Gender and Material Culture

The Archaeology of Religious Women

Roberta Gilchrist

• Editorial: Routledge
• Año: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781134730629
• Edición: 1
• Categoría: Social Sciences
• Categoría: Archaeology

Gender and Material Culture is the first complete study in the archaeology of gender, exploring the differences between the religious life of men and women. Gender in medieval monasticism influenced landscape contexts and strategies of economic management, the form and development of buildings and their symbolic and iconographic content. Women's religious experience was often poorly documented, but their archaeology indicates a shared tradition which was closely linked with, and valued by local communities. The distinctive patterns observed suggest that gender is essential to archaeological analysis.

1

THE HANDMAID’S TALE

1.1 INTRODUCTION

This book focuses on the relationship between material culture and the social construction of gender in later medieval English monasticism. Gender, like class, is defined here as an aspect of social structure which is socially created and historically specific, in contrast with the categories of male and female sex which are fixed and biologically determined. The purpose of the present study is twofold: first, to examine how gender works in relation to material culture through a detailed archaeological case study; and second, to introduce the archaeology of medieval religious women, a rich and distinctive monastic tradition which has remained hitherto ‘hidden from history’.

In drawing together these two strands I provide in this opening chapter a background to gender archaeology and a review of the relationship between medieval archaeology and social theory, before presenting my own approach to gender and material culture, which focuses particularly on aspects of gender and space. In contrast to most previous gender studies in archaeology, this framework emphasizes the study of gender as power. This is achieved through a comparison of male and female cultural categories, their meanings, and the resultant social expectations placed on men and women in medieval society. The main subject of the case study is the archaeology of medieval women’s religious communities, which are compared with the better-studied monasteries for men. Thus gender is studied as an analytical and comparative category. The relationship between institution and individual experience, or structure and subject, is explored through the interaction of gender, ideology and material culture in the construction of gender identity.

A brief historiography of the study of medieval nunneries is presented in Chapter 2, with the aim of exploding androcentric traditions in monastic history and archaeology. The status and social value with which women’s communities were perceived by medieval society is examined through long-term changes in female monasticism, including a summary of evidence for religious women in the Saxon landscape, and a comparison of provision for male and female monasteries in later medieval England. Chapters 3 to 6 attempt to balance symbolic and sociological approaches to medieval nunneries with ecological and economic concerns. In Chapter 3 the religious and economic expectations placed on male and female monasteries are examined according to landscape situation and economic production and consumption. Chapter 4 defines the form and function of medieval nunneries, with reference to liturgical roles for men and women and links to forms of secular architecture appropriate to the gentry society with which nunneries were closely allied. In Chapter 5, female religious symbolism is explored through the iconography of nunnery architecture. Chapter 6 is concerned with gender and space in medieval monasteries, with a comparison of the construction of gender and class in relation to space in monasteries and castles. In Chapter 7, forms of alternative female monasticism are outlined, including beguinages, hospitals, anchorages and hermitages, in order to assess the full range of opportunities available to medieval religious women. A concluding chapter summarizes the new perspectives which have been gained by adopting gender as an analytical category in the study of medieval monasticism.

1.2 THE ARCHAEOLOGY OF GENDER

Gender may be seen as the social construction of difference between men and women. Thus it is socially created and historically specific; rather than simply reacting to social structure, gender can stimulate change. Gender archaeology classifies male and female activities, roles, relationships and cultural imagery according to the social and sexual divisions of a given society. It does not just study women; gender archaeology aims at a more comprehensive, humanistic, and sensitive study of the lives of men and women in the past. Because gender archaeology often focuses on the day-to-day playing out of domestic roles, it may offer a more accessible theoretical archaeology, which deals less with abstract processes and more with the intimacies of human lives.

