Iara Cury
TT Week 1
Elizabeth Ewart
Gender, Biology and Culture
A specter is haunting the field of gender studies. The ghost of Lévi-Strauss, embodied in the
notion of unconscious structures permeating society, continues to challenge
deconstructivist or relativist approaches to the study of human culture and society.
Decades of theorizing gender have led us to appreciate how gender is socially and
culturally constructed within local contexts. Even beyond that, it is possible to say that
“gender itself does not exist outside its material and symbolic intersections with other
forms of difference” (Moore 1994, 26). Efforts to free our understanding of gender from a
Western cultural imaginary, particularly in regards to the ultimate “reality” of biology, have
been heralded as the key achievement of feminist anthropology. In a parallel universe,
however, biology, cognitive science and psychology forge ahead in the production of
scientific knowledge about gender differences. Navigating the biological, social and cultural
dimensions, the anthropologist is presented with the task of taking careful stock of the
universality of claims rooted in the body and in the mind—of the possible presence of thus
far unknown unconscious structures such as Lévi-Strauss conjured. The scope for
relativism, often posed as the necessary and sufficient antithesis of ethnocentrism, remains
open to question.
In probing the origins and mechanisms of gender differences, social anthropologists have
generally refuted outright biological explanations. According to Sherry Ortner, “these facts
and differences only take on significance of superior/inferior within the framework of
culturally defined value systems” (1996, 25). Dismissing biological determinism, however,
has not meant abandoning the consideration of how physical differences have affected the
development of social hierarchies throughout societies of the world. Henrietta Moore
frames the analysis of women’s subordination in “two different, but not mutually exclusive,
perspectives. Gender may be seen either as a symbolic construction or as a social
relationship” (1988, 13). Both will be discussed below.
The sociological account of gender differences has emerged from the study of gender
relations as rooted in social roles, oftentimes roles related to the production, distribution,
and consumption of material resources. Nevertheless, social roles cannot be divorced from
cultural systems of values; in turn, cultural systems cannot be divorced from material
reality, from the “social and economic conditions within which they are developed and
employed” (Moore, 1988, 38). Thus, feminist anthropologists have devoted more energy
towards elucidating the cultural construction of gender differences.
Within the cultural or symbolic dimension of gender, two major debates have emerged,
both originating in chapters of the 1974 book, Woman, Culture and Society, edited by M.
Rosaldo and L. Lamphere. The first was Sherry Ortner’s proposal that female is to male as
nature is to culture. Ortner maintains that every culture “asserts itself to be not only
distinct but superior to nature” (1974, p.26). She proceeds to make the claim that due to
women’s “body and natural procreative functions”, at the physical, social and psychological
level women are placed closer to nature than men (p.27). Liking these two propositions
together explained why women occupied a subordinate place in the social hierarchies of
different cultures.
The second debate centered on Rosaldo’s theory that “the identification of women with
domestic life and of men with public life” (1974, p.23-4) accounted for asymmetries of
power. Responsible for the reproduction, nurturance and care of infants and the
socialization of children, women had less opportunity spatially and operatively to engage in
social and political activities assigned high social and moral value, remaining subordinate
to men. According to Rosaldo, “women gain power and a sense of value when they are able
to transcend domestic limits, either by entering the men’s world or by creating a society
unto themselves” (p.41).
In the 1980 book, Nature, Culture and Gender, chapters by C. MacComarck and M. Strathern
provided a serious critique of both Ortner’s hypothesis. Strathern’s “No nature, no culture:
the Hagen Case” forcefully argues against the nature-culture/female-male association. She
maintains that the nature-culture dichotomy is attached to a constellation of values—
active, passive, subject, object, creator, resource, energy and limitation—which are not
fixed but attachable to either category (p.178). Because of this polysemy, in Strathern’s
opinion the mistake was to assume that every culture contrasted nature and culture, and
that this contrast corresponded to our notions of nature and culture. The same argument
goes for the superposition of the female-male dichotomy on the nature-culture dichotomy:
the fluidity and constant interchange of associations assures a state of “no overall
consistency” within Western ideologies, making cross-cultural analysis simply
meaningless.
