Carved Flesh / Cast Selves

Gendered Symbols and Social Practices

Tone Bleie, Vigdis Broch-Due, I. Rudie, Tone Bleie, Vigdis Broch-Due, I. Rudie

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000323160
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Scienze sociali
• Subtopic: Antropologia

All the papers in this volume deal with the central theme of gender. The social contexts they examine range widely from Melanesia and Southeast Asia to Africa, Europe and America; yet in each case of these very diverse cases the concern is to analyse the ways in which gender is constructed.

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Carved Flesh - Cast Selves: An Introduction

Vigidis Broch-Due and Ingrid Rudie

All the papers in this volume deal with the central theme of gender. The social contexts they examine range widely from Melanesia and Southeast Asia to Africa, Europe and America; yet in each case of these very diverse cases the concern is to analyse the ways in which gender is constructed, symbolised, understood and enacted. This fact in itself announces the comparative project in which we are all engaged. We feel that the papers provide important new material for the cross-cultural study of gender. In bringing them together, however, we also want to accomplish a number of ends beyond simply this. One of these is to undertake a timely re-examination of some theoretical themes at the core of this project, particularly those clustered around the nature of gender models themselves and the ways selves are cast through them, but also the vexed question of their relationship to sex, reproduction and biology - the body and the multiple ways in which flesh is carved into male and female. Another is to introduce to a wider audience the work of Norwegian feminist scholars and something of an anthropological tradition which, for purely linguistic reasons, has all too often gone unperceived by the broader English-speaking public.

These apparently disparate aims are not unrelated, for at the heart of contemporary feminist theorising is a concern for reflexivity, for a careful examination of the context in which all discussions, intellectual ones included, arise. As a specific form of scholarly critique, feminist anthropology has taken shape through several stages of theorising of sex and gender systems. The concern with writing the lives of women into malebiased reports in the 1960s, resulted in a ‘woman-centred’ theory that transported through time and across types of societies the clear-cut category 'woman'. This convenient and colonising ‘we’ was seriously shaken and finally fragmented when the issue of difference within ‘woman’, both as category and as subject, forced itself into focus. For feminist anthropologists produced an extensive corpus of cross-cultural data evidencing the enormous range of difference in the relations of women and men to specific tasks, tools, and teams. Similarly, they elicited an extensive array of different terms and ways in which the category of gender itself is constructed, experienced and enacted in everyday life. While these accounts of the 1970s and 1980s were useful in highlighting global variation, they tended to gloss over local variations within each culture. To bridge this gap is among the central concerns of contemporary theorising. The issue at stake is one about the specific intersections between gender difference and other constructs containing ideas of differences, such as class, ethnicity, race and religion - to elect a few entries on this expandable list. Findings from fresh fieldworks show that cultures do not have a single gender model or a simplified gender system. A composite canvas has emerged in which gender constructs weave themselves from complex and conflicting beliefs and practices that can vary both contextually and biographically (Moore 1988; Strathem 1987; Sanday and Goodenough 1990; Broch-Due 1990).

Within this new frame of feminist enquiry in anthropology, it is necessary to make a plea for an enlarged understanding of what it means to employ gender analytically. It is far too often assumed that when the term gender is used it specifies women, as if they were the only gendered category - the something which is ‘other’ than the general. One consequence of this is that when the phrase gender relation is used, it is often assumed that this refers to relations exclusively between men and women, and usually between husband and wife. We need to deconstruct the dualism of man/woman and see that the cultural construction of gender - and the structuring role of gender relations in symbolic and social processes - means that all relationships are ‘gendered’ relationships whether they involve subjects of same or different gender.

We are nowhere better qualified to do this than in our own societies. ‘Modern’ societies are a particularly promising field for reflexive feminist anthropology, as Henrietta Moore has observed (1988:196). This concern for the phenomenon of ‘modernity’ is reflected in a number of our papers and will be discussed at greater length later in this introduction. Here we would simply like to add that a study of feminist politics and its effects in its own social context should be included in reflexive understanding. This calls for an elaboration of our own background for reflection, the distinctively Norwegian intellectual and political ‘hotbed’ in which our work has been nurtured.

