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Beyond the Second Sex: New Directions in the Anthropology of Gender
Beyond the Second Sex is an innovative work that challenges Simone de Beauvoir's notion that women are "the second" in every society. Anthropological inquiry into male-female relations has evolved around debates concerning sexual inequality. Based on original field research, the essays presented in this volume are not concerned with inequality per se. Rather, the authors pose ethnographic and analytical challenges in the assumptions and definitions that, in the past, have supported judgments about sexual equality and inequality. They move away from broad labels and blanket judgments in favor of addressing the conflict, contradictions, and ambiguities that are so often encountered in field research.
These essays maintain that, in discussing the cultural construction and representation of gender, the "culture" that is abstracted from field data cannot be separated from a complex, ongoing, and everchanging local process. From this point of view, the editors conclude, the relationship of the sexes to each other is best discussed in terms of the conflicts, tensions, and paradoxes that are at the heart of daily life in many societies.
Beyond the Second Sex will be of interest to students and scholars of anthropology and women's studies.
These essays maintain that, in discussing the cultural construction and representation of gender, the "culture" that is abstracted from field data cannot be separated from a complex, ongoing, and everchanging local process. From this point of view, the editors conclude, the relationship of the sexes to each other is best discussed in terms of the conflicts, tensions, and paradoxes that are at the heart of daily life in many societies.
Beyond the Second Sex will be of interest to students and scholars of anthropology and women's studies.
320 pages, Paperback
First published July 28, 1990
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October 12, 2020
Every so often a book properly expands your mind. I love learning about different cultures and how something that seems obvious and proper to one seems so foreign to another. Despite my resistance to a sometimes slightly patronising or racist tone, in this book I learned:
1. The nature= feminine and culture= masculine dichotomy that De Beauvoir popularised is not universal, and comes from a specific 18th/19 th century European ideology. In some cultures that dichotomy doesn't exist or is reversed.
2. "Culture is contested rather than shared"
3. In general, American gender roles assume more implications for identity and personality than the gender roles of many African peoples (there were studies looking at specifically the rural Suku people and Yoruba women in Lagos)
4. Gender can grant different status in different settings (a study looking at the Hua people of PNG)
5. Ideas of what is "clean" or "polluting" (specifically as it relates to sex & menstruation) can vary widely between cultures
6. Larger transnational forces (e.g. European colonisation, the spread of Islam or American culture) have increased or changed the flavour of gender inequality in smaller, local cultures and not always made things more equitable (see points 1&3)
7. Stressful situations can lead to an increase in sexist behavior as individuals grasp whatever power they can get
8. Things we think are causal relationships are sometimes reversed- e.g., higher levels of education don't always cause lower fertility because of a change in life goals: lower fertility allows girls to stay in school
9. Studying resistance to power is a really useful index of understanding the power in question - "where there is resistance, there is power"
1. The nature= feminine and culture= masculine dichotomy that De Beauvoir popularised is not universal, and comes from a specific 18th/19 th century European ideology. In some cultures that dichotomy doesn't exist or is reversed.
2. "Culture is contested rather than shared"
3. In general, American gender roles assume more implications for identity and personality than the gender roles of many African peoples (there were studies looking at specifically the rural Suku people and Yoruba women in Lagos)
4. Gender can grant different status in different settings (a study looking at the Hua people of PNG)
5. Ideas of what is "clean" or "polluting" (specifically as it relates to sex & menstruation) can vary widely between cultures
6. Larger transnational forces (e.g. European colonisation, the spread of Islam or American culture) have increased or changed the flavour of gender inequality in smaller, local cultures and not always made things more equitable (see points 1&3)
7. Stressful situations can lead to an increase in sexist behavior as individuals grasp whatever power they can get
8. Things we think are causal relationships are sometimes reversed- e.g., higher levels of education don't always cause lower fertility because of a change in life goals: lower fertility allows girls to stay in school
9. Studying resistance to power is a really useful index of understanding the power in question - "where there is resistance, there is power"
Displaying 1 of 1 review