Of interest to many Histarchers:
John
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H-NET BOOK REVIEW
Published by [log in to unmask] (July, 2002)
Sarah Milledge Nelson and Myriam Rosen-Ayalon. _In Pursuit of
Gender: Worldwide Archaeological Approaches_. Gender and Archaeology
Series. Walnut Creek: AltaMira Press, 2001. x + 433 pp. Tables,
maps, notes, bibliography, index. $85.00 (cloth) ISBN 0-7591-0086-1;
$34.95 (paper), ISBN 0-7591-0087-X.
Reviewed for H-Women by Jodi Barnes <[log in to unmask]>, Women's
Studies Program, University of South Carolina, Columbia
Digging for Gender: Recreating the Dialogue between Theory and
Methodology
In the past decade a number of texts that seek to illuminate the
subject of gender from the archaeological record have been
published.[1] Several of the authors in this new volume, _In Pursuit
of Gender: Worldwide Archaeological Approaches_, have contributed to
this research. Yet this new collection moves beyond the previous
texts to interpret and reinterpret sites and cultures from the
perspective of gender. _In Pursuit of Gender_ advances the study of
gender archaeology with detailed data, a worldwide scope and
carefully reasoned conclusions that pave the way toward further
research in gender-based theory.
_In Pursuit of Gender_, edited by Sarah Milledge Nelson and Myriam
Rosen-Ayalon, is the "fruit of a conference at the Rockefeller Study
and Conference in Bellagio, Italy, in October 1998" (p. ix). By
focusing on gender ideology, gender roles and gender relations the
authors seek a "social archaeology that considers the agency of men
and women beyond their purported artifacts" (p. x). The authors are
not searching for a universal truth, but rather "nuanced local
meanings" (p. 10). This is evident since the chapters in the book
represent archaeological work in China, Japan, Thailand, the
Philippines, Andaman Islands, Egypt, South Africa, southwestern
Asia, Italy, Germany, France, Argentina, Brazil, Central America,
and eastern and western North America. An array of time periods and
societies is represented, ranging from the Lower Paleolithic to the
early historic Philippines and including hunter-gatherers, early
horticulturists, incipient and well-developed states, and historic
communities as well as primate studies. Rock art, the domestic use
of space, ethnohistoric documents, prehistoric DNA, burials and
their content and context are all sources of data.
The articles in this volume are diverse in their theoretical and
methodological approaches as well as their focus areas and time
periods. This can be a distraction, yet Milledge Nelson's
introductions give the volume cohesion. The text is organized into
three sections: "Gender Ideology," "Gender Roles," and "Gender
Relations," yet the permeability of these categories is acknowledged
and demonstrated by the writings of each author. In order to
demonstrate the diversity of methods and theories for approaching
gender, I will discuss the text by section.
According to Milledge Nelson, gender ideology "subsumes both gender
identity--how individuals perceive their own gender--and societal
correlates of possible gender identification" (p. 10). Each article
in the first section addresses a facet of gender ideology. Ruth D.
Whitehouse concentrates on southern Italy during the Neolithic
Period, using a combination of types of evidence including burials,
cult caves with paintings, anthropomorphic figurines, and
architecture and space. Centering around 3000 BC, women in
predynastic Egypt are the subject of Fekri Hassan and Shelley
Smith's article. The two examine grave goods, figurines, palettes,
and iconography to discern the inner logical fabric of a culture;
they examine the symbols, meanings, metaphors, and tropes in order
to understand the culture and their ways of structuring thought and
transforming it into bodily experiences. Karen Rubinson tackles the
theoretical question of the meaning of mirrors in central Asia,
about 5000 B.C. By examining the distribution of mirrors in graves
she shows that mirrors cannot have the same meaning or function
throughout the vast territory despite the fact that people share
many of the same traits. She concludes that mirrors are specific to
each culture and need to be treated accordingly. Rosemary Joyce
relies on images and documents to discuss what she calls "appearance
cues," ways that clothing, ornaments, artifacts, and body
modifications mark and call attention to various significant aspects
of a person chosen to delineate significance in a given culture.
John Parkington's article focuses on South African rock art in which
men and women are depicted doing different tasks in separate
settings; he relates the scenes to folktales that were recorded by
early European settlers. His article shows how differences between
the sexes are naturalized and projected into objects that have no
inherent gender. Although the articles in this section utilize
various methods and theories, and focus on differing time periods
and regions, they illuminate what different people may think about
gender and how gender can be an organizing principle of a culture.
