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Feminism And Anthropology
Abstract
"This is a very important book and should be read by everyone interested in the development of, or feminist contributions to, sociocultural anthropology." Anthropos "It is as near as possible essential reading. It brings feminist into the mainstream with a vengeance." Sociology "[Moore's] emphasis on the issue of 'difference' and the ways that feminist anthropology can contribute both to anthropology and to feminism through its critical analysis of difference is an important and very helpful approach. This is a book that should be widely read and discussed." American Anthropologist
... The hazards of female gender All societies are divided in two along a male/female axis. This means that those falling on opposite sides of the divide are seen as fundamentally different types of creatures with different duties and responsibilities as well as different entitlements (Charles, 1993;Moore, 1988). Though the precise formulation of these definitions varies between societies, there is also a surprising degree of consistency, with those who are defined as female having primary responsibility for household and domestic labour. ...
... Of course in most societies there are not just differences but inequalities inherent in the social definitions of femaleness and maleness. Those things defined as male are usually valued more highly than those things defined as female and men and women are rewarded accordingly (Charles, 1993;Moore, 1988;Papanek, 1990). Not surprisingly these inequalities have a significant effect on the health of both men and women though so far it is only their impact on women that has been explored in any detail ...
... Lack of adequate nourishment and unequal access to health care mean that sometimes their most basic needs are not met (Tinker, Daly, Green, Saxeman, Lakshminarayan & Gill, 1994). The gender division of work means that women are often denied the opportunity to meet other basic needs such as time for rest and recuperation (Charles, 1993;Moore, 1988). ...
... Such problems are acute for feminist scholars researching in what was once called the Third World. (See Fox-Genovese, 1986; hooks, 1984, 1991 Lazreg, 1988; Mohanty, 1988; Mohanty, Russo, & Torres, 1991; Moore, 1988; Ramazanoglu, 1989; Spivak, 1987; Strathern, 1985 Strathern, , 1987). These intellectual contexts have produced inevitable awkwardness in the WID literature . ...
... They not only overlooked the continuing importance of women's family labour, but also generalised from the highly specific western experience of the development of the housewife form to the rest of the world. (See discussions in di Leonardo, 1991; Moore, 1988.) In any case, it became obvious that women's involvement and subordination in mainstream industrial and service sectors was not only rising very significantly in the First World, but also in the periphery, especially in Newly Industrialising Countries. ...
... di Leonardo , 1991). Critics have argued that dividing societies into 'male' productive spheres and 'female' reproductive spheres is dualistic and part of a tainted western inheritance (see the discussion in Moore, 1988 ). But the recognition of the need to deconstruct such problematic intellectual inheritances has emerged within the already noted general retreat from the social in the humanities and social sciences; I would argue that we need to return to more explicitly sociological approaches to deal with social change and women's oppositional practices within it (cf. ...
Synopsis-This article looks at the difficulties facing feminist scholars in conceptualising the fate of women caught up in agrarian transformations and passages to modernity throughout the world. It is argued that while the dominant discourses dealing with peasantries have been able to marginal-ise or exclude gender, the attempts to displace those discourses have proved more problematic than feminists might have hoped: a deconstruction of the received categories leaves scholars facing the awkward and difficult task of reconstructing and reclaiming gender from the edifice of concepts that implicitly include it but exclude any real consideration of its workings. Against a background of ethnographic research in Rembau, Negeri, Sembilan, Malaysia, the article explores the implications of these issues for 'peasant studies', with special attention to the debates about the application of western mainstream/malestream and feminist theories to the 'periphery'. Arguing that merely adding women to the classical debates about the processes subsuming peripheral agrarian forms, demonstrating 'effects on women', will not necessarily advance our understanding of the operations of gender in history, it suggests that we need to show how gender relations have been part of such agrarian transformations and to detail the linkages between local level and larger political and economic forces. But to do that we need to rethink many of the categories used in such analyses to overcome the obfuscation produced by gender absence.
... Within the literature, several socioeconomic and demographic factors have been identified as key determinants affecting women's access to land in Africa. These include marital status345, age, level of education678, place of residence (rural/urban), wealth class [9,10], number of children, and monogamous/polygamous relationships. Many studies also indicate that population density The DHS is an ideal vehicle for studying the linkages between women's access to land and the context in which it takes place. ...
... Analysis of the Figures indicates a positive association between married women in West Africa and access to family land. This could be attributed to the fact that as wives, custom dictates that married women are granted a portion of their husband's land (which falls into the category of family land) and have both the right and the obligation to cultivate it [3,4]. Evidence from the literature also suggests that in some cases where the husband is unwilling to provide access to land, married women in Burkina Faso, have been known to demand land from the husbands' lineage [21]. ...
The underlying motivation of this study is to account for the spatial variation of factors affecting women’s access to land, which has been largely ignored by the traditional regression- based model studies, much to the detriment of spatially varying relationships. Using household and individual-level data from the Demographic and Health Surveys (DHS), this study used Geographically Weighted Regression to explore and analyze the spatial relationships between women’s access to own or family land and determinants that influence women’s access to land in Africa. The results demonstrated that HIV-positive women in West Africa and Ethiopia were more likely to have access to own land than family land. Educated women in North, West and Southern Africa were less likely to have access to own land than their non-educated counterparts. Population density exhibited predominantly negative influence over women’s access to both own and family land. The relationship between rural areas and women’s access to their own land was mostly not significant across the continent. However, both rural and urban women in West Africa and Ethiopia were negatively associated with access to family land. Women within the 15-24 age group in West, Central and East Africa were more likely to have access to own land than family land, while those within the 25-34 and 35-49 age groups had a better chance of gaining access to family than own land, with the results being significant in Southern, West and North Africa. While some of the reasons for these variations have been discussed in this paper there is still need for further investigation particularly focusing on smaller regions since this study shows that women’s access to land changes as one crosses geographical boundaries even within the same country.