To address gender through archaeology will not necessarily require new data, but rather new questions and new thinking regarding the nature of gender and society. The archaeological study of gender has developed in response to feminist politics and scholarship in the social sciences, particularly in anthropology (H. L. Moore 1988), although the attitudes and constraints of evidence in archaeology resulted in a delayed response of up to two decades (discussed in Wylie 1991; 1992). Like the gender archaeology to which it has contributed, feminism is varied and cannot be defined as a single movement. However, underpinning the diverse schools of feminist thought is a political commitment which, in the disciplines of history and archaeology, challenges us to re-examine our preconceptions about the gender relations of past societies.

The first archaeological studies to address gender issues explicitly emerged from feminist critiques of androcentrism, or male-bias, in archaeological interpretations (Conkey and Spector 1984). Parallel to this feminist critique, the revision began of previous narratives of the past which omitted or stereotyped women’s roles. ‘Women’ formed a topic for revised histories which challenged accepted syntheses which were male-dominated or featured gender-neutral characters (for example, Fell 1984; Ehrenberg 1989). More recently, gender has been approached as a structuring principle primary to all social structures (Barrett 1988; Sørensen 1988), just as classifications based on status, age, culture or ethnicity structure societies.

Alison Wylie (1991: 31–2) has compared the gradual development of gender studies in archaeology with a similar three-stage process of maturement experienced in other disciplines: initial critiques of androcentrism; ‘remedial’ research focusing on women; and finally broader reconceptualizations of existing subject fields which consider gender with other structuring factors (after Harding 1983). Archaeology has been slow to ascend to this third stage of development in gender studies, in which conceptual approaches are united with archaeological data in providing new and ‘engendered’ interpretations of the past (now see Archaeol. Rev. Cambridge 1988, 7.1; Gero and Conkey (eds) 1991; Seifert (ed.) 1991). This reluctance may stem from two factors which set archaeology apart from other disciplines in the study of gender.

The first concerns the very definition of gender as a socially created and historically varied force. For some time this definition of gender has been resisted in favour of a biological definition of sex, which for an archaeology grounded in empiricism, is more easily quantified as a fixed factor which can be deduced from the sexing of skeletons. This form of biological essentialism has been countered by new attitudes to social structures more generally within archaeology, which have been fostered by post-modernist thought in philosophy and sociology. Processualist and structuralist approaches to the past had emphasized universal tendencies in social formations and the use of material culture. In contrast, post-processual archaeologies have explored the specificity of social structures and the active, variable nature of material culture (for example, Hodder (ed.) 1987a; (ed.) 1987b; Hodder 1990; Shanks and Tilley 1987a; 1987b; J. Thomas 1991; McGuire and Paynter 1991). A new emphasis on individual agency and smaller-scale variability over larger-scale processes, has encouraged the rethinking of definitions of gender in archaeology.

The second impediment to the development of gender archaeology has stemmed from the nature of archaeological interpretation itself. Emphasis on the empirical testing of data according to the hypothetico-deductive approach prevalent in archaeology, which attempts to develop and test hypotheses by data-gathering and analysis, has demanded that a methodology must be sought in order to address gender. This attitude assumes that a material manifestation of gender is latent in the archaeological record, and that testing according to the appropriate theorem will unlock gender, making it visible and rendering it amenable to methods of archaeological quantification. In this vein, previous approaches have sought material correlates which are thought to reflect directly the presence of men and women in excavated material. Such correlates might take the form of particular artefacts or tools which when recovered through excavation would suggest the activities of men or women. Where attempted, the identification of artefacts as sexual correlates has been based on implicit assumptions concerning the sexual division of labour, for example that women cook and weave and that men hunt and manufacture tools (D. Clarke 1972; Flannery and Winter 1976); in correlations between objects associated with anthropologically sexed skeletons (Gibbs 1987; Brush 1988); and in observations drawn from ethnohistoric and ethnographic sources (Conkey and Spector 1984; McEwan 1991). The identification of sexual correlates is problematic in a number of ways, particularly because it relies on interpretations of the sexual division of labour which result from personal preconceptions or from anthropology and history often formulated from the perspective of male-bias. In addition, in order that material correlates reflect male or female, an exclusive sexual division of labour must be assumed, when in most cases task-sharing or fluidity in labour can be expected.

