Gender, Agency and Change: Anthropological Perspectives

by Victoria A. Goddard

In response to global change, people create new opportunities and conditions, and in their responses they are influenced by both gender and age. In Gender, Agency and Change the contributors illustrate the complexities involved in the constitution and performance of agency. Such agency may be reflected in strategies of accommodation and adaption that can nevertheless produce new institutional arrangements. Alternatively, they may be directed towards the outright rejection of these processes. The cases examined in this volume explore the ways in which different subjects engage in the reformulation of spaces, roles and identities, redefining the boundaries between, and the content of, the 'public' and the 'private'. The examples also provide an account of how gendered discourses are deployed to convey new meanings, a new sense of place and time, confirming or challenging ideas of 'tradition' and 'modernity'. This collection will be of particular interest to students of anthropology and gender studies.

292 pages, Hardcover

First published July 6, 2000