... Most authors point to the contribution of patriarchy in instigating (and sustaining) this problem. Sociological studies discuss patriarchy as power structures, which are characterised by dominance, hierarchy and control, with women's positions subjugated to the background (Mann, 1987;Moore, 1995;Whitehead, 2002). ...
This study explores poor widows’ perceptions of their vulnerabilities and the strategies they adopt to address those vulnerabilities in rural communities in the Southeast of Nigeria. Using an exploratory approach, data were gathered through 48 semi-structured interviews and observations. Analysis of the data uncovered three key empowerment strategies adopted by the widows: (1) support from aid organizations, (2) the formation of ‘Nsusu Group’ and (3) support from their social networks – the indigenous and religious groups. The findings show that despite the experiences of vulnerability and the frustrations and constraints they face in the rural communities, the widows were able to make transformative choices to address their life challenges, highlighting their agency in the process. Our findings also highlight the problematic role of aid organizations in filling institutional voids in the community. The findings contribute to the developing literature on widowhood in Africa by providing an empirically grounded narrative about the lived realities of widows in Southeast Nigeria and their individual and collective agency in empowering themselves.
... Yet in contexts of extreme vulnerability, it can potentially expose them to additional work burdens, alongside engaging with more risky, if flexible ventures, with negative wellbeing effects (Arora et al., 2017). For many women, whose labouring bodies are their main asset, their invisible networks, including with mothers and female kin, become the major, if not only, source of support (Bujra, 1977;Cooper, 2017;Moore, 1986Moore, , 1988, despite the potential tensions therein (Rao, 2016). ...
Access to resources, both material and social, are central elements in responding to social and environmental transition, and adapting to change, yet the ways in which such access is negotiated within and across varying household structures is not well understood. In semi-arid Kenya, persistent drought has made male incomes from pastoralism insecure, and contributed to women’s growing engagement with trade, farming and other independent enterprises, for survival. This has, however, raised questions about women’s dependence on men for household provisioning, and enhanced expectations of reciprocity in both production and reproduction within households. While demographers note the rise in female headship in sub-Saharan Africa, and female headed households are often the target of policy attention, the situation on the ground is much more complex. Polygamy, separation and consensual unions, multi-generational and multi-locational households, point to a growing diversity in gender and generational relationships, in rights, responsibilities and norms. Based on data from household surveys, focus group discussions and life history interviews with differently positioned women and men within pastoralist communities in northern Kenya, the paper explores the implications of changing household structures beyond headship, in particular the loosening of marriage ties, frequent separation and regrouping, on relational vulnerability and the micro-politics of adaptation in the region.
... We also hope they will encourage wider use of feminist approaches in geography and social sciences. Feminist scholarship in geography, anthropology and related fields attained growing influence from the 1970s onwards (Domosh, 1991;Massey, 1994;Moore, 1988;Strathern, 1987), but it was mainly over the last two decades that feminist approaches came to be applied in research in the Arctic. ...
Vladislava VLADIMIROVA & J. Otto HABECK
Introduction: feminist approaches and the study of gender in Arctic social sciences
This is an Accepted Manuscript of an article published by Taylor & Francis in Polar Geography, 41(3): 145–163, on 14 August 2018, available online at https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/1088937X.2018.1496368?tab=permissions&scroll=top
... We also hope they will encourage wider use of feminist approaches in geography and social sciences. Feminist scholarship in geography, anthropology and related fields attained growing influence from the 1970s onwards (Domosh, 1991;Massey, 1994;Moore, 1988;Strathern, 1987), but it was mainly over the last two decades that feminist approaches came to be applied in research in the Arctic. ...
Notwithstanding the gradual intensification of contacts across the different parts of the circumpolar North, research on gender in the Arctic is still a fragmented field–not the least because of language barriers. The four cases presented here, all from the Far North of Russia, are intended to complement research on gender in North America and the Nordic countries. We also hope they will encourage wider use of feminist approaches in geography and social sciences. After a first overview of how gender emerged as a topic of study in the circumpolar North, the introduction will focus on gender-specific forms of mobility and immobility. Next, gender will be discussed in relation to identity and intersectionality under colonial and post-colonial conditions. Thereafter, Feminist Political Ecology and other theoretical directions are portrayed as theoretical approaches to studying gendered economies. Such contextualization of the study of gender in the Arctic prepares the ground for short summaries of the four papers in this special issue, to be concluded by a brief statement about future directions of research. Particularly the concept of intersectionality is favored as a useful basis for examining gender, indigeneity, and economic differences. © 2018
... In so doing, they spend longer hours in their household environment. All societies are divided along what we can call the fault line of gender (Moore, 1988;Papenek, 1990). This means that women and men are defined as different types of beings, each with their own opportunities, roles and responsibilities. ...
It has been established that women spend more time in the neighbourhood environment, and therefore, are more vulnerable to the observable poor conditions. The focus of this study is on neighbourhood environmental stressors that affect womens' health in Lagos metropolis. The factors considered include access to clean water, adequate sanitation, drainage conditions, ventilation and hygiene, type of energy for cooking and nutrition. These factors are exacerbated by poverty and differ across different neighbourhoods in Lagos metropolis. 1150 respondents (high-50; medium-328; and low-772) consisting of randomly selected women, aged 18 years and above were selected from all the 17 Local Government Areas (LGAs) in metropolitan Lagos to achieve 100% representation. Focus Group Discussions were held with women from selected different neighbourhoods. A 5-point likert scale was used as a measure of self-reported stress and self-reported health, with higher numbers indicating a greater self-reported stress. From the different survey methods used, results show that women in the low income neighbourhoods are more vulnerable to environmental stressors, and so their health is mostly affected negatively. Women in the other income groups also experience some form of stress but at lower severity levels. Environmental stressors and severity of chronic illness are linked to stress. An improvement in the environmental conditions will reduce the amount of stress experienced by women of different income neighbourhoods.
