Материал: Nigel Rapport, Joanna Overing, Social and Cultural Anthropology - The Key Concepts (2000)

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activity than the ‘domestic’ domain of women, the status of females is always judged as inferior to that of men.

Overing has argued (1986) that when the anthropological gaze is through the lens of such Western paradigms of power females are universally placed in a position of ‘catch-22’. As Joseph Heller in his novel Catch-22 tells of air force regulations, ‘there was only one catch…and that was Catch-22’: you are damned if you do and you are damned if you don’t. A similar absurdity was evident in much of the early literature on gender, where any piece of ethnographic information on women’s activities was taken as evidence of female degradation. The catch to Meillassoux’s judgements of male and female tasks is clear. He asserts (Meillassoux 1981:28–9) that in societies where hunting and therefore war is valued (an unwarranted assumption itself) women are correspondingly devalued and made inferior because of their social vulnerability, and thus ‘put to work under male protection and given the least rewarding, the most tedious and above all, the least gratifying tasks such as agriculture and cooking’ (ibid.: 19, my italics).We find that by the ethnographer’s definition, the work, ritual, obligations and pain of men are all tribute to their high status as controllers of society, while women’s work, ritual, obligations and pain become evidence of their subordinate status and exploitation. If women follow menstrual taboos, have children, tend gardens, prepare and cook meat and vegetables, bake bread, spin cotton—all these activities are taken as signs of woman’s exploitation by men and of their demeaned status. Similarly, if they do not hunt, go to war, make political speeches, play sacred flutes and drums, make canoes, cut down trees—each such omission also provides yet one more example of woman’s lowly position.

Attempts such as that of Meillassoux, to achieve a viable unified Marxian theory of gender relations (and of social inequalities more generally) have proven to be based on too uncertain a ground. As Keesing notes (1987b:59), anthropological theory, including the Marxian attempt, has not developed a concept of ideology that is sufficiently sensitive to allow for adequate generalizations about the force of cultural symbols or constructs cross-culturally. The achievement of such a unified theory would, at any rate, be highly unlikely in that the Marxist notion of culture-as-ideology acquires its saliency within a particular history, and that is a Western one. As such it carries all the baggage of this specific history which makes it risky to use as a lens for understanding even those other systems that manifest blatant inequalities, and for which such concepts as ‘subordination’, ‘exploitation’ and ‘oppression’ are too bluntly crude (cf. Strathern 1988; Keesing 1987b; Overing 1986).

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The question of coercion, and its evaluation

The Western notion of the political tends to be highly restrictive, being attached to ideas about coercion and the control of labour and the products of it. Also, embedded in it are all those ethnocentric assumptions about what work is, what constitutes personhood, agency, power, what subjects and objects are, and what property is (cf. Strathern 1980, 1984, 1988). It is assumed that women’s work, the products of their labour, and their reproductive capacities are controlled by men. But equality and inequality can be very difficult to judge, and there is a serious methodological question with regard to how we as ethnographers recognize exploitation among other peoples. Roger Keesing remarks (1987:59–60) that attempts to find the mystification, false consciousness and oppression lurking within other peoples’ practices, and their constructs of gender, rely too often upon hazardous assumptions about what constitutes inequality, domination and exploitation, or about what equality means and what a just and liberated society would be like.

From a cross-cultural perspective the equation between public leadership and dominance is questionable. What does one mean by ‘dominance’? Does it designate coercion? Or control over ‘the most valued’? ‘Political’ systems may be about both, either, or conceivably neither. The idea of ‘control’ would be a bothersome one for many peoples, as for instance among many indigenous peoples of Amazonia where all members of a community are fond of their personal autonomy and notably allergic to any overt expression of control or coercion (cf. Clastres 1977; Thomas 1982; Riviere 1984; Overing 1993a). The conception of political power as a coercive force, while it may be a Western fixation, is not a universal. It is very unusual for an Amazonian leader to give an order. If many peoples do not view political power as a coercive force, nor as the most valued domain, then the leap from ‘the political’ to ‘domination’ (as coercion), and from there to ‘domination of women’, is a shaky one. As Marilyn Strathern (1981:167–8) has remarked, the notions of ‘the political’ and ‘political personhood’ are cultural obsessions of our own, a bias long reflected in anthropological constructs. We should be wary of projecting our own value of ‘the political’ upon others.

Given this difficulty of defining ‘the political’ within a crosscultural framework, it would be facile to assume that women are not political beings, nor powerful actors within their own societies. It should be noted that for many peoples it would be difficult to draw the line between what we might separate as ‘religious’ and ‘political’

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domains. In early feminist literature the general idea was that while boys at puberty receive esoteric privileged knowledge, girls only suffer prohibitions and restrictions at their initiation. This is an area where later ethnographic attention has greatly enriched and enlightened our view, particularly on the topic of the privileged knowledge of women (e.g. Keesing 1987; Descola 1994, 1996; Ardener 1975; Hugh-Jones 1979). As Overing has noted (1986), the meaning of gender, its cultural construction, is often associated with highly complex theories of energy, fertility, and power in the universe.Thus to reduce the meaning of such idea systems to the political one of male dominance over women would be foolish. David Guss writing on the Yecuana of the Orinoco Basin notes that privileged knowledge, or ritual activity, permeates every cultural function, whether centred on males or females. Women, who are masters of the domain of gardens, own powerful magical herbs which ‘are the paramount expression of women’s sacred knowledge and ritual independence’ (Guss 1989:35). Some of these plants heal children or initiate women, others ‘ease menstruation, aid or prevent birth, cure or produce fever, frighten snakes, stop rains, secure lovers, induce sleep, dispel ill humor, deter evil spirits, protect travellers, and cause death’ (ibid.). For the Yecuana, power vacillates between men and women through the endless interplay of dualistic structures: female and male, inside/outside, house and garden; female outside/male inside; female inside/male outside. There is therefore a strong relativity to Yecuana gender politicking, which is also ritually played out, where women, and not just men, take their respective centre positions.