Gender roles, the topic of the second section, reflect the economies
of gender--what women and men are expected to do in their daily
lives, how and where they do these things and with what tools (p.
7). In this section, the article by Joan Gero and M. Cristina
Scattolin is one of the most thought provoking. Gero and Scattolin
analyzed gendered household activities at Yutopian in Argentina to
argue that gender is not a thing but a series of relationships--a
process, a performance. At the site, the gender system could be
classified as a "gender complementarity" or a "gender hierarchy,"
but the authors show that divisions of labor and integrated
household labor are present as shown by food production and copper
reduction at the same hearth. Both forms of labor serve to produce
social cohesion. Therefore, it is important to think about gender
roles along a continuum rather than as binaries. Margaret Nelson,
Donna Glowacki and Annette Smith consider women's impact on
household economies among the Maya. In this ethnoarchaeological
study, the authors sought material correlates of women's work that
could be applied to archaeological sites. Rather than looking at
men's productive activities, they analyze women's contribution to
households and the relative wealth of households as it relates to
women's contributions. They examine the organization, special
facilities and tools, and whether work done there may have an impact
of the material goods of the household. How to ask gender questions
where little else is known of the culture is the subject Zarine
Cooper addresses. Since the disposition of artifacts in the midden
fails to reveal the division of labor by gender, Cooper turns to
ethnographic accounts to consider gender in her sites in the Andaman
Islands. Rasmi Shoocongdej examined three rock art sites in the late
historic period in western Thailand. She considers both the spatial
distribution of the sites and the content of the scene depicted.
Cheryl Claasen discusses the time constraints of women's work and
the likelihood that children's labor was called on especially for
the care of younger children. Using data from the Middle Woodland
Period in the American Midwest and bioarchaeological data, she
considers time management by women. I found this section to be the
most enlightening. It offered new ways to think about gender roles
and showed how we think about gender roles can influence how we
think about gender relations and gender ideology as well.
The third section, titled "Gender Relations," discusses ways to
approach the politics of gender, or the negotiation of power between
men and women (p. 7). Bettina Arnold takes up the topic of Iron Age
burials in Germany and France. She describes in detail the problems
of using sex in burials as a proxy for gender and comes to the
conclusion that the importance of the sex/gender distinction for
archaeologists is in perceiving it as a continuum rather than as
binary opposites of male/female and man/woman. This makes the
interpretation of sex and gender in burials much more difficult but
opens up possibilities for better understanding of a culture.
Kathryn Landuff examines women's graves in Anyang, the last capital
of Shang China about 1200 B.C. Myriam Rosen-Ayalon describes the
context of paintings in early Umayyad times. She examines the
particular placement of paintings in buildings dedicated to pleasure
and to administration. Elisabeth Bacus provides a new understanding
of women in the political economy of the Visaya region of the
Philippines in early historic times. Using documents, especially
Spanish accounts, combined with archaeology, she finds the most
significant social categories are elite and nonelite rather than
male and female. Fumiko Ikawa-Smith examines strange humanoid
female-like figurines that are found unevenly in time and space
through the Jomon period in Japan. A. C. Roosevelt takes a
different approach as she reviews sociobiological literature on
human evolution and concludes that gender inequality did not exist
before the Holocene.
_In Pursuit of Gender_ attempts to recreate the dialogue between
theory and methodology and shows how differing theoretical
perspectives and methodologies can be utilized in the search for
gender in the archaeological past. As a graduate student in Women's
Studies with a BA in Anthropology and a background in Archaeology,
the text offered me new ways to consider the study of gender and
archaeology. The articles in this volume help show how women may
differ within a single culture by age, class, marital status,
presence or absence of children, and the kinds of work they do. With
its emphasis on worldwide perspectives and gendered interpretations,
this text would be great for introductory courses as well as
graduate courses in archaeological theory, methodology and, of
course, gender.
Note
[1]. See Joan Gero and Margaret Conkey, eds., _Engendering
Archaeology: Women and Prehistory_. Social Archaeology Series
(Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1991); Cheryl Claasen and Rosemary
Joyce, eds., _Women in Prehistory: North America and Mesoamerica_
(Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1997); Kelley
Hays-Gilpen and David S. Whitley, eds., _Reader in Gender
Archaeology_ (London: Routledge, 1998); Tracy L. Sweely, ed.,
_Manifesting Power: Gender and the Interpretation of Power in
Archaeology_ (London: Routledge, 1999); and, Bettina Arnold and
Nancy L. Wicker, eds., _Gender and the Archaeology of Death_.
Gender and Archaeology Series (Walnut Creek: AltaMira Press, 2001).
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