... As many feminists question the universality of theories and concepts, a foundational one -gender -is also questioned for its universal application in the Western intellectual tradition as it has been used since the 1970s-1980s as a theoretical panacea for explaining gender inequality (Rubin 1975;Edholm et al. 1977;Moore 1988). The Western-centric derivation and representation were brought into discussion as Spelman (1990) criticises the Western feminists for taking "the experiences of white middle-class women to be representative of, indeed normative for, the experiences of all women" (ix), while gender variations between male and female resulting in increased recognition of masculinities and femininities were more cherished (Wharton 2005, 5). ...
This research aims to argue that gender mainstreaming, mainly analysed in an institutionalist approach, could alternatively be understood in the politics of meanings and to challenge its ‘universality’ by proposing the transnational meaning of gender mainstreaming, based on the degree to which four transnational and local NGOs in Mae Sot District differently negotiate with the politics of meanings of the Western vocabulary and notion of ‘rights’ and the Thai Sitthi-Manusyachon as well as the confrontation between ‘gender’ and Phetsaphawa, as both vocabularies are the two foundational elements of gender mainstreaming discourse.
... Marriage is a rite of passage and signifies a transition from childhood to adulthood (Bell 1997). Most previ- ous wedding studies examine how these ritual events contribute to the construction of marriage, family and gender relations (e.g., Edwards 1989;Moore 1988), but they do not examine the wedding as a cultural event (Goldstein-Gidoni 2001). When couples declare their new personal identities to their families and friends publicly in a wedding that follows a prescribed proce- dure, such ritual elements are culturally and historically conditioned (Nelson and Deshpande 2003). ...
To understand power dynamics between Chinese and Western cultures, this research examines the content of advertisements from bridal magazines in Hong Kong, China, and the US. Wedding magazines in Chinese societies visualize the hegemonic power of Western cultures using English language text, Caucasian models and Western wedding practices. Meanwhile, culture plays a role in selling ritual goods. Clothing advertisements were more common in the US, suggesting that the beauty of the bride in the US is important with respect to the body, whereas in China beauty in terms of both the body and face is important.
... Indeed, Steuernagel et al. (1999, p.65) considered culture/place so central that they have questioned the utility of identifying the sex of respondents independent of their particular cultural contexts. While there has been some tendency to survey the universality of gender asymmetry (Rosaldo, 1974), and there has equally been some impetus to approach the phenomenon as a monolithic concept (Moore, 1988), Steuernagel et al. (1999, p.65) maintain that "biological males and females become gendered males and females in the context of particular cultures and particular historical periods….Gender viewed this way [they argue] becomes for an individual a set of opportunity structures that a particular culture values". Place may impose a patriarchy, but all patriarchies are not similar. ...
The notion that policy orientation is gendered has important implications for both policy research and practical policymaking. If men and women differ in their policy orientation, policy action will equally differ depending on which group controls the levers of community politics/policy agenda. However, a substantial question still looms: are gender cleavages in policy orientation inevitable, or, do things change markedly according to locality? This research uses national probability sample data from Afghanistan to examine the extent to which locality shapes gender cleavages in policy orientation. The results posit that locality matters in two significant ways. First, it crystallises women's group interests. Secondly, it promotes policy 'convergence', to the extent that men and women living and operating in the same social space will tend to react to policy similarly. However, such a broad outlook does not preclude gender polarisation on policy matters. Women will align with their group interest even when that interest is at odds with their community's trajectory.
... Indeed, Steuernagel et al. (1999, p.65) considered culture/place so central that they have questioned the utility of identifying the sex of respondents independent of their particular cultural contexts. While there has been some tendency to survey the universality of gender asymmetry (Rosaldo, 1974), and there has equally been some impetus to approach the phenomenon as a monolithic concept (Moore, 1988), Steuernagel et al. (1999, p.65) maintain that "biological males and females become gendered males and females in the context of particular cultures and particular historical periods….Gender viewed this way [they argue] becomes for an individual a set of opportunity structures that a particular culture values". Place may impose a patriarchy, but all patriarchies are not similar. ...
The notion that policy orientation is gendered has important implications for both policy research and practical policymaking. If men and women differ in their policy orientation, policy action will equally differ depending on which group controls the levers of community politics/policy agenda. However, a substantial question still looms: are gender cleavages in policy orientation inevitable, or, do things change markedly according to locality? This research uses national probability sample data from Afghanistan to examine the extent to which locality shapes gender cleavages in policy orientation. The results posit that locality matters in two significant ways. First, it crystallises women's group interests. Secondly, it promotes policy 'convergence', to the extent that men and women living and operating in the same social space will tend to react to policy similarly. However, such a broad outlook does not preclude gender polarisation on policy matters. Women will align with their group interest even when that interest is at odds with their community's trajectory.
... In reality, sociologists and anthropologists have long been arguing that household is not a site of consensus (Moore 1988;Kabeer 1994). Kabeer (1998: 92) criticised Neoclassical Economics' treatment of the household as a 'black box' of joint welfare maximisation and unified preferences and pooled resources. ...
The article argues that remittance behaviours of
the households vary in terms of types of the household and how trust,
co-insurance and bargaining forms important determents of remitterr ecipient
nexus. The paper unveils the ways in which socially embedded
gender and generational norms impact intra-household decision-making
regarding remittances. While remittances foster the needs, preferences and
capacity of individual and household member to manage the remittances,
the aim of this paper is to offer an in-depth understanding of the social
and cultural processes of remittance behaviour.
https://www.routledge.com/South-Asia-Migration-Report-2017-Recruitment-Remittances-and-Reintegration/Rajan/p/book/9781138227125
... Mahremiyet as an Institution of Intimacy Intimacy, in this article, is not necessarily tied to romantic coupling but involves boundaries and borders of the gendered female body and the ways female heterosexuality and femininity are built and rebuilt, made and remade in everyday life, producing gendered knowledge and meaning (Moore 1988; Strathern 1990; Yanagisako and Collier 1987). I consider the culture of mahremiyet an institution of intimacy (Berlant and Warner 1998). ...
