Gender Roles and Marriage Among the !Kung
Although we have yet to discover complete equality among the sexes in any pre-existing or presently existing society, the !Kung people are among the closest to reach such equality. The !Kung are an egalitarian society, meaning everyone has access to the valued resources. While the amount of access does vary, just the fact that everyone is includedat least on some levelwhen it comes to meeting the essential needs of living is significant.
Much of !Kung life consists of caring for one another and there is a strong effort put forth to keep everyone relatively on the same status level. A great example of this exists in the traditions of hunting. When a man returns to the village after killing a large animal, there is a certain role-playing he is expected to participate in. As people approach him about what happened, he pretends that nothing worth mentioning took place. This signifies to the rest of the !Kung that the hunt was a success as they continue to inquire for further detail. The successful hunter continues to tell his story, however, if he appears to be too proud the people will not hesitate to make jokes as a means of humbling him. The credit for the hunt invariably goes to the one who made the arrow (which, although rare, can be a woman as well as a man) and it is his (or her) duty to divide the meat fairly between everyone in the village. One way or another, either directly or indirectly, everyone will be given a part of the animal.
For example, When one of Nisa’s husbands died, she was pressured into marrying a man who worked in the villages because this was the only way to ensure her financial stability. She married this man, Besa, even though neither she, nor her parents approved, and she was in love with someone else. When women stopped providing most of the food for their families, they lost their economic independence. When Nisa’s daughter, Nai, was killed by her husband, the headman appointed to lead the bush tribes did nothing but call Nai’s husband “foolish” and he told him to bring Nisa five goats in compensation. If the headman had not existed, then the !Kung could have exacted their own justice on Nai’s husband by beating or killing him, instead of letting him go free, only having to give five goats in exchange for taking a woman’s life. If Nisa’s stories are true, then there is evidence to suggest that the women in !Kung society are losing some of the high status they enjoyed before their society was forced to
Marjorie Shostak, an anthropologist who had written this book had studies the !Kung tribe for two years. Shostak had spent the two years interviewing the women in the society. The !Kung tribe resided n the Dobe area of Northwest Botswana, that’s infused with a series of clicks, represented on paper by exclamation points and slashes. Shostak had studied that the people of the tribe relied mostly on nuts of the mongongo, which is from an indigenous tree that’s part of their diet.
ꀀ ꀀine a world of unequal social status. Envision a world where customs are different, whether that is through family or political standpoints. In America, in today’s day and age, every human being despite their gender is supposed to be seen as equal. In our modern world, gender equality is beginning to prevail, and men and women are looked at on the same level. However, there are still flaws in our society. Some of these flaws are exemplified through Cao Xuequin’s novel The Story of the Stone: The Golden Days, Volume 1. The Qing Dynasty, as depicted through the families in the book, portrays a life of unequal gender relations, through marriage, family matters, and education.
In Pa Chin's Family, he portrays a traditional Confucian family battling to keep their traditions and their way of life in tact, amidst the deep upheaval and civil disorder gripping China. Pa Chin clearly portrays a family of which the Venerable Master Kao rules supreme at the expense of his family. The Kao family runs into several set backs such as suicide, death, depression, unhappy marriages, family conflict, and lack of respect for elders that undoubtedly lead to the unraveling of the Kao family. One significant reason the Kao family fails to maintain its integrity and way of life is because of the clash between Confusion traditionalism and Chinese cultural modernization. One of the main driving forces in disruption in Kao family tradition would have to be the rebellious youth, Chueh-min, Chueh-hui, and Chin in particular.
Sharing Plays a big role in the Kung culture, and is essential for their survival. If the hunter of the family gets sick or injured and can't hunt, other hunters will share their food with them and their families. Sharing has it's rewards and, also provides a sort of insurance policy for them and their families.
