Female to Male as Nature is to Culture

Female to Male as Nature is to Culture

Gender relations form an integral part of human social interactions

and are of great interest to anthropologists. Since the feminist

movement in the late 1960s, one question that has been discussed is to

what extent the opposition between women and men can be thought of in

terms of the dichotomy between nature and culture and what

implications this has for the position of women in society. This

structuralist perspective was first formulated by Ortner (1974),

drawing on Levi-Strauss and de Beauvoir, but has since been criticised

for being simplistic and ethnocentric. I will delineate Ortner’s

argument and look at its application to male and female roles in

childbirth before examining the ways in which her line of reasoning

has been found wanting. The universality of the opposition between

nature and culture is questioned, and the cultural specificity and

complexity of gender, power relations and sex is explored before

concluding that the parallel dichotomy of nature / culture and female

/ male is a relatively recent Western concept which does not

necessarily help us understand other societies’ gender relations.

Ortner (1974, in Rosaldo & Lamphere) attempts to answer the questions

why women, as she sees it, are universally subordinate to men. She

admits that the relative power women wield and the actual treatment

they receive vary widely between societies, that each society’s

concept of the female position is likely to consist of several layers

and that the cultural ideology may well be distinct from the

observable state of affairs, but sets out nonetheless from the premise

that women have ...

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...different societies and the

relationships between gender and power and sex and gender are far from

clear-cut. In order to elucidate the position of women in a particular

society we must examine the complexities and nuances of its social

relations and culture rather than imprudently applying our own

categories.

Bibliography

Callaway (1978) ‘The most essentially female function of all’ in

Ardener (ed) Defining Females

Cornwall & Lindisfarne (1994) ‘Dislocating Masculinity: gender, power

and anthropology’, in Cornwall & Lindisfarne (eds) Dislocating

Masculitnity

Hoskins (1998) Biographical Objects

MacCormack & Strathern (1980) Nature, Culture, and Gender

Moore (1986) Space, Text and Gender

Ortner (1974) ‘Is female to male as nature is to culture?’. In Rosaldo

& Lamphere (eds) Women, culture and society