Women's control of their bodily movements, especially in the Islamicate contexts of the Middle East, constitutes a multilayered process of building privacy, heterosexuality, and intimacy. Physical exercise, however, with the extensive body movements it requires, problematizes women's ability to control their public sexualities. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork conducted in 2011 and 2012 in Istanbul, this article explores the everyday concerns of Istanbulite women who seek rahatlik (comfort) during exercise. The interviewees frequently used the word rahatlik when referring to women-only spaces in the culture of mahremiyet (intimacy, privacy). This article furthers the scholarship on Muslim sexualities by examining the diversity of women's concerns regarding their public sexualities and the boundary-making dynamics in the culture of mahremiyet. I argue that mahremiyet operates as an institution of intimacy that provides a metacultural intelligibility for heteronormativity based on sexual scripts, normative spaces, and gendered acts.
... However, this doesn't imply that collection action is a failure altogether; as a matter of fact, it is quite a success for women in many developing societies. Women use kinship and non-kinship links to co-operate across households – farming each other's fields, helping with childcare, sharing their life savings to cover for major life cycle events (such as marriage), or for productive investments [13,14]. Many of these groups or arrangements are informal and have evolved as coping mechanisms through which women try to escape some of the constraints of their economic, as well as cultural, circumstances. ...
The objective of this study is to explore the plight of Afghan women during the Taliban era, and how they managed to overcome gender-specific barriers through cooperative initiatives thereby developing and empowering each other. For this study, a literature search was undertaken by using various electronic research databases to understand the Gender and Development (GAD) paradigm in the context of Afghan women in Afghanistan, as well as to examine how two decades of war, invasion, and violent conflict has affected the lives of these women. The literature search determined that despite the horrific conditions for women in Afghanistan, they were still able to organize gender-related survival strategies and, in the process, become aware of more gender-specific concerns. Participatory Rural Appraisal (PRA), the Identities of Women Framework (IWF), and bottom-up development initiatives were just some of the useful tools that were utilized to appropriate quantitative and qualitative analyses of the needs of rural women in Afghanistan. As such, women collaboratively worked together, in groups and organizations, to generate networks, norms, and trust in their communities. This was established not only through aid/assistance but also through partnerships with national and international women's organizations, women's media, and non-government organizations (NGOs). This review thus aims to inform that joint ventures have enabled rural Afghan women to feel more empowered and break taboos, thereby working towards changing gender relations and perceptions at a much deeper level.
... Along with the big data that highlight the scale of inequalities globally, approaches in this field have often been dominated by qualitative approaches, which highlight the lived experiences of those inequalities. Earlier feminist work, which sought to fore ground women's stories emerged in a wide range of disciplines, such as history (Rowbotham, 1975), sociology (Oakley, 1979), and anthropology (Moore, 1988(Moore, , 1994, emerged as a useful strategy to highlight the ways in which women's experiences had been excluded from dominant historical and social narratives, by suggesting ways in which the stories of the disadvantaged and dispossessed could be "put into discourse" as Michel Foucault argued, happened with sexuality (Foucault, 1981: 11) and made audible and visible. ...
... The strong ontological claims of essentialism hardly take into account the critics of the complexity epistemology regarding objectivity and neutrality (Morin, 1977). Moreover, the conventional idea of nuclear family has been strongly challenged in different fields (Fruggeri & Mancini, 2001; Moore, 2013; Pievani, 2014). Families with same-sex parents have proven their ability to provide an appropriate environment for their components, equal to that of traditional nuclear families (Bozett & Sussman, 1990; Gartrell & Bos, 2010; Patterson, 1992 Patterson, , 1995), if not more: A recent meta-analysis (Fedewa, Black, & Ahn, 2015) showed a good parent-child relationship and a better psychological adjustment in children of same-sex couples. ...
The Italian situation of lesbian women-parented families seems to be trapped between a deprivation of public and legal acknowledgment and the reality of everyday lives of lesbian women having children in a same-sex relationship context experiencing this ambivalence in their personal, familiar, and social existence. The aim of this study is to analyze the narratives of 17 lesbian mothers (10 biological mothers and seven social mothers) in order to outline the construction of their identities as parents, their affective relationships with the partner (social mother), and the relationships established with public agencies (school, neighborhood, family networks). Results show that lesbian maternity has strong political and social implications. In particular, our analysis underlines the libertarian extent of lesbian maternity paths, often based on equal roles and promoting the enlargement of the concepts of family. Our findings suggest that the lack of legal recognition has a threatening effect on the sense-making processes that social mothers perform during the development of their parental role.
The need to uncover, interrogate, and integrate women’s contributions to fisheries in research and development has never been clearer. As coastal and fisheries management continues to look to the Sustainable Development Goals and the Voluntary Guidelines for Securing Sustainable Small-Scale Fisheries in the context of Food Security and Poverty Eradication, as frameworks and mandates, gender equity and equality have become a central concern. To fill the still existing gap of documentation and theoretical engagement, in this thematic collection, we gather together voices from researchers and practitioners from around the world, with one overarching common approach of using a gender lens to examine the relationship between humans and aquatic resources. Drawing on Donna Haraway’s classic feminist concept of situated knowledges, we examine the many and varied approaches researchers are using to engage with the intersection of gender and fisheries. Beginning and ending with two reviews that examine where gender and fisheries has come from, and where it is going, this thematic issue includes case studies from 10 countries, engaging in the topic at various scales (individual, household, national, institutional etc.), and using multiple methodological approaches. Taken together, these pieces explore the mechanism by which women’s contribution to fisheries are overlooked and provide direct evidence to contest the persistent invisibility of women in fishing, fisheries labor, and fisheries decision-making. Going beyond the evidence of women’s contributions, the authors go further to examine different coastal contexts, intersectional identities such as age, and explore gender transformative approaches to fisheries development.