The Norwegian 'Hotbed'

The editors as well as most of the authors of this volume are observing participants in a Norwegian gender discourse, and are trained in a Norwegian sub-tradition of mainstream anthropology: circumstances which are likely to affect our approach in several recognisable ways. For besides being very international, anthropology is also a discipline which betrays the background of its practitioners in subtle ways, one of which lies in the choices that are made of problems to study. Two important features of Norwegian anthropology are its theoretical preoccupation with problems of change and stability, and the keen interest that many of its practitioners take in studying their own society. Real-life experiences which have contributed to such interests may be linked to the rapid social change, and public management of social change, during the last few decades in Norway. This historical process, framed by a social democratic ideology of equality, had a definite take-off in the 1930s, and gained momentum during the three decades following the Second World War when rebuilding merged with rapid industrialisation and urbanisation. Most of the now-active social scientists spent their formative years at some point in this timespan, so that these important innovations and their political motivations, along with conservative counter-arguments, have constituted part of their primary experience. This might have contributed to a reflexive attitude to our own society, as well as to a particular preoccupation with ‘truth’ and ‘equality’. Two intellectual features connect in more or less intricate ways to this situation. One of these has been a thorough debate about positivism, characterised by:

a unique exchange of views between Anglo-American positivistically oriented theory ... and a Continental social philosophy governed by a transcendentalist and dialectical approach. This debate created a fruitful theoretical debate ... different from, for instance, the strife about positivism in Western German sociology. (Slagstad 1976:9, our translation)

The other influence has been a remarkable preoccupation with the power of language, which has been nurtured from many sources. Partly, it dates right back to the creation of a dialect-derived Norwegian literary language (in opposition to a Danish-based one) during the struggle for national sovereignty in the nineteenth century. Partly, it derives from a more recent concern with language strategies in power relations, based both in gender and class, developed in the 1960s among poets, philosophers and political activists alike. The struggle to rid language of sexist phraseology took shape in the feminist movement particularly through the theory and practice of ‘consciousness raising’. This became a popular process which gained widespread currency in Scandinavia through the force and scale of the feminist movement. Central to this self-conscious recounting and repositioning within a different set of social discourses was a concern with gaining ‘control of our bodies’. This slogan carried a powerful claim about culture and oppositional consciousness. Although dominant discourses and practices sought to discipline and turn women’s bodies into ‘docile bodies’ of the home, the hospital and the work-place, women could resist subordination by articulating a demystifying alternative vision. By creating a ‘new’ language - new vocabulary, new concepts - the women concerned were able to redescribe and re-present diverse personal experiences under the sign of ‘sameness’ and to recognise this commonality as the politics of ‘woman’s situation’.

This notion of experience being bound up with language, both as a medium of representation and as a medium constituting the possibility of experience, was elaborated in an early social-science document namely, Blakar’s book about power language and the politics of naming (Blakar 1972). A ‘real-life’ example was a series of initiatives in official language politics, aimed at neutralising a gendered public and occupational sphere. Language politics linked up with a more comprehensive legislation aimed at male/female equality. This legislation (a quota system in favour of female applicants to jobs and political positions; new curriculums, free abortion, extended maternity leaves, kindergartens, etc.) sometimes ran faster than everyday practice. In other words, some feminist issues were rather quickly accepted and sedimented in the Norwegian political establishment, and became a source of data for an anthropological study of gender.