The Kung San are a hunting and gathering people living in southern Africa. Kung San are a varied people in terms of looks and language, and include people living Angola, Botswana, Zambia, and Namibia. The Kung San, like many human groups, have a rigid sexual division of labor, with women doing most of the gathering, food preparation and child care, and men doing hunting and some complementary gathering. There does exist a limited socioeconomic hierarchy by age, with adults controlling more resources and manufactured goods than children. The Kung San usually eat small meals during the day and eat a large supper with the whole family in the evening. Water is a limiting factor in the Kung San environment. The Kung San will disperse in the wet season, and aggregate in camps in the dry season around the few permanent water holes. A Kung San encampment consists of grass huts arranged roughly in a circle, constructed around an area of clearing in the center; these huts are constructed quickly and rarely used for more than a few months at a time. The Kung San maintain a level of egalitarianism so that no one person is revered more than the next and so that no one thinks they are any better than the next. In the Kung San culture, many are married as young as eight years old in order to keep conflicts and extramarital relations down to a minimum. One of the Kung San's favorite activities is to sit in the shade talking amongst themselves. They are afraid of angry words and violence so the occasional dispute is worked out before it becomes a major one. Since competition might bring dispute, they try to live as equals. The Kung San effectively employ talking and joking to
Food distribution is a tense, momentous part of the !Kung culture. With the sharing of
1. The idea of equality when referring to egalitarian societies is used to describe the fact that these societies have no formal division of power or access to resources as other societies might have. That is to say, no one group will have barred access to resources. Everyone will have access to food and other necessary resources. For example, in “Marriage and the politics of yams” by Annette B. Weiner, we learn that every single married woman in the Trobrianders of Papua New Guinea is guaranteed yams, which are both of monetary value and for sustenance uses, but some women will get more yams because they have more people tending yam gardens to them for whatever reason. All women will have access to the same resources, and some women and their spouses will have access to more plentiful resources, but no one is denied access based off class or rank. Therefore that is not to say there is no discrepancy among people within an egalitarian society. People can have access to more resources or possess more prestige as distinguished by age, ability and sometimes gender. However, nothing in egalitarian societies is decided by formal heredity. There could be leaders of the group that are in that position because they have proven they are a capable leader, and when they die their son or daughter could be considered for a similar position, however it is not guaranteed they will get the position. And it is also not guaranteed there will be a leader of any sort. The group could make all decisions if that’s how the society works. We see an example ability being able to elevate one’s status within an egalitarian in the article “Parent-Offspring Conflict in Marriage” by Polly Wiessner. In the article Wiessner discusses the facts that the parents i...
Thesis: Housewife, breadwinner, caregiver, man of the house are typical common stereotypes of males and females all over the world, while each country may be different on their gender norms they are all socially constructed by our society, culture, media, and family.
men and women in a household. My main aim is to find out if household
But one begins to detect a new theme emerging in society, especially amongst the Chinese reformers: the theme of individualism opposed to familialism. Today, would the Confucian family be more and more aware of abuse of women and children? Rituals and traditions can be seen as both positive and negative. The ways in which women suffered affirm that some rituals were abusive. There are multiple signs indeed that something has gone badly wrong with the Chinese family traditions that led to family instability.
Historically, the model family involved couples marrying and starting a family young and absolutely no divorces. However, as time has progressed, the family structure has become increasingly complex, and less “traditional.” The typical and “traditional” family of the 1950s included the breadwinner father, housewife/mother and 2.5 happy and well-adjusted children (Kimmel and Aronson 181). Gender roles have always played a significant role in the root of the “traditional” family and marriage. Some individuals believe that we are born with these innate instincts to assume these gender-specific roles, while others believe these roles have been socially constructed over time. Gender roles allow men to assume superiority over women and unfortunately,
Examples of cultural constructions can be seen throughout history in several forms such as gender, relationships, and marriage. “Cultural construction of gender emphasizes that different cultures have distinctive ideas about males and females and use these ideas to define manhood/masculinity and womanhood/femininity.” (Humanity, 239) In many cultures gender roles are a great way to gain an understanding of just how different the construction of gender can be amongst individual cultures. The video The Women’s Kingdom provides an example of an uncommon gender role, which is seen in the Wujiao Village where the Mosuo women are the last matriarchy in the country and have been around for over one thousand years. Unlike other rural Chinese villages where many girls are degraded and abandoned at birth, Mosuo woman are proud and run the households where the men simply assist in what they need. The view of gender as a cultural construct ...
Kung people of the Kalahari, are a very primitive group of nomads that travel in groups throughout the Dobe desert in Southern Africa (Kinsley 1996:39). There are several groups of Kalahari throughout this region, they are hunters and gatherers, which migrate to different watering holes during dry periods. The fact that they live so freely, openly, and untouched by modern society is amazing. Kinsley (1996:39-40) says, regardless of their primitive culture, they are a fairly healthy group of individuals, which work together, sharing what they have with everyone in the group. Kung healers can be anyone within the group that wants to learn or are given healing powers from Gods, ancestors, or severe illnesses they have overcome giving them the
is the most usual in which a man and a woman unite themselves in the