The dry-salted trade of Nile perch or kayabo is important for many along the shores of Lake Victoria. The kayabo trade started in the 1990s and has been increasingly restructured due to changing regional and global trade relationships. This shift has led to the emergence of hierarchical trading relations, which create an exploitative network in which powerful middlemen control the access of trade for women from the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) and marginalizes the Tanzanian women, changing the organization from a poly-centric to a more centralized trade organization in the hands of a small group of powerful business men. We show in this paper that whereas the women traders from the DRC manoeuvred themselves in positions from which they could manipulate the network through bribery and conniving to derive substantial capital gains from the kayabo trade, their Tanzanian counterparts however are excluded from the decision-making processes, access to fish resources, financial capital, and negotiation power. They persevere by operating in increasingly competitive markets, relying on illegal fish that they sell with little profit at local and domestic markets. They survive in jobs that are insecure and risky by nature.
A comparative analysis of artifacts recovered from three plantation quarter sites in Tidewater Virginia indicates that enslaved households varied with respect to their labor patterns and household economies. An approach which positions these households within the broader context of slavery illuminates how different labor demands on a smaller, urban versus large rural plantations resulted in household variability. Moreover, a gendered analysis of labor reveals how enslaved women’s work challenges the universality of the private/public dichotomy.
This chapter discusses the book’s methodological approach. Inspired by feminist methodologies, participatory methods were used in the research to break away from hierarchical power dynamics and minimize harm and control of the research process. The chapter presents the realization of the methodological approach and the methods used such as ethnographic research, focus group discussions (FGDs), the collection of life stories, and following girls over a longer period of time to get a better insight into their life trajectories and choices. It reflects on the involvement of migrant and refugee girls as research assistants and researchers in the three different contexts, and on the advantages and disadvantages of collaborative and comparative research. It explains the choice to make a documentary film about migrant girls in Bangladesh and Ethiopia, and the ways in which the film was used not only for dissemination but also as a data-analysis method.
Paleopathology has become the quintessential interdisciplinary subject. While disciplines such as medicine and biology are intuitive foundations for paleopathology, and have played key roles in the diagnosis of diseases, social theories are playing an increasingly critical role in the interpretation of pathological lesions. Theories centering on socioeconomic status, the construction of human agency and identity, feminist and gender paradigms, concepts of disability, and the application of the Developmental Origins of Health and Disease Hypothesis, for instance, contribute to a complex and nuanced understanding of health and disease in the past.
The tea plantations of Dooars in West Bengal are founded on a gendered division of labour. The recent economic crisis faced by the tea plantations brought long-established labour practices into question. Mounting expenses and closures led to rising migration of plantation workers to distant urban areas in North and South India, in search of alternative employment. Many of these women found employment as domestic workers and care workers in Delhi and Gurgaon. Drawing on the in-depth narratives of these migrant domestic workers, this article explores self-perceptions and representations of work and brings to the forefront the ongoing process of skill acquisition on the one hand and its constant invisibilization on the other. This reproduces paid domestic and care work not only as women’s natural labour but as low skilled and low status work that is particularly suitable for migrant women. The women’s own perceptions help problematize and nuance otherwise monolithic understandings of labour in general and domestic labour in particular.
Labour migration from subsistence households in Tamang‐speaking communities of Northern Nepal heralds their transition from an agrarian to a remittance economy. This migration entails the abandonment of subsistence labour processes that once wove households together in reciprocal mutuality. Migration thus dislocates persons from moral economic institutions and norms, and reciprocity is replaced by cash‐calculative decisions about food systems. However, migration is a broader sociocultural response to historical precarities and struggle over de‐territorializing effects of state development. Moving beyond standard ‘peasant economy’ forms of analysis, and domestic autarky in particular, this essay explores neglected areas of the comparative anthropology of subsistence labour, and situates the ethnography of work and power relations in indigenous and other critiques of development nationalism in Nepal. Redirecting labour abroad creates tensions in domestic reproduction. These surface in intra‐clan gift exchange, in managing agro‐pastoral viability, and in the ritual maintenance of order among humans and nonhumans that invokes ancestral migrations for dealing with dilemmas about contemporary dispersals.
By examining a funeral ritual devised by Tamil refugees living north of the Arctic Circle in Norway, I argue that the study of migrant rituals offers new insights into migrants’ senses of belonging, identity and wellbeing. Within a context of the exclusion and inclusion of cultural minorities, I describe the process of creating a funeral ritual that involves encounters between local Norwegians and Tamil refugees. The funeral followed the sudden death of a Tamil worker at the local fish plant as a result of a freak accident. The article focuses on how the Tamils’ work of devising and performing the funeral speaks to local migrant experiences of living on the boundaries between the Tamil and Norwegian life-worlds. A centrepiece of the case study involves a young widow, thus the analysis includes social and cultural dimensions of widow- and womanhood, while also highlighting issues of migration and the shared human condition. In conclusion, I underscore the way in which the migrant ritual, embodiment and (Othering) discourse cohere together to form a temporal phenomenon that responds to the present-ism of human life.