Modernisation and the Gendered World

Modernisation and modernity are concepts to which we try to give a fairly precise meaning (see particularly Melhuus, chapter 12, in this volume). Several of our papers deal with societies somewhere on their way towards modernity. That is one reason why we feel a need to pay special attention to modem societies. Another reason lies in the reflexive ambition announced above. We are concerned with unearthing the emic models behind gender research. The concepts ‘emic’ and ‘etic’ have been borrowed from linguistics, where they are derived from the words ‘phonetic’ and ‘phonemic’. In anthropology, ‘emic’ analyses are based on the informants’ subjective categories, while ‘etic’ analyses refer to models derived from analyst’s theoretical categories. We argue, however, that this distinction can never be perfectly clearcut, because the intellectual traditions of the analyst’s lived culture lurk behind the development of theory. Therefore, it is our emic models that are turned into the etics with which we attack other cultures. And these models are the models for living which are current in modem societies. Modernity, however, is an ideal concept rather than something existing ‘out there’. Or to put it differently, modernity is nowhere complete and hardly anywhere fully absent, but rather, modernisation is a process which happens to most societies in the world. Two important theoretical contributions stress different aspects of the process. Berman, building on Marx, describes it as a state of affairs which has come about through an historical process of accelerating social change triggered by industrialism (Berman 1983). It is characterised by repeated transgressions of limits, cultural pluralism, and ‘the Assuring of little worlds’ (p. 5Iff.) Dumont puts the stress on the breakdown of traditional value hierarchies, which leaves the individual as the only supreme value that can be agreed on (Dumont 1986). The process such as it is described by Berman implies a special kind of complexity. We prefer to call it a new type of complexity, thereby acknowledging that ‘small worlds’ are also complex, but in a different manner. The new complexity consists in a new relationship between the individual and its environment: the individual is brought to mirror a world of a larger scale, an international world, rather than the kin group and the small-scale local world. And the ‘splitting’ of small local worlds means that they are brought to mirror the international in addition to themselves. In other words, the individual as well as the local are reorganised.

Analyses of modernisation and modernity can deal with its social organisation, its morality, its aesthetics, individually or all at once. For our present purpose, we wish to draw particular attention to some important corollaries of the organisational dimension: the ways in which the individuation of the person under modernity necessarily adjusts itself to the opening up, pluralisation and mobilisation of social and cultural orders. In this process lines of demarcation between ‘private’ and ‘public’ are realigned, and established categorical distinctions are attacked, among them those of gender, because the process of individuation is adverse to heavy structures of institutionalised gender complementarity.

Three important concepts from The Gender of the gift, as well as from Marilyn Strathern’s contribution to this volume, point themselves out as particularly promising to shed light on these processes. First, the notions of ‘complete’ and ‘incomplete’ persons, although formulated in dialogue with a Melanesian material, can be expanded to throw light on some of the dilemmas of individuation under modernity. Or perhaps better they can be reflected back on modem society; for perhaps the concern with completeness is primarily a modem one. Second, the notion of the person as microcosm is well-suited as a starting-point to compare seemingly universal ideas that the individual ‘mirrors’ the world. Again, this is a notion which has its very clear, if different, counterparts in modem thought. Third, the notion of different forms of ‘sociality’, which Strathem launches in an attempt to free analysis of some of the stereotyped preconceptions attached to ‘society’, may do a number of useful analytical jobs for us. It can, in fact, help us rethink notions of ‘public’ and ‘domestic’ in the light of different gender models and different notions of completeness.

In chapter 2, Strathem starts off from the debates about the significance of women’s relative exclusion from public life and collective ritual, and counters a couple of commonly held notions in anthropological theory - notably that society is collective life and a corresponding idea that male initiation rites prepare boys for societal roles, while the (usually less-spectacularly dramatic) female puberty rites just underline sexual maturation as a ‘natural’ phenomenon. The author suggests that such ideas stem from a Western idea that the adult is a completed person - completed through education - and she draws on New Guinean practice and beliefs to underline her points. Instead of assuming that ritual displays society to the individual, the author suggests that ritual brings out of the person the social relations of which he or she is composed; the person is a pluralised composite of social relationships. The child is seen as composed of the acts of both parents, and in that sense is regarded as androgynous. In order to become a reproducer the male and the female child have to be made more one-sidedly male and female, and in that sense, less complete. It is particularly boys that have to be made into reproducers within the body of the lineage members, hence the more collective style of male rituals. Girls are seen as directly reproduced by their mother, and capable of directly reproducing children, hence the more individual concern with their maturing.

Strathern suggests that Melanesians may be most complete in their most androgynous state, so that they have to be stripped of androgyny and made single-sexed in order to procreate. Completeness is then restored in the heterosexual couple, when single-sexed males and females co-operate to produce children. Melanesian thought is described as firmly rooted in body imagery, and our notion of nature and culture as distinct realms is overruled by their notion that family relationships are concretely present in individual bodies.