Such methods of ‘gender attribution’ have been challenged recently: ‘Why is there a “need” to “find” females and not the same “need” to “find” males who are, by implication, already present, active, and the primary contributors to the archaeological record and the human past?’ (Gero and Conkey (eds) 1991: 12). In other words, why should the onus of proof fall upon ‘engendered’ interpretations rather than on the androcentric histories which they challenge? Joan Gero and Meg Conkey have argued that progress in gender archaeology can be made only by rejecting the attitude that ‘testable’ data is fundamental to commenting on the past. By adopting gender as an analytical category, it should be possible to proceed from a strongly developed theoretical position (ibid. 20). Abstract concepts of gender should be no more difficult to countenance than approaches to state formation, the emergence of elites, or other issues which characterize more traditional approaches to social archaeology.

Thus recent work in gender archaeology can be seen to challenge accepted assumptions in archaeology which have dominated the discipline, particularly in America, for over two decades. Principally this approach questions the hypothetico-deductive method and the reflectionist attitude that social structure will be mirrored directly in material correlates. The overturning of standard scientific method has been a feature of much feminist research, in particular that of the more radical, ‘standpoint’ feminists who have questioned the structures within which knowledge is constructed (see Harding 1986). Feminist critiques of scientific method and structures, particularly in its claims to objectivity and the politics of the construction of knowledge, have features in common with branches of post-modernism. Some ‘standpoint’ feminists would concur with the validity of subjectivity in informing archaeological interpretations, so that studies of women in the past could only be intuitively carried out by female archaeologists, and not by their male colleagues, however sympathetic. Feminists have been invited to explore their subjectivity in relation to archaeology. But despite the taunt that feminism has contributed little to a value-committed, post-processual archaeology (Shanks and Tilley 1987b: 191), feminists have tended to resist the danger of the relativist trap, which, by virtue of the acknowledgement and elevation of subjectivity, sometimes accepts all interpretations as equally valid. Indeed, it is because of its political commitment that feminism resists the relativism which would judge its own interpretations to be only equally valid to those androcentric narratives which it seeks to replace. Feminist subjectivity has inspired critique and introduced new topics of analysis, including the nature of personal agency, sexuality and the body. However, few feminists would support a body of theory based on the subjectivity of being a woman, regardless of time or culture.

Gender arrived firmly on the agenda of archaeology as a result of the politicization of women working in the discipline (Gilchrist 1991; Walde and Willows (eds) 1991; Wylie 1992). And their political motivation and subjectivity shares much in common with the ‘critical’ or ‘radical’ archaeology of post-processualism, which has been vilified as relativist (Binford 1989). But despite having been influenced by post-modernism, feminists have reserved the right to choose between different versions of the past. In order to refute androcentrism, feminist archaeologists must be able to evaluate archaeological data and their varying interpretations. Despite their reticence regarding the hypothetico-deductive method, feminist archaeologists must traverse the distance between archaeological hypothesis and data. Thus certain problems remain surrounding the issues of epistemology and method in making the leap of faith towards interpretation.

The emphasis on historical and cultural specificity in feminist and post-processual approaches has led to a crisis in archaeological interpretation more generally, in which the use of cross-cultural analogy has been brought into question. Gero and Conkey have called for a greater scrutiny of ethnographic and ethnohistoric sources for androcentric (and ethnocentric) bias rather than a total rejection of the potential for these sources. The thrust of their argument, however, suggests that the future for gender archaeology does not lie in interpretation through analogy or empirical testing. Instead, conceptual frameworks will provide the basis for ‘engendering’ archaeology through feminist re-evaluations of anthropological constructs such as kinship, the family, and the household (Gero and Conkey (eds) 1991: 12).

