The Natural Superiority of Women (5 page)

Read The Natural Superiority of Women Online

Authors: Ashley Montagu

Tags: #Social Science, #Anthropology, #Cultural, #Women's Studies, #test

BOOK: The Natural Superiority of Women
8.09Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
page_25<br/>
Page 25
male anthropologists have had more access to and interest in the lives of men, among other reasons. In some cases, wives in the field with anthropologist husbands studied women and wrote "women's ethnographies," such as Elizabeth Fernea's
Guests of the Sheik .

45
By the early 1970s gender was being written into anthropology as exemplified by two important anthologies of feminist anthropology published in the middle of the decade: Rayna Rapp Reiter's
Toward an Anthropology of Women
(1975)
46
and Michelle Rosaldo and Louise Lamphere's
Women, Culture, and Society
(1974).
47
These works included new data and theoretical approaches. Women's kinship struggles in the distribution of power were noted by Jane Collier; Louise Lamphere, who surveyed the political ramifications of women's networks cross-culturally; and Sylvia Yanagisako. Annette Weiner and Jane Goodale returned to the sites of two classic male ethnographies to reconsider the lives of women. Both showed women's power in kinship relations and prestige. A number of studies of peasant populations emphasized the significance of women's economic roles.
48

Eleanor Leacock used ethnohistorical evidence to rework Engels' theory linking the rise of private property to woman's subordination.
49
She argued for precolonial, pre-state egalitarian societies, as does Montagu in
The Natural Superiority of Women .
In doing so, Montagu refers to the work of archaeologist Marija Gimbutas and her popularizers, suggesting widespread matricentric cultures in Europe and elsewhere until their conquest by warrior-based groups.
50
Rosaldo, Chodorow, and Ortner substantially reworked Weberian, Freudian, and Levi-Straussian theoretical frameworks, respectively.
51
Gayle Rubin's "sex-Gender system" reoriented theoretical issues in Freud, Marx, Levi-Strauss, and Lacan.
52
In the introduction to her important edited volume,
Gender at the Crossroads of Knowledge: Feminist Anthropology in the Postmodern Era,
di Leonardo describes as the "conundrum of ethnographic liberalism,"
53
the problem faced by feminists in taking a cultural relativist approach to their data, and at the same time explaining the seeming near-universality of female subordination over two decades of ethnographic work. One approach has been the "indigenous women better off model" based on the assertion that women outside of the industrialized west enjoy a higher status. Working within

 

page_26<br/>
Page 26
this framework, some feminist ethnographies have noted the fact that peasant women in many groups exercise considerable power and influence. One advantage of this perspective, di Leonardo notes, is the way in which it fits with ethnographic liberalism's advocacy stance, functioning to
epater
complaisant westerners. At the same time, she points out, it was sometimes simply true.
Another approach has been the return to Marxist evolutionary models, such as the one proposed by Engels in
The Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State
(1884).

54
Engels had based his model heavily on L. H. Morgan's research on kinship terminology, which links different systems to evolutionary stages of human culture. These approaches identify particular modes of production to gender relations, claiming an originally egalitarian social structure that becomes stratified with the rise of private property. These studies reversed the Victorian ideology of Western colonialism's "uplifting" impact upon women, claiming a worsening effect after contact with the West.
55
An important feminist rereading of structuralism, particularly Levi-Strauss's analyses of symbolic structures of human cognition, is reflected in the work of Sherry Ortner.
56
Ortner's influential and controversial theory claimed an association between women and nature and men and culture as a universal symbolic cognitive model, and links this to women's subordination. An entire book of feminist critique takes up the problems posed by her theory.
57
Other important approaches to symbolic structures include Michelle Rosaldo's separation of domestic and public domains, in which she proposed that societies with rigid separations between these domains tend to devalue the private and thus women.
58
Chodorow's Freudian revisionism looked at the role of mothers as by its very nature engendering universal male resentment of female authority, male dominance, and weak female ego boundaries in daughters.
59
Other ethnographies offered data without proffering larger theoretical points, such as Margery Wolfs 1974 Taiwan ethnography
The House of Lim
or Liz Dalby's ethnography of Japanese geishas,
60
which document avenues of authority and power among women informants.

Each of these approaches to the relationship between gender and culture has received substantial critical attention. For instance, it has often been noted that the evolutionary Marxist

 

page_27<br/>
Page 27
explanations use living cultures as exemplars of the past, thereby employing the Victorian comparative method discarded by many in the twentieth century. There are also numerous examples of nonegalitarian small-scale societies, among groups in Papua New Guinea for example. In this regard, Rapp (1979) has shown that changes brought about by capitalist production relations, or even the colonialism that preceded them, are not automatically detrimental to women. Jordanova and Bloch have noted that Ortner's symbolic associations model is not universal, that the oppositional categories nature/culture have a specifically Western, enlightenment history.

61
In contrast to the grand theoretical visions, di Leonardo suggests strongly that the most significant labor of feminist anthropology to date may consist of the careful attempts to understand the particular meanings of gender in specific cultural, political-economic and historical contexts.