The term feminism expresses a commitment to resist the various forms of oppression women experience. Drawing from the author’s extensive interactions with the emerging indigenous women’s movement in Mexico, this article explores its political agency and social strategies. Feminist indigenous practices both question and shape the wider feminist movement in Mexico. A certain hegemonic feminism often reproduces the relationship that Chandra Mohanty speaks of when describing the links between First and Third World feminist discourses. She argues that Western feminist discourse has produced a “ ... composite, singular ‘third world woman,’” who is a “powerless” victim of male dominance and patriarchal oppression (Mohanty 1991, 53). Urban feminist analysis in Mexico has given rise to a hegemony that has often defined indigenous feminism as the “other”: exotic, strangely rooted in “culture” and powerless if not nonexistent.
Differences between men and women are now beginning to receive greater attention in the planning of health services. The appearance of these issues on the health care agenda owes a great deal to the tenacity of the many women who have drawn attention both to the specificity of their reproductive health needs and also to the discrimination they still experience in many of their medical encounters. (Dan 1994; Fee and Krieger 1994; Smyke,1991; White, 1990). More recently, some men have begun to express similar concerns, highlighting their difficulties in obtaining effective and appropriate care for specifically male problems (Carroll, 1994; Sabo and Gordon, 1995). Both women and (latterly) men have also looked at the wider gender dimensions of health and illness, highlighting the different social pressures constructing their lives in unhealthy ways (Doyal, 1995; Harrison et al., 1992).
Azam Torab’s interest is in the gender metaphors of gift and commodity. To illustrate this distinction, she describes women’s popular ritual votive meals known as sofreh and men’s rituals in commemoration of the death of Imam Husseyn in the month of Muharram. Torab’s study, however, questions the normativity of a gendered dichotomy usually attributed to these activities by analyzing the tropes of food and blood, which are central to these rituals, allowing that she perceives a specific mode of gender blurring in both the men's Muharram rituals and the women’s gift-giving celebrations.
In this paper Noriko Kawahashi presents the specificity of Okinawan women’s religious practices. Women priestesses, respected as divinities who are incarnated in female form, are the primary agents of religion. Men are relegated to politics. This dual polito-religious structure has existed for many centuries. The special rituals where the divine priestesses exercise their benevolent power by administering religious blessings and providing protection for all people are described in detail.
In the context of the rise of feminist scholarship exploring links between caste, class and gender, the particular concern of this article is with developing a sociological framework that would help locate gendered power relations and women's oppression within the structures of caste and class domination, inequality and social stratification. While a politics of difference is indispensable to highlight the differential axes and experiences of oppression, a critical sociological understanding of social relations that make for structural differences and commonalities needs to be built up in order to grapple with a complex and rapidly changing social reality. Drawing from multiple critical perspectives to create a conceptual synthesis and taking a structural approach to ?difference?, the article develops the contours of a critical feminist sociological framework grounded in theories of production relations and cultural subordination that may be useful to explore the complex and dynamic interconnections between caste, class and patriarchy. It also attempts to understand aspects of caste?class-specific gender relations and patriarchal forms as well as account for key differences and divisions between women. The article argues that by providing a contextualised, interactional understanding of differential social relations and differential social locations of both women and men, feminist sociology can make a new and distinct contribution to the systematic and systemic study of, as well as illuminate more fully, the workings of societal systems of domination?subordination.
This chapter describes how the work of migrant teachers has been devalued and diminished, and what forms of downgrading have been forced on them. It further argues that the discussion of “teacher quality” should also take into account their everyday practices and contributions in the migrant community; this is shown by providing a portrait of an ordinary migrant teacher. Then the chapter moves to narratives of how migrant teachers form their own communities to support themselves, especially when most are women and considered as powerless and lacking in resources.
This chapter reviews gender research in the field of sociology and anthropology in Sarawak. The discussion is contextualised in the wider debates of women and gender studies and explores the development of anthropology of women to a feminist anthropology and a feminist ethnography. The chapter argues three salient points. First, research that disaggregates women and men and discusses their differential experience of a social phenomenon is not necessarily a gender study because, for the purposes of this chapter, gender studies is defined as research with an explicit feminist agenda. Second, anthropologists studying indigenous societies in Sarawak often point out that gender is unmarked and therefore gender relations are of little interest. I argue instead that gender is deeply implicated in processes of social transformation and the black box of gender relations requires unpacking in the context of rapidly changing Sarawak. Third, the future of gender studies in Sarawak in the field of anthropology and sociology is challenging, as there is no critical mass of researchers and academics in this specific field for capacity building among students and young scholars.
The first year in our graduate studies at the University of Pennsylvania, the members of my cohort were assigned selected chapters from the groundbreaking Engendering Archaeology (Conkey and Gero in Engendering archaeology: women and prehistory, Wiley, Cambridge, 1991). The edited volume delivered on Conkey and Spector’s (Adv Archaeol Method Theory 7:1–38, 1984) initial prompt to study gender with a critical feminist lens in place. Its inclusion on the Fundamentals of Archaeology’s syllabus indicated that by the late 1990s archaeologists recognized, some more begrudgingly than others, that gender was a viable research concern.
The study of barnacles would occupy much of Charles Darwin’s
time from 1846 to 1854. His grappling with these creatures may also explain why the naturalist’s better known treatise on the evolutionary origin of species did not see publication until 1859. Certain species’ hermaphroditism and variable sexual relations were quite perplexing for the naturalist. For this reason, barnacles invite us to think about the constitution of common sense and queer matter.
The shift to companionate marriage in South Asia and elsewhere is widely read as a move from ‘tradition’ to ‘modernity’ resulting in an expansion of individual agency, especially for women. This paper critically examines the narratives of urban middle-class women in Sri Lanka spanning three generations to illustrate that rather than indicating a radical shift in the way they negotiated between individual desires and social norms, the emphasis on ‘choice’ signals a shift in the narrative devices used in the presentation of the ‘self’. The paper illustrates how young women’s narratives about marriage appear to suggest ‘modernity’ as inevitable—that its processes are reconstituting the person who, less constrained by ‘tradition’ and collective expectations, is now experiencing greater freedom in the domain of marriage. However, it also shows how urban middle-class families in Sri Lanka have collectively invested in the narrative of choice through which ‘a choosing person’ is consciously created as a mark of the family’s modernity and progress. Rather than signalling freedom, these narratives about choice reveal how women are often burdened with the risks and responsibility of agency. The paper illustrates that the ‘choosing person’ is produced through narratives that emphasise agency as a responsibility that must be exercised with caution because women are expected by and obligated to their families to make the ‘right’ choices. Hence, a closer look at the individualised ‘choosing person’ reveals a less unitary, relational self with permeable boundaries embedded within and accountable to family and kinship.