But completeness is certainly also a modem notion. In her contribution to this volume Strathern uses a Western notion of educational, cultural completion of the individual in order to exhibit a Melanesian notion that is different. One of our chapters takes as point of departure the concept of androgyneity, against which the concept of completeness works, and traces several of the ways androgyneity is constructed through time and across cultures. Bleie (chapter 13) starts from the observation that androgyny has become a catchword in feminist and gay-liberation movements as well as in some psychoanalytic circles, and in this article she wishes to start an exploration of the various meanings of the concept. European ideas of androgyneity are traced in Greek and Judaeo-Christian myths, in the works of nineteenth century writers fascinated by the mysterious completeness of androgynous beings, and in psychoanalytic literature. The Western views are contrasted to Melanesian gender discourse as described by Strathem (1988c), and the author concludes that there are comparable, as well as radically different, notions: the idioms of splitting and fusing seem to be present in the two cultural worlds, while androgyny not as a state, but as a technique which produces oscillation between states, seems to be more specifically Melanesian. The discussion ends in an open question about the feasibility of comparison. It is possible that preoccupation with androgyny is a widely shared human concern cross-cutting boundaries between literate and complex societies on the one hand, and oral, small-scale societies on the other. But it is also possible that the seeming ease of comparison is a warning signal that the analytical frames on which we base our inquiry make it excessively difficult to get at other peoples’ contexts.

Such is the reflexive effort in anthropology: in our attempts at understanding other societies we are locked in the contrasts that we are able to make between ourselves and others. Our emics govern the creation of our etics, by means of which we try to come to grips with the emics of others. When the modem notion of completeness is mirrored in the implicit notion of Melanesians, the two stand out partly as inversions of each other, partly as parallels. In our society as well as the Melanesian, completeness somehow implies the suspension of specifically male or female gender. In modem discourse we may discern two ways in which this is achieved: one ‘natural’ and one ‘cultural’.

‘Natural’ completeness is inborn and unchanging, and is tied to the abstract equal value of individuals, in the Dumontian sense: when all value hierarchies break down, the individual emerges as the supreme value (Dumont 1986). We find it rather easy to concede to this part of Dumont’s reasoning, even though we have some reservations about his more inclusive hypothesis that societies generally strive towards a neat hierarchisation of values. The value of the individual crystallises in the notion of human rights, from which nobody can be excluded by difference along any conceivable dimension. These dimensions are ‘natural’ ones like sex and race as well as ‘cultural’ ones like religion and competence. In its purest form - its crystallisation in Human Rights - individuation is an abstract principle that overrides gender. Rather than explaining away sex and gender, perhaps, it takes its departure from a common substance of humanity, which is then given precedence over male and female. To recall Dumont’s hypothesis, we may say that common substance becomes a supreme value. This, of course, is an idea buried deep in Christian thought. The Christian concept of the soul is a gender neutral one. But in Judaeo-Christian thought earthly gender does also interfere with ideal equality. Eve started the trouble, and as a result equalisation can only be realised in heaven, after the physical body is gone. It is secularised modern morality that argues for extending the equalisation to earth.

What we referred to above as the cultural mode of completion, lies on a practical level and is tied to the person as social actor. Its incentives act both on a systemic and individual level. In ‘modern’ societies there is a need for creating gender-neutral space, and a need for individuals that can circulate freely within this space without being hampered by the specificities of gender. Occupational specialties and skills for living have to be gender-neutralised to enable the individual to carry through a life project (Rudie 1984). Lack of some of these skills may be experienced very acutely as a lack of fully competent personhood; and more often in women than in men. The notion of completeness is very explicit in the modem ideology of socialisation, and an apparent inversion of the Melanesian view (Strathem, chapter 2, this volume). If Melanesian completeness is an inborn androgynous state which does not distinguish the ‘cultural’ from the ‘natural’, modem cultural completeness is an objective of scientifically guided childrearing and formal education. The idea is that appropriate skills and attitudes have to be coded into the individual, and most people, lay as well as professional educationalists, agree that this is all about acquired cultural behaviour. The aim of...