This most recent edition of
The Natural Superiority of Women
builds upon a number of these perspectives in feminist anthropology. Montagu makes good use of the revised view of women's power in a number of non-Western cultures, pointing out the Western lack of familiarity with the reality of women's activities in many other settings, such as his use of ethnographic data from the Agta people of Luzon, Philippines. In offering explanations for the widespread observation of female subordination in many complex societies, he cites the archaeologist Gimbutas' theory that female subordination in Europe and the Near east is a relatively recent phenomenon, only about seven thousand years old, and imposed by warfare bringing about a shift from matricentric to androcentric culture.
Here, again, we can see Montagu's bridging of late Victorian and modern anthropology. Montagu uses modern foraging societies as examples of what human life may have been like in prehistory. This has been a popular turn in evolutionary analysis, since most of our history as a species has been spent as food foragers. In Montagu's (and many other influential modern social scientists') embrace of the San and other food foragers as models of what gender relationships might have been like for early hominids there is a persistence of same cultural evolutionary schemes of the nineteenth century that he explicitly indicts. Recent revisionist ethnographies of the San speakers of the Kalahari illustrate the problem with generalizing about the past

 

page_28<br/>
Page 28
from our often flawed visions of food foragers. For instance, in Edwin Wilmsen's study of the San, he suggests that "their bodies express their structural position as an ethnically encoded underclass in the political economy of the Kalahari,"

62
and that they have a long history of herding, farming, domestic service and begging, even as laborers in African mines, as well as food foraging. In his use of the San as models of food foraging society, Montagu essentializes them, a move criticized in some recent feminist anthropology.

Despite the hopeful liberalism of Montagu's interpretation on this issue, we are left with the unruly facts of groups as diverse and historically separate as cultural communities in Highland New Guinea and the Amazon basin which have developed their own "brands" of institutionalized female subordination. Hence, unilineal models are insufficient to explain these widespread cultural forms. Perhaps in response to this fact, Montagu posits a revision of Freudian arguments that universalize male jealousy of female reproductive processes, in a similar vein to some psychological anthropologists such as Melford Spiro. Spiro has recently analyzed a variety of cross-cultural myths of female danger and pollution as universal responses of males to the reproductive role and power of mothers.
63
Other feminists have questioned essentialist visions of the family with great currency in the modern west. In their seminal essay "Is there a Family?", Collier, Rosaldo, and Yanagisako view the family "as not a concrete institution designed to fulfill universal human needs, but as an ideological construct associated with the modern state."
64
They deconstruct Malinowski's theory of the universality of the family (itself an attempt to overturn the nineteenth-century evolutionary model of "primitive promiscuity" as the earliest stage of human culture). Malinowski believed that essential features of the family exist in all cultures, flowing form the universal need of the human infant for prolonged nurturance. Collier
et al.
point out that this bounded unit is not really defined as such in many cultures. For instance, among the Zinacantecos of southern Mexico there is no similar term for parents and children to the English word "family,'' the basic social unit is defined as "the House," which may include from one to twenty people:

 

page_29<br/>
Page 29
The Malinowskian view of The Family as a universal institution-which maps the "functions" of nurturance onto a collectivity of specific persons (presumably nuclear relations) associated with specific spaces (the home) and specific affective bonds (love), corresponds to that assumed by most contemporary writers on the subject. But a consideration of available ethnographic evidence suggests that the recent view is a good deal more problematic than a naive observer might think.

65

Collier, Rosaldo, and Yaginasako point out that when antifeminists attack the ERA, it is often on the grounds that women's equality has encouraged the loss of nurturant bonds within the family. Because this is where we are used to receiving nurturance, they write, it is a functionalist error to assume that this is the only site and constellation of personae that can provide nurturance. Family and work are conceived a oppositional realms; the latter where cutthroat capitalism holds sway and the former becoming everything oppositional to that. This taxonomy not only represents real relationships between people, but to some degree helps shape them.
Thus, the ideal of the postindustrial Western family becomes
an ideological construct with moral implications. . . . This ideology also exploits women's weariness with the incompatibility of postindustrial work and family demands, as well as their anxiety over the asymmetrical terms of the heterosexual courtship and marriage market and of women's vulnerability to divorce-induced poverty.
66
Montagu's approach to the modern Western family is sometimes ambiguous. On the one hand, he thoroughly rejects the idea of superior male authority within the family, at the same time embracing the concept of an essentialized, morally superior woman as the civilizing influence in family life. Here, again, we see him bridging essentialist visions of women reified in the west over the last centuries and a progressive egalitarian view of power and authority within family life.
But the most sophisticated feminist theory in anthropology is moving steadily in another direction from these universalizing discourses inherited from the Victorian period-merging feminism and political economy, minus the Victorian evolutionary stagism of earlier Marxist theory. This suggests a

 

Other books

Birthright by Jean Johnson
In My Sister's House by Donald Welch
Dark Tales Of Lost Civilizations by Eric J. Guignard (Editor)
The Selkie by Rosanna Leo
King's Shield by Sherwood Smith
What Remains of Me by Alison Gaylin
People Who Knock on the Door by Patricia Highsmith
Burn Bright by Marianne de Pierres