At a time when there has been a great deal of debate about women’s international rights and new areas of rights concerning women have begun to be defined, my aim in this chapter is to consider how such rights operate in specific class and cultural contexts. The area I shall discuss is the poblaciónes (low-income settlements) of southern Santiago, Chile. Whilst emphasising the particularity of cultural contexts, I also argue that international rights are applicable across cultural contexts. The process by which women interpret such rights and apply them in their lives illustrates how ‘rights’ and ‘citizenship’ can be used as strategic tools in negotiating their position in different contexts.
The feminization of migration flows is an important trend in contemporary international migration. Women are playing an increasingly important role in all types of migration in all regions of the world (Castles and Miller, 1993, p. 8). Female migration is part of a global change in migratory phenomena affecting both the sending and the receiving countries. In the sending countries, ‘emigration is one aspect of the social crisis which accompanies integration into the world market and modernisation’ (Castles and Miller, 1993, p. 3). In addition, urbanization in these countries deeply modifies lifestyles and gender roles. In the receiving countries — and nowhere is this more true than in Southern Europe — changes in the labour market and the production system have affected the demand for labour, which is growing in the tertiary sector and reduced in the industrial sector. At the same time, the informal economy is growing and developing. In this new economic landscape, the demand for female labour in the tertiary sector, including services to private persons, has increased. Hence the feminization of migration into Southern Europe corresponds rather precisely to this increase in demand for workers to fill ‘female’ jobs.
While the previous chapters have engaged with the situation of people displaced due to conflict, war, persecution and political discrimination, the next two chapters examine the situation of those who are affected by development-induced displacement (DID) and displaced by infrastructure projects such as large dams. As discussed in the book’s introduction, DID is on the rise, affecting the lives of millions across the globe every year. Large infrastructure projects such as dams have far-reaching impacts on ecosystems and river basins, and notably on the millions of people who must be resettled. Existing dams have displaced around 40-80 million people worldwide in the last fifty years (WCD 2000), most of whom are indigenous and minority peoples. For example, of fifty large dams surveyed, 54 per cent (twenty-six cases) were found to resettle a majority of indigenous or tribal people and other ethnic minorities (Scudder 2005).
This introduction identifies central traits of the contemporary labour situation in emergent economies of the global South, and situates the articles for the special section within this broader context. The focus is on the ways changes in labour produce reconfigurations of gender and power relations, and on how local models of gender shape new forms of labour and emerging labour markets. The object of study is thus the complexities different forms of capitalist integration pose in specific socio-historical localities and moments where people’s ‘work membership’ in society is becoming actualised in new ways.
Bali’s recent socio-economic transformation is mainly a result of rapid growth in mass-tourism, which, as a capitalist labour-intensive industry, represents a new regime of labour that reorganises, dislocates, and multiplies wage labour opportunities. ‘Localising globalisation’ through labour in tourism alters conditions for gaining a living wage; yet, it also produces new contestations of gender, caste and class. This article argues that the labour regime shift has produced a large informal economy that provides new paths for social mobility for low caste Bali-Hindus, whilst at the same time class, gender and caste inequalities interlock in the shaping of different labour trajectories.
The group of female forest owners is growing across Europe and currently estimated to be about 30% of all private owners. This new category of forest owner merits a closer look. By introducing a gender perspective across three different research frameworks, this paper substantiates that gender matters in forest ownership, management, operations, and the understandings of these three aspects. Where gender-disaggregated data is available, and gender is assessed as an empirical variable, we find differences in numbers between male and female forest owners in most countries. By adding the concept of gender as a relational and structuralizing category, we demonstrate that gender-structures affect e.g. actual behavior of female and male forest owners and the self-evaluation of forestry competence. Further, when considering gender as a meaning category we explore how meaning produces behavior and behavior produces meanings, and how both shape institutions and natural and artificial matter. Here forestry competence is the applied example. To further increase the knowledge on new forest owners, we recommend i) fellow researchers in the field to assume that gender matters and design their empirical studies accordingly and ii) policy makers to guarantee access to gender-disaggregated data in official registers and statistics.
Feminist critiques, which have emerged in many disciplines of the social sciences, including geography, anthropology, sociology, development studies, and even economics (Folbré, 1994), grew out of concern for the neglect of women. The basis of a feminist critique is not the study of women, but rather the study of gender and the interrelationships between women and men. A feminist methodological approach analyses the role of gender in all human societies as a structuring principle shaping their economic and market systems, as well as their histories, geography, ideologies and political systems.
For 6 years, the Massachusetts Maritime Academy (MMA) of the USA has been conducting a student exchange program with Shanghai Maritime University (SMU) of China. Every spring term, about 20 cadets are selected from each institution and sent to the other campus to study for one semester. MMA, like many other traditional maritime schools, is a male-dominated institute, with the gender distribution being 12 % female cadets and 88 % male cadets. However, the cadets participating in the MMA exchange program have shown quite a different gender ratio with the female’s participation rate, displaying a surge in the past 2 years. Furthermore, the female cadets tend to stand out in the job market upon graduation, especially in comparison to their male peers. This paper presents an analysis of what accounts for the success of selected female cadets, how they outperform in the international exchange programs, and their subsequent achievements in the job market by applying case-study methodology, school-wide surveys and the data collected over the course of 6 years. The findings indicate that the outstanding qualities of female cadets, such as language proficiency, cultural adaptability, flexibility, intuitive vision, and genuine curiosity and perseverance, are displayed and encouraged, allowing the women to reach their full potential. The school-wide cultural awareness and job market success, motivate more MMA female cadets to participate in the MMA-SMU exchange program.
