Feminists in the West were questioning the assumptions on which the patriarchal nuclear family was based and looked to anthropology for examples of alternative arrangements from contemporary non-Western societies.
They sought to avoid prior assumptions about what these differences were.Īnthropology seemed uniquely well-placed to examine cross-cultural variation in gender ascriptions. Studies of gender as a symbolic system focused on the roles that men and women played, on ideas about what constituted a proper man or woman in a particular culture, and on how differences between men and women were perceived in that culture. In contrast, gender referred to a social category comprising the roles and expectations a culture had for men, women, and (in some cases) additional genders, such as the berdache (men who live as women and women who live as men, found in some traditional American Indian cultures) or the hijra (men who live as women, found in some parts of India).
To clarify this difference, scholars came to use sex to refer to biological characteristics, the most obvious of which are the genitalia (e.g., male, female, or hermaphroditic). Studies of women had made it eminently clear that there were very few characteristics that could be attributed both exclusively and universally to one sex or the other whether one was expected to be strong or weak, aggressive or passive, serious or humorous, disciplinarian or nurturing, and so on depended on cultural expectations, not on biology. This shift can be connected to a broader questioning of gender roles outside (and within) the academy and was marked by the analytical separation of the terms gender and sex, among other things. Women’s involvement in households and domestic arrangements, trade, exchange, labour, religion, and economic life was rendered in detail, making the gaps in previous cross-cultural studies all too visible.īy the end of the 1970s, attention had begun to shift from women to the symbolization of gender itself. This resulted first in a number of important works that documented the lives of women, which had previously been omitted from ethnographic accounts. SpaceNext50 Britannica presents SpaceNext50, From the race to the Moon to space stewardship, we explore a wide range of subjects that feed our curiosity about space!įeminist and gendered approaches to kinshipįrom the 1960s onward the feminist movement and the scholarship it inspired have had a very obvious impact on kinship studies.Learn about the major environmental problems facing our planet and what can be done about them! Saving Earth Britannica Presents Earth’s To-Do List for the 21st Century.Britannica Beyond We’ve created a new place where questions are at the center of learning.100 Women Britannica celebrates the centennial of the Nineteenth Amendment, highlighting suffragists and history-making politicians.
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