world into opposing categories. Several problematic assumptions lie at the base of this structural argument, many of which have not been substantiated by data. For example, there is no evidence that people at all times and in all places think through the construction of binary oppositions. Since “Western” thinking has been based on such oppositions, some have reproached Lévi-Strauss with ethnocentrism: projecting Western ideas on to all human beings. Regardless of the specific drawbacks of a structuralist interpretation of gender roles and asymmetry, its insights have been valuable to grasp cultural interpretations of biological attributes related to “sex” and gender stereotypes in a specific social system (Marcia-Lees and Black 2000).

The Critical-Reflexive Approach

The critical-reflexive approach to gender studies has been adopted by some feminist anthropologists.

Marcia-Lees and Black (2000:92) place this theoretical orientation within the historical context out of which it emerged, explore the self-critique which anthropology has recently undergone, and assess the challenges anthropologists continue to encounter in a world of changing power relations. Such challenges have led to a re-evaluation of anthropology’s tradition of fieldwork and of writing descriptions of the people it studies (Marcia-Lees and Black 2000:92).

By the 1970s, “white women”, African-American men and women, and members of other ethnic

“minorities”, such as Native Americans, waged battles against their own oppression, just as many colonized people around the world had done. The roots of the critical-reflexive approach in

anthropology began to grow within this cultural milieu. In the wake of such criticisms, many anthropologists themselves began to recognize the limitations of traditional anthropological practices in their own research. They questioned not only previous representations of non-Western people, but also traditional explanatory models, finding many insufficient for understanding a fundamentally changed world.

Anthropology by this time had moved well beyond its roots in social evolutionism. Nonetheless, critics argued that it is still perpetuating inequalities between the West and what has come to be known as the “Rest” (the traditional societies that anthropologists have studied). Theoretical orientations such as structuralism were criticized for assuming that Western categories like

“subject/object”, nature/culture were universals, rather than recognizing them as Western categories that helped to keep people “in their place”. These kinds of criticism gave rise to a new reflexive anthropology, one greatly influenced by feminist anthropologists. Reflexive anthropologists think critically about the political and ethnical questions surrounding their work. These anthropologists have focused specifically on how unequal power relations are reproduced in anthropological fieldwork and in ethnographic representations (Marcia-Lees and Black 2000:94).

The critical-reflexive approach in anthropology focuses on effects of material conditions or of ideas on people’s lives while simultaneously keeping in mind the limitations of the researchers. This awareness encourages the researchers to question how any theoretical orientation helps frame the research in ways that might not be beneficial to the people under study. The significance of self-reflexivity lies in the constant evaluation and re-evaluation it calls for. This evaluative process better enables all of us to remain aware of how power relations continue to operate, not merely in anthropological research, but more importantly in the larger world. These days, the trend in anthropology is away from asking questions about women’s oppression in general and is towards investigating causes of gender inequalities in particular cultural contexts. These investigations have recently proceeded within the framework of particular theoretical orientations that help guide a researcher through an overwhelmingly complex set of variables and factors. Currently, the tendency, however, is towards studies that combine the strengths of particular theoretical orientations while eschewing some of their weaker points (Marcia-Lees and Black 2000:102-105).

Generally, the foregoing anthropological discussions of gender roles and relations revolved around evolutionist, psychological, materialist, structuralist and critical-reflexive orientations. These theoretical frameworks serve as a general guideline in analyzing ethnographic data on gender relations and inequalities in a particular socio-cultural and economic context. More specifically, in analyzing the ethnographic data on gender specific issues surrounding early marriage and girls’

education, the researcher employs an information synthesis approach, since a single theoretical orientation cannot fulfill to explain the ethnographic data. Hence, gender specific causes and consequences of early marriage as well as gender issues in education can be interpreted in terms of the above presented anthropological orientations to gender studies.