SCIENCE / MEDICINE : The Feminization of Anthropology : Many anthropologists are challenging decades-old research of primitive cultures, saying the scientists’ male bias denigrated : the contributions of women.
In the 1950s, anthropologists who traveled to Australia to study the aborigines reported that the men bonded with each other and kept their women at bay with secret ceremonies and dazzling displays of magic they said came from the gods.
It was not until a woman anthropologist recently studied the same peoples that it was learned that aborigine women knew the magic was a hoax, indulgently humored the men and had a good laugh about it behind their backs.
“You have to take a good look at the women to get the whole story,” said anthropologist Helen Fisher of the American Museum of Natural History in New York, who uses the story to illustrate a decade-old movement in the ranks of anthropology.
It is the feminization of a profession that, ironically, is best known to laymen because of a woman--the late and revered Margaret Mead, who wrote the classic anthropological work, “Coming of Age in Samoa.”
But many men and women anthropologists said in interviews that most early reports on evolution, primitive cultures and primate behavior were overly male-oriented, and have since been proven misguided and misleading.
In the old Fred Flintstone school of anthropology, cavemen went out to conquer the world with a club while their monogamous mates stayed home in the cave with the kids.
Anthropologists who studied primate behavior tracked orangutans and gorillas and reported that the dominant males kept harems of docile females. And those who studied primitive cultures wrote in innumerable ethnographies that men in most societies held all positions of religious and economic power.
White Western Males
“Basically, anthropologists were from white Western societies of male domination and everywhere they looked they saw Western-like societies of male domination,” Fisher said in a recent interview at the museum.
“They were explaining male-female roles from a Western male perspective.”
Now, a steady influx of studies and discoveries have painted a new picture of male-female relationships, status and roles.
Anthropologists have determined that most primate societies are comprised of matriarchal groups of related females that dominant males join--if the dominant females acquiesce.
A new look at primitive cultures has suggested that women’s status cannot be measured by Western standards. In hunter-gatherer societies, for example, women play a crucial role in providing food and have more power within social groups than previously thought.
Our knowledge of early man, meanwhile, is so scant that anthropologists can’t even say for sure whether people knew of the relationship between sex and birth. The concept of “fatherhood” may have been nonexistent.
“We don’t have much of an idea at all of what social patterns existed for australopithecine,” said University of New Mexico’s Jane Lancaster of one of modern humans’ earliest ancestors.
Lancaster and other anthropologists said few of their number actually believed that nuclear families similar to those of today existed hundreds of thousands of years ago.
But they do concede that anthropologists of the 1950s were quick to assume that early man had many of the same values and social structures that existed in the United States and Great Britain at the time.
“There was a tendency, there still is a tendency, to push back what we see now onto societies that existed before,” said Lancaster, who teaches anthropology at the Albuquerque school. “But that doesn’t really work.
“They probably had social behaviors and patterns and adaptations that do not even exist today, not among hunter-gatherer societies and certainly not in the modern Western world,” she said. “They had something that was unique to that time.”
Anthropologists said there were always women--Mead foremost among them--who countered a traditional male bias in the profession.
But in the last decade, the growing body of research on the female role in primate and human behavior has revolutionized the field and is slowly changing perceptions long held by many.
The belief that male gorillas, baboons and other primates fought among themselves for the right to collect and keep a stable of females has been shattered by field research collected since the 1960s.
“Knowledge is built up over a period of time. It takes years of careful research,” said Donald Lindburg, an expert on primate behavior who studied macaque monkeys in Borneo and India before joining the Zoological Society of San Diego.
“The original view was that if you described the males, you described the society,” he said. “There is a much more balanced view now.”
Observations in the field have shown that relationships between male and female primates can have all the subtleness and diplomacy of human relations between the sexes--although anthropologists are careful not to read human characteristics into animal behavior.
Shirley Strum, who studied baboons in Kenya in the 1970s, published her observations of a 61-member group that was approached by a huge, healthy male baboon nicknamed Ray.
Ray did not strut into the middle of the throng and challenge the nearest male, as Strum expected. Instead he stayed on the edge of the group trying to look unobtrusive and making friendly overtures to several females of the group, who finally accepted him as a member.
Only then did he struggle with the males to establish his rank.
Human Relationships
Untangling old myths about male-female relationships in humans has been more difficult than understanding primate behavior, researchers said.
“By the time anthropologists started studying cultures seriously, Western cultural standards had already pervaded so many societies that it was hard to measure traditional women’s roles,” Fisher said.
She cited studies of North African communities indicating that males held all economic, political and religious power. But the old studies did not take into account the fact that British colonialists had established judicial systems and local governments in which only men were allowed to serve.
