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Assignment II At Home Mid-Term

Robert Walker
ID# 2351768
Anthropology 375Anthropology of Gender
Natalie Sharpe
August 24, 2007
These questions were answered closed book.
Does gender have an effect on anthropological fieldwork? Question One
The gender of an anthropologist, we are realising, does indeed have an effect on
fieldwork. The gender of a field worker influences the gathering and interpretation of
data, how relations are negotiated, and what information a researcher can expect to
obtain.
One area of study where the gender of a researcher affects the questions asked to
obtain, and the interpretation of, any data collected, is the study of so-called Venus
figurines. As feminist anthropologists have pointed out, though figures have been
interpreted as a rod with breasts, for example, an equally plausible interpretation posits
the rod as a phallus with testes. Unconscious projection of cultural biases, while
unintentional, compromises the researchers ability to hear informants stories in their
own categories and/or precludes other reasonable interpretations of the same data.
A researchers gender also affects how he or she negotiates relationships with
informants during fieldwork. One male researcher, in a Reading File article, notes that
while studying a group home, the female informants eventually treated him almost as a
favourite uncle. One difficult situation arose when he had to assist a distressed female
resident of the home while there was no one around to help; the incident raised questions
for him about sexual ethics and how to maintain appropriate emotional distance.
This negotiation of boundaries is also important because in some societies the
way one member of one gender communicates with a member of anotherand what
information is sharedmay be very different from when communicating with members

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of the same gender. In one of the course readings, one male researcher reported that he
felt women were unreliable sources of information about daily routines because their
answers were vague, whereas he felt male informants were much clearer and more
detailed. The female author of the article felt her colleague failed to consider the impact
of his gender on the quality the data collected.
Accounting for these affects may involve taking more time to gain informants
trust, researchers becoming more aware of their own biases and social locations, or using
mixed-gender teams to layer the data by exploring differences in how different genders
negotiate their relationships.

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Robert Walker ID# 2351768 ANTH 375 A2
From an anthropological perspective, do women possess maternal instinct? Question 2
Anthropological knowledge definitely complicates our own cultural
understanding that women have maternal instinct and men are social fathers. We
generally believe that close attachment to the mother, in particular, leads to healthy
development for a child.
One article on the course discussed one researchers study of women who do not
care for sickly babies because they believe God wants them to become little angels.
Though Roman Catholic priests with a liberation theology perspective try to tell the
women to care for their babies, this rarely has an affect on the mothers attitudes;
interestingly, however, the children of that community often seemed to feel that letting
the babies die was wrong. The researcher herself intervened to save one of these dying
little ones, who commented several years later, A boys best friend is his mother! In
certain situations, then, it does not seem as though mothering is an instinct; however,
could one argue that a basic impulse has been stunted or blocked somehow, perhaps as an
emotional adaptation to abject poverty.
Other communities seem to value motherhood, but these communities may place
much less emphasis on physical contact with a child, especially where the father or the
extended family can be expected to help. Instead of merely being social with a child,
fathers in some cultures have close physical contact with a child nearly half the time, and
participate in bonding activities like feeding.
I grew up in a fundamentalist Christian subculture where it is assumed that there
is a specific range of acceptable roles and behaviours for men and women. Women are
expected to be wives and mothers with a strong maternal instinct who teach children to

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love themselves. Fathers, on the other hand, mediate between a child and the outer world
(especially that outside the home), calling forth the childs ability to love others by the
masculine voice. Men are the leaders who most often preside over public communities
of faith. These views are allegedly rooted in the presumably infallible and crossculturally applicable dictates of the Bible.
Since leaving Bible College in 1999 to deal with issues surrounding personal
identity and sexuality, anthropology, literary/queer theory, and feminist thought have
taught me that the Bible speaks from quite specific milieu; it cannot be interpreted transhistorically because human objectivity does not exist. Many values and practices are
relative, and I am increasingly comfortable with this. The difficulty, as in the baby
angels story, is that it is very hard to negotiate letting someone have their views and
having a humanist perspective (especially as someone who believes in the Christian
metanarrative, if not the specific interpretations of my upbringing). Does the fact that the
children recognized the wrongness of letting the babies die a function of learning from
liberation-theology priests in Church school, or a(n) (quasi-)innate sense of right and
wrong that has roots deeper than human culture? How do we as students of anthropology
object in situations like this when all worldviews are based on fundamentally improvable
axioms?