Rosaldo’s domestic/public dichotomy has been challenged as well. Moore states, “other
cultures do not…define ‘woman’ in the same way, neither do they necessarily establish a
close relationship between ‘woman’ and home or the domestic sphere, as Western culture
does” (1988, p.25). What many anthropologists assumed to be the universal social unit, the
mother-child pair, has been open to question in view of a new understanding of the
variability of kinship forms and experiences. Even the notion that motherhood necessarily
entails close attachment, love, and full-time care has not been irrefutable. Moore cites the
example of the nanny and wet nurse during Victorian times to demonstrate how various
people can fulfill functions that today in the Western world are assumed to belong to the
mother.
Overall, anthropologists have found plenty of ethnographic cases to disarm attempts at
deriving universal gender principles out of localized cultural ideology and social
organization. Overing’s ethnography of the Amazonian Piaroa is of relevance in that she
explores a social imaginary where the nature/culture, domestic/public contrasts appear
trivial and misplaced. According to Overing, Piaroa myths, particularly one about the origin
of menstruation, display the ambiguity of gender principles and the lack of a clear social
hierarchy between sexes. She further demonstrates that pollution beliefs are bilateral: the
husband of a pregnant woman is constrained by couvade restrictions as much as women
are constrained during menstruation. In sum, “all beings [are] considered different, and
dangerous, for one another” (1986, p.150), yet “the principle at work here is one without a
valuation of inferiority and superiority, but rather one of difference and equality” (p.149).
Overing makes explicit what often has gone unquestioned in the anthropological treatment
of gender—the intrinsic correlation between political system and gender relations. She
states, “in relatively egalitarian political systems the relationship between the sexes can
also be relatively egalitarian” (1986, p.142). In fact, her analysis brings to the fore two
contemporary insights regarding gender. First, not only do we often stumble in making
universal claims with respect to the cultural construction of gender, but finding common
ground between women situated in an extreme diversity of lives is in itself a challenge.
Second, the impossibility of understanding gender whilst ignoring or neglecting issues of
power and politics calls for the utmost care in interconnecting these different yet
overlapping dimensions. Both concerns will be addressed below.
Interestingly enough, what early feminists took for granted—the very basis for their
project of the global liberation of women—current scholars of gender studies place in
doubt. O. Oyewumi makes the case by observing that the universality of the category of
‘woman’, so central to mainstream gender discourses, “simply did not exist in Yorubaland
prior to its sustained contact with the West. There was no such preexisting group
characterized by shared interests, desires, or social position” (2006, p.540). According to
her, rooted on the Western “ideology of biological determinism”, the binary male-female
categories of sex are as socially constructed as ideas about gender. In turn, Moore stresses,
“the construction of fixed binary sexes with fixed categorical difference, is the effect of a
specific discourse” (1994, p.12-3).
Leaving behind the idea of sex as a natural given in terms of gender parallels the
decoupling of kinship from its supposed biological basis. Yet if sex is a constructed category
and gender is comprised of a spectrum of social and culturally mediated features,
characteristics and experiences, we are left to look for a basis of relatedness or
commonality elsewhere, or to deal with the lack of one (outside of very local domains). At
this point, the reinstatement of the political dimension, particularly with respect to race
and class would offer potential sites of commonality or difference.
In A Passion For Difference, H. Moore quotes Teresa de Lauretis’ statement, “the female
subject is a site of differences; differences that are not only sexual or only racial, economic
or (sub)cultural, but all of these together and often enough at odds with one another” (de
Lauretis, 1986, 14 cited in Moore, 1994, 26). Far removed from the essentialisms or
universal claims of anthropology’s initial approach to gender, today it seems that our task
is to understand the “complex ways in which gender, race and class intersect and cross-cut
each other, as well as the way in which all three intersect with colonialism, the
international division of labor and the rise of the modern state” (Moore, 1988, p.10).