Patriarchat ist für die feministische Theorie und die zweite Frauenbewegung von zentraler Bedeutung, um Ungleichheiten und Diskriminierungen, die Frauen in den unterschiedlichen Lebenssphären betreffen, als Teile eines übergreifenden Phänomens zu erfassen. Die Auseinandersetzung mit diesem Begriff spiegelt auch wesentliche Entwicklungen der feministischen Theorie wider, in deren Diskussionen und Kritik das Verständnis von Patriarchat erweitert und differenziert wurde. Patriarchat ist als ein Schlüsselbegriff für feministische Wissenschaftlerinnen aller Disziplinen relevant, Philosophinnen, Historikerinnen, Soziologinnen, Politikwissenschaftlerinnen, Literaturwissenschaftlerinnen haben zu unterschiedlichen Aspekten wesentliche Erkenntnisse beigetragen.
This thesis is a study of women, warung (small shops) and Cicadas kampung community of Bandung, West Java. Data on warung, women, and the Cicadas kampung is based on 12 months fieldwork in 2002. To collect the data, a combination of in-depth interviews, observation and participant observation were adopted. In this research I explore the warung issue from the perspective of warung owners and other members of the kampung. ¶ From the owners’ point of view the main reason to establish warung is to extend the limited income produced by their family members to make ends meet. Other reasons are the possibility to combine income earning activities with domestic chores and social prestige. Having a warung gives more social prestige to a woman warung owner than being a domestic helper. On the other hand, having a job in the formal sector is considered better than conducting a warung business. ¶ From the kampung residents’ point of view, the reasons to shop at warung are mainly related to certain services offered by warung which are not available in other trading sectors. Warung offer small quantities of goods and credit. These services match the socioeconomic condition of the people, who are mostly low income. For the poor, warung indeed ‘support’ them by providing these affordable services which are in accord with their purchasing power. Moreover shopping at warung enables the people to save, especially when buying cooked food. For kampung people, cooking may lead to a higher cost. Proximity is another reason people shop at warung - which could be as close as next door - and this saves them transportation costs. ¶ Warung are also a social centre where people interact and discuss community affairs. Buying snacks (jajan) and credit (nganjuk) are important practices which mark the relationship between warung owners and their customers. These practices are less likely to characterize other trading sectors. ¶ More women than men run warung because having a warung enables women to combine reproductive and productive work, though this leads to the women working extremely long hours - up to 16 hours a day - to perform both tasks. Warung can also be seen as an extension of women’s domestic responsibilities, by reinvesting money and providing meals for their family.
This article deals with the empowerment and resistance strategies used by working women in Turkey. In order to explore the ways in which gender ideologies are produced and resisted, a very specific group of women were studied using life history and focus roup interviews. The interviews were conducted with women who hag graduated between 1960 and 1970 from Girls' Institutes. The Girls' Institutes were all-female high schools and the curriculum of these institutes was particularly geared towards modem domestic, or homemaking skills. However, despite the notion of producing modem women for the domestic sphere most of the graduates have chosen to work outside their homes. Of these working women some have remained single, some have not had children. These outcomes present a paradox. The article focuses on the resolution of these paradoxes, the power and resistance manoeuvres that women employ and their relationship to the processes of modernization and westernization in Turkey.
This paper focuses on the 'gendered' politics of economic adjustment exemplified in India's New Economic Policy (NEP) and interrogates NEP's tacit appropriation of women's labour (productive and reproductive) to maintain social reproduction during times of economic insecurity. Through a micro-study of an 'Oraon' village in the Jharkand region of Bihar, India, I explore the changing nature of women's work and gender relations in response to the larger socio-economic transformation initiated by the NEP; and how in turn these changes are mediated through the interacting politics of the gendered ideology of the family and the household, class and ethnicity. Through the analysis of changing gender responsibilities within the household, I critique the 'unitary model' approach to household behaviour implicit in the NEP and argue for the need to move beyond it, to address the larger issues of gender equity and empowerment.
Gender in Prehistory (c.40,000–4,000 years bp)The Socio-politics of Studying Ancient Gender: Epistemology, Methodology, and the Gendered Practice of ArcheologyEpistemologyMethodologyConclusions
Focusing on women’s and men’s participation, this article sheds light on the reindeer herding on the island of Hinnøya and in the southern areas of the county of Troms, Northern Norway, during the 18th and 19th centuries. In this region the Sámi and the Norwegian populations have been living side by side for a long period. In addition to hunting and gathering, the economy of the Sámi population was based on farming, fishing, and reindeer herding. Based on a variety of scant sources, the study focuses on the organization of the household and the concept of household as applied to a reindeer herding population. Who was participating in the reindeer herding and how was it organized? Men’s and women’s roles in the household, their economic contributions and their attachments to specific places and areas, are also studied. Public documents such as assize minutes, tax registers, censuses and court testimonies dating from the 1740s onwards have been analysed with regard to ethnographic and biographical studies. The four mentioned sources allow for different approaches to the analysis of gender perspectives, families, kinship, female and male participation, household organizations, economic activities and land use. By comparing this material with ethnographic studies and travel literature, selected individuals are followed – at least partly – through the different phases of their lifetime. Their roles within the household, their social status and kinship shed light on different conditions of their economic base. It is shown, in a systematic discussion of the sources related to specific regions, that women contributed to and participated in the reindeer herding as a part of a combined economy. However, the sources are insufficient for a full reconstruction of the Sámi households in this geographical area.
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