A British plan to tax men as if their wives were property prompted a 1929 Nigerian rebellion in which women marched on British garrisons. British historians incorrectly believed that the men had engineered the rebellion and sent their wives and daughters on a rampage because they believed the colonialists would not shoot at women, Fisher said.
“In reality it was a protest started and carried out by women who owned their own property and were outraged,” she said.
Misinterpreting Darwin
It was during this time that people in Western societies were misinterpreting Charles Darwin’s “survival of the fittest” theory to justify the domination of upper-class whites over other classes and races.
“The belief was they were superior and the belief was that men had evolved to be superior to women,” Fisher said of the early 1900s.
Now anthropologists have determined that almost all the physical differences between men and women boil down to the fact that women bear children.
“If you took that away, we would be the same,” Lancaster said.
Fisher, who lived with and studied Navajo Indians while a 23-year-old student, said in many American Indian tribes women had considerable power until tribal communities were reorganized by government officials.
“Anthropologists are beginning to realize this phenomenon and take it into consideration,” she said.
Western Power Concepts
Fisher said early anthropologists also measured the status of women in different cultures based on Western perceptions of power.
“Do they hold office, do they hunt, do they own property?” she said. “That does not always give us an accurate reflection of what is going on.
“An older Chinese woman in the home can dominate a whole patriarchal line,” she said.
“It used to be thought that an arranged marriage was a sign that women had little say in their future. But for every arranged marriage there is a young boy who is being traded off without any say-so.”
Anthropologists said that a woman’s role as bearer of children often prevents her from physically working to provide food from a hunt or from the family farm. But, in most societies, she is a vital contributor to the overall economic well-being of the society.
Important Work
During a tour of the museum, Fisher paused before a diorama of African Pygmies that showed a male shooting at game while a woman with a baby on her hip and a basket on her back foraged for edible plants.
“A hunt may bring in meat only every few days or once a week,” Fisher said. “Without the food brought in by the women, they would starve.
“Men and women are built to work together. In every society men do some things and women do others in a general division of labor. We have evolved to complement each other.”
Anthropologists said studies of women have given them a broader picture of how societies work and survive under pressure.
Lynn Bolles, director of Afro-American studies at Bowdoin College in Maine and a past president of the Assn. of Black Anthropologists, has spent considerable time in the West Indies looking at how women factory workers roll with the economic punches of a depressed region.
“It’s not the kind of thing that was looked at 10 or 15 years ago,” she said recently, “but a whole new age of anthropologists is realizing you have to look at all links--economic, political forces--not just at how the men spend their days.”
Going Too Far
Some anthropologists charge that the feminization of the field has swung the pendulum too far in the opposite direction, citing reports suggesting that female primates and humans choose their own mates, raise their offspring and determine the economic and social structure of animal kingdoms and great nations.
But Lindburg said he sees little “over-compensation” in the field.
“There is a concentrated effort not to go too far with a preconceived notion or idea,” he said. “We see the trouble we got into by laying too much emphasis on males. I don’t think too many people are going to go in the opposite direction.”
“Anthropologists have been leaders in the feminist movement to re-examine traditional beliefs in scholarship,” said Sandra Morgan, professor of women’s studies at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst.
“We have made all these great advances within the field and now it’s time to disseminate it to the student,” she said.
Morgan is director of the Anthropological Assn. Project on Gender and Curriculum, which is incorporating new data on sex roles into anthropology courses and textbooks. The three-year project, which Bolles is also participating in, is being funded by the U.S. Department of Education.
Someday soon, anthropologists may look at the old cartoon image of a caveman clubbing the woman of his choice and view it as a quaint anachronism of a misguided culture.
MARGARET MEAD: FROM SAMOA TO THE FOREFRONT OF SOCIAL SCIENCE It was Margaret Mead who raised anthropology to celebrity status. A prolific author, Mead wrote 24 books and co-authored 18 more. So pioneering and so popular was her work that many anthropologists credited her with changing attitudes toward human sexuality and many of the principles of modern sex therapy can be traced directly and indirectly to her work.
At age 23, fresh out of Columbia University graduate school, Mead set out alone for Samoa. The book she wrote upon her return, “Coming of Age in Samoa,” a study of adolescence in a primitive culture, immediately established her in the world of anthropology. After the publication of her first book, Mead set out for the Admiralty Islands to study the children of Manus. She later studied American Indians and three tribes in New Guinea.
In her later years, she became a towering symbol of the independent woman, championing both the Equal Rights Amendment and the importance of maintaining the family. She raised eyebrows with her outspoken comments on a variety of issues, including a universal draft for men and women.
For 52 years, Dr. Mead had maintained the same office in the American Museum of Natural History. She was a familiar figure wandering the halls of the New York museum with her familiar fork walking stick, red cape and rimless spectacles. She died in 1978 of cancer.