The relationship between the genders among Amazonian peoples is often highly egalitarian by anyone’s standards, and an emphasis, for instance, on ‘hidden’ control mechanisms that might allow for male dominance can too easily lead one to miss the more socially prevalent institutions that create equality. There is by now a large amount of ethnography telling of indigenous peoples among whom the women, both ideologically and in practice, control their own labour, and the products of it (see much of the contemporary literature on Amazonia). On the other hand, values—and the structures of equality and inequality linked to them—may well not be so straightforward, but ambiguous, as among the Hagen of New Guinea (Strathern 1981, 1988) where there is constant play between egalitarian and hierarchical principles. There are also by now many ethnographic examples showing that the quality of the relations between the genders may well be subject to perspective, where females have a very different view from males of the strengths of their respective roles and participation within the social life of the

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community (cf. Ardener 1975; Keesing 1987b). The problem for the ethnographer is that because of our gender politics a particular kind of inequality is presumed to be the predominant mode of existence.

A plurality of voices, and the artful skills of everyday life

Anthropology, in its self-reflection upon its treatment of the ‘problem of women’, and subsequent attempts to rectify its sins, has, because of its cross-cultural perspective, much to offer its sister disciplines. The most difficult set of assumptions of all to shift within anthropology has been those having to do with the Western distinction between the ‘private’ and the ‘public’, and the immensity of the implications of its ensnarement of our judgements are only beginning to be appreciated. The dichotomy of the ‘domestic’ and the ‘private’ has been noted time and again in gender studies more generally to have special saliency within Western political and moral thought and evaluations, and it is therefore with its intricacies and iniquities that much of the more recent feminist literature has been concerned.

The distinction assumes that women are imprisoned within the domain of the private and the domestic, and therefore devalued by the male public and political arena. One of the chief contributions of feminist thought to political theory, psychology and moral philosophy is to question this line that divides the public and the private (cf. Gilligan 1982; Benhabib 1992; Baier 1994). Women, being bound to the domain of the private, have been confined beyond the pale of justice where they take an invisible place within contemporary theories of justice and community. As Benhabib says (1992:12–13), ‘the norms of freedom, equality and reciprocity have stopped at the household door’.The moral reasoning of women has been denigrated as they are shown to be lacking in their acceptance of universals of justice, and more attentive in their moral judgements to context, details of relationships and narratives (Gilligan 1982). Some feminists are attempting to wed the traditional male theories of justice and contract theory with what they understand to be the female concerns of care and nurturance (cf. Benhabib 1992; Baier 1994). In other words they are trying to find ways in which ‘the public’ can responsibly include the female domestic matters of childrearing and all the other normal concerns and responsibilities with which we are daily and intimately most concerned.These writers assume ‘the domestic’, and the concern for care and trust, to be largely a matter of gender, of interest to females but not males. For them, the genders have different moral outlooks: while men tend to phrase morality in terms of obligation, contract and justice, women are most concerned

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with a morality relevant to the bringing up of children, engendering of love, care, trust and cooperation.

Anthropologists, however, may well question the cross-cultural relevance of the Western case, where males and females appear to be opposed in moral outlook in accordance to their respective separation of domains of activity. There are peoples who do make a strong separation between the public and the domestic, and others who do not (cf. Overing 1986). Or, conceptually, the distinction may not make a fit with our own. For instance the notion of ‘the private’ may well pertain to the person, and not a domestic group. Among many indigenous peoples, female performance as primary actors, listeners, or provocative commentators is as public as that of the men (cf. Passes 1998). Moreover, there are peoples, certainly in Amazonia, who prize ‘the domestic’ over the political, as that informal, intimate domain where the art of everyday maintenance and artful skills for social life reign. In such cases that is what social life is about, the care of children and the trust in relations of interdependency related to such care. Here neither a gender distinction in moral outlook, nor a distinction between ‘public’ and ‘private’ domains, is relevant (cf. Overing 1989, 1999). Until recently, because of the dominant strand in Western political theory, from which anthropology has not been totally exempt, that excludes domesticity and the everyday relations of the ordinary moral agent, this type of Amazonian sociality was not seen, much less understood. By listening to the women, the messages of the men could be understood in a different light, for these are peoples whose social organizations make no sense without the full inclusion of the social acts of their women.

In short, it has made all the difference to the ethnographic endeavour to include the subject of women and especially women’s voices. In the process we have time and again discovered a rich symbolic world that demands an understanding of the interplay of men and women, and their respective knowledges, that makes a travesty of the simplistic ‘male only’ models of yesteryear. It is only by understanding both male and female (often complementary) perspectives that gender relations among another people can begin to be comprehended. As gender studies progressed, it became absolutely clear that the peremptory voice of the ethnographer was insufficient, as too that of the male informant. Nor can we speak from the perspective of a generic female, for there is no such thing. There is ever a plurality of voices, a seemingly helter-skelter chiming, that provides, significantly, rich layers of evaluative contextualization, the recognition of which has in the end transformed our anthropological visions of culture and society.

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