Here we come to an interesting juncture between anthropological theory and ordinary
practice on two counts. The first point of divergence is the fact that through colonialism,
international capitalism and globalization, Western ideas about gender have been spread
far and wide, to the well-documented detriment of other societies (not to say that some
have not benefited) (Moore, 1988, 33). While ethnographic evidence pointing to the
uniqueness and cultural rootedness of conceptions of gender exists aplenty, to what extent
may we assume that local “varieties” of gender are today operatively stronger in practice
than the gender ideology exported by the West? Although theories of cultural
homogenization have given way to ideas about multiculturalism and hybridization, it is
fundamental to question and evaluate the strength of such ideologies. In the rush to
deconstruct ethnocentric universalisms we run the risk of neglecting certain structures of
economic and political power that are truly ubiquitous nowadays.
Second, as much as anthropology would like to dismiss the biological basis for sexual and
gender differences, the Western scientific apparatus continues to grind. The biological,
behavioral and cognitive sciences carry on investigating and proposing new information
with regards to the intrinsic biological differences between men and women and to the
scope for variability from average types. Books like, The Essential Difference, by S. BaronCohen, propose that indeed there exist “essential” differences between the “natural”
genders, even if individuals should be taken at face value. Within the discipline of
anthropology itself, cognitive and evolutionary anthropologists thread a careful path and
battle for recognition of their contributions. It appears that anthropology must seriously
consider the extent to which it considers “Western science” and the scientific method a
massive and intricate cultural artifact or a source of valuable “universal” (if only statistical)
insight.
On balance, although cognitive science was in its nascent stages at the height of LéviStrauss’ work, his principle of unconscious structures could be interpreted as certain
cognitive configurations of the human mind. If it were the case that these structures truly
exist, anthropologists would have to reconcile much of the gender theory elaborated in the
past decades with certain “universal” facts and to imagine how cognitive structures would
or could be reflected in recurrent social roles and convergent cultural systems of meaning
and value. Ortner’s statement that gender asymmetries are probably the result of a
“complex interaction of functional arrangements, power dynamics, and bodily effects”
(2006, p.439) cannot be too far off the mark.
Meanwhile, in terms of striving for a functional equality of the sexes, both Ortner and
Rosaldo’s conceptualizations of gender and cultural symbolism seem to have been fruitful
insofar as women strive to break off the mold of “nature” and the “domestic”. Nevertheless,
in addition to taking women into the public domain, bringing men into the domestic
sphere, as Rosaldo suggests at the end of her chapter (1974, 42), is still a step waiting to be
fully taken by Western society.
Bibliography
Baron-Cohen, S. (2003) The Essential Difference: men, women and the extreme male brain.
London: Penguin.
Moore, H. (1988) Feminism and Anthropology. Oxford: Polity Press.
Moore, H. (1994) A passion for difference. Oxford: Polity Press.
Ortner, S. (1974). ‘Is Female to Male as Nature is to Culture?’ in Rosaldo, M. & L. Lamphere.
(eds). Women, Culture and Society. Stanford: Stanford University Press.
Ortner, S. (2006) ‘So, Is Female to Male as Nature is to Culture?’. in Moore & Sanders (eds)
Anthropology in Theory. Oxford: Blackwell.
Overing, J. (1986). “Men control women? The catch-22 in the analysis of gender” in
International Journal of Moral and Social Studies (1/2)
Oyewumi, O.(2006) ‘The invention of women’ in Moore & Sanders (eds) Anthropology
in Theory. Oxford: Blackwell.
Rosaldo, M. (1974) ‘Women, Culture and Society: a Theoretical Overview’ in Rosaldo, M. &
L. Lamphere. (eds). Women, Culture and Society. Stanford: Stanford University Press.
Strathern, M. (1980) ‘No Nature, no culture: the Hagen case’ in MacCormack, C. & Strathern,
M. (eds). Nature, Culture and Gender Cambridge: CUP.