The diversity of feminist and archaeological approaches will lead inevitably to many gender archaeologies. This variety is borne out by contrasting approaches taken in prehistoric and historic studies and in those informed by American or European theoretical traditions. While all gender archaeologists are linked through the common concerns of critique and theory-building, prehistorians will be more concerned with re-evaluating the uses of cross-cultural analogues, while archaeologists of the historic period grapple with the relationship between documentary and archaeological sources.

Many European archaeologists have studied gender as a descriptive category of material culture linked to biological sex, particularly in relation to Anglo-Saxon grave goods (for example Härke’s work on masculinity, Härke 1989). More explicit studies have concentrated on the study of gender as a symbolic construction, focusing on studies of space and imagery. At first gender was addressed as an expression of the structuralist categories of male and female as opposed pairs, exploring male/female as dichotomies such as public/private, political/domestic and culture/nature (H. L. Moore 1982; Braithwaite 1982; Sørensen 1987; Gibbs 1987). Binary oppositions imply a universal contradiction between male and female cultural categories, and exclude the possibility of other gender constructions, including transsexualism or a third gender, such as the eunuchs of medieval Byzantium, who occupied their own convents (Patlagean 1987: 597) or the Native American berdache, individuals who in entering adulthood chose to change the gender ascription of their youth (Whelan 1991: 24). Gender archaeology must remain open to considering any number of ‘genders’ in past societies.

The influence of contextualism (Hodder (ed.) 1987a) led to gender archaeology which explored the potential meanings derived from archaeological context, often relying on the sexing of skeletons and the assignment of male or female categories to associated artefacts (Gibbs 1987; Therkorn 1987). This approach, like ‘gender attribution’, assumes that women must be made visible in the archaeological record. My own objection to this framework lies in the premise that women, their behaviour and material culture, can be recognized only as a deviant pattern to a standard which is male. Marxism has had little influence in gender archaeology, possibly due to earlier friction with feminism over its general under-representation of female labour (Hartmann 1982), although the domestic labour debate can be useful in discussing spatial segregation and the division of labour (Gilchrist 1988). In some post-processual archaeology, gender has been integral to studies of power, agency and social change (for example, Barrett 1988; Bender 1989). Studies of women in historical archaeology have begun to re-evaluate social structures such as kinship and power (Dommasnes 1991) and the role of female agency in economic activity, including trade and exchange (Stalsberg 1991).

American approaches to gender archaeology have been more concerned to analyse gender in terms of economic production, leading to the wider deployment of archaeological data, including environmental sources and variability in artefact-patterning. Two recent volumes on gender in prehistoric and historical archaeology have made great progress in demonstrating the potential for gender archaeology – and it is interesting to note that these volumes consist of papers which were in effect commissioned, often asking archaeologists who were initially sceptical to reconsider their own data from a gendered perspective (Gero and Conkey (eds) 1991; Seifert (ed.) 1991). Several of these studies re-examine the role and status of female labour in subsistence, manufacture and social change, and through standard archaeological approaches overturn previous errors and misconceptions (Gero and Conkey (eds) 1991). These studies of gender have successfully examined the issues of female agency, for instance in the emergence of agriculture (Watson and Kennedy 1991), changing gender relations and the definition of the household (Brumfiel 1991; Hastorf 1991). More sophisticated approaches to analysing gender in relation to cultural imagery have rejected earlier claims for binary representations, instead exploring the ideological content of art, whether as pornography or iconography (Conkey 1991). Stronger links to anthropology have encouraged a greater interest in ethnographic and ethnohistoric sources and their applications to understanding a sexual division of labour and its material culture (Spector 1991).

Some ‘empirical’ feminist approaches to historical archaeology continue to employ methodologies of artefact-patterning in order to ‘find’ women in the archaeological record (Gibb and King 1991; Seifert 1991); and many studies have continued to employ a reflectionist paradigm in which archaeological correlates or patterns are accepted as reflecting static, descriptive categories asso...