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Robert Walker ID# 2351768 ANTH 375 A2
Question 3 Why do sex and gender appear natural?
Societies and cultures tend to organize themselves in ways that benefit their own
survival. Over the longer term, as social values and stories develop about the way things
are, tradition plays a huge role in making sex and gender roles appear natural. In
subsistence societies, we most often see broadly patriarchal patterns: women attend to
tasks of hearth and home, and men tend to tasks that entail social prestige, like hunting.
Contemporary ethnographic analysis, however, complicates this picture. We increasingly
see that the work of women involves real and concrete cultural influence (as in the case
of the making of clothso necessary the development of civilization, yet almost
universally considered womens work). Women are not just in the background
supporting the men who are doing the real work of building culture, but rather they
are often the architects of the social networks that allow a community to function.

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Robert Walker ID# 2351768 ANTH 375 A2
Question 4 Why is economy of affect an important consideration in anthropology of
gender?
Bonnie McHilleney uses the concept of an economy of affect in her article on
womens police work. Affect for McHilleney seems to mean something like
emotional work or state of being. Her emphasis on economy shows that the energy
for such emotional work is within a closed systemthe more positive affect expended,
the less there is for oneself (to deal with potentially traumatic situations arising from
police work). Like male co-workers, female police officers may find that they smile
less or decide to handle a murder scene, for example, by deciding, Thats not a person,
thereby conserving emotional resources.
Economy of affect follows clear gender-role expectations in our society. For
example, men tend to practice occupations in which negative affect is expected (like in
police work) and women tend be more in jobs where positive affectprojection of
positive emotion) is more helpful (social work or serving).
Interestingly, female police officers do not see themselves as more masculine
when on that job, but instead index their behaviour to the requirements of their jobs rather
than referring to (adjusting directly) their gender identities. They are not less feminine
when on the job, but simply do what seems necessary when wearing the uniform. As one
informant stated, Its not man versus woman [in a potential crisis], its man versus a
police officer.
Members of other occupations also seem to challenge the perception of gender
boundaries: male nurses and female Christian clergy are cases in point. I remember, as a

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Robert Walker ID# 2351768 ANTH 375 A2
young boy, being in hospital after surgery. An older man came into my room wearing a
hospital uniform, and I asked him what his job was.
Im a nurse, he replied.
No youre not, I exclaimed. Youre a boy! My own mother was a nurse, yet I
had never encountered a boy in that job before! My attitude then seems to reflect a
cultural stance that women are most suited for jobs that require nurturing or intimate
contact with people. They are not beneath performing menial or domestic tasks. (There
is an interesting conflation between gender identity and sexual orientation I have
encountered since: Male nurses behave like women; therefore, they are perceived as gay.)
Women who describe entering Christian religious ministry often elicit a sense of
invading a gender boundary. The public spiritual work of a priest or pastor represents an
allegedly male God. Though women may be perceived as innately more spiritual or
caring in the private sphere (per the late 19th Century cult of domesticity,), only a
male priest, in the hegemonic narrative, seems fit to shepherd the community of faith.
(There is a sense, particularly in strong liturgical traditions (and however ironically) that
a male priest does not have a robust masculine performance either, per scholars like
Robert Goss or Mark Jordan.) I wonder if some women priests negotiate in the same way
that women police officers mightby indexing the masculine authority they wield to
the collar they wear. They may also (as in my experiences of Anglican female priests),
re-image God as beyond gender or as female.

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Robert Walker ID# 2351768 ANTH 375 A2
Question 5 What does it mean for anthropology of gender to wake sleeping metaphors
in the sciences?
Emily Martin constructs her argument about how sexist ideology affects our
views of fertilization by comparing the models shown in textbooks and scientific research
to views of gender in North American societies. She cites examples, usually in textbooks,
that perceive womens ova as wasted if not fertilized. On the other hand, male sperm
are produced in prodigious or amazing numbers without any hint of the language of
waste (though it seems obvious, when speaking in these terms, that a male wastes
much more than a female ever could).
Further, Martin compares two standard archetypes or metaphors than
subconsciously influence how the science of fertilization is presented: the damsel in
distress and the femme fatale. In the first model, the egg seems like a huge, passive
woman waiting to be conquered or rescued by the much more active (but smaller) male.
In the second model, though the egg has a much more active role, it is opposed to the
male, throwing up all kinds of dangerous obstacles to overcome.
Martins reading seems strong in light of other readings in the course that
demonstrate masculinities and femininities as both socially constructed and individually
negotiated (as in McHilleneys article on economy of affect). Such an approach also
lends credence to the idea that science and medical institutions can reinforce, and even
shape, social values. Martin notes that it may be ideologically simplistic to simply
substitute an egalitarian model or computerized model of the fertilization process, but her
point that we must wake sleeping metaphors and be aware of their consequences is a
central insight within the discipline of anthropology.

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Robert Walker ID# 2351768 ANTH 375 A2
I wonder if she realised that waking sleeping metaphors seems derivative of the
damsel in distress?

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