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Theory is the New Black!

This is the blog for Wake Forest University's Anthropological Theory class for Spring 2014. Get ready for challenging, probing,
insightful sociocultural critiques to challenge everything you know about culture and being human!

Sunday, March 30, 2014

Blog Archive
Man the Hunter, Woman the Gatherer: Binary ▼ 2014 (72)
Opposition in Historical Interpretations of Gender ► May (12)
► April (18)
Critique of Woman the Gatherer: Male Bias in Anthropology (1975)
▼ March (20)
One of the most notable lines from Sally Slocum’s “Woman the Gatherer: Male Bias in Anthropology” Man the Hunter, Woman the
was as follows: “The basic of any discipline is not the answers it gets, but the questions it asks” Gatherer: Binary Opposit...
(313). She dove deeper into the nature of forming questions and asserted, “our questions are shaped Gal: Power and Resistance as
by the particulars of our historical situation, and by unconscious cultural assumptions” (307). Here, Seen Through Female A...
Slocum made the assumption that we as human beings are unconsciously shaped by history and the
Through the Eye of the Beholder
driving ideologies of the culture. In essence, she created a clear link between history, or specifically in
this case, patriarchy, and “unconscious cultural assumptions.” It is even slightly unclear who or what Liminality and Greek Life
she refers to by “our.” Those it seems that she was accusing the academic discipline of anthropology, Liminality at Wake
she was also accusing the very nature of human beings as focused and shaped only on one
Disney Dynamos - Juxtaposition
particular framework and mindset of scholarship: man as the hunter.
of Main Characters ...

Her argument is, essentially, driven around how men have manipulated historical data and information "Mankind The Story of All of Us"...
Or Most of Us
to support the “men as a hunter” argument. Using an example such as an increase in brain size, she
argued that the act of gathering resulted in a rapid increase in brain size as well. Slocum essentially "Language, Gender, and Power" -
used the women as a gatherer argument and specifically the argument that the oldest form of incest A Reflection on Su...
prohibition is between that of mother and son in order to reconstruct primitive social structure. Cockfighting and Buzkashi
Through the use of the woman as a gatherer argument, she attempted to recreate how gathering was
The Interpretive Anthropology of
perceived. She argued for how gathering was both difficult and demanding and even implied how our
Football and Craz...
molded perceptions of masculinity and feminity and the designated roles from these perceptions
made it difficult to view gathering as a difficult and demanding activity. White and the Rational Individual
My Not So Fun St. Patty's Day
As Slocum constantly mentioned that the questions drive the nature of knowledge, I believe that there
The Life and Times of Capt.
are some questions that she did not ask that should have been asked. It seemed that her argument James Cook
created a binary opposition; she created two separate gender-based roles for the human through
primarily archaeological and behavioral analysis. Such a binary opposition limited the nature of A Reflection on Marshall Sahlins
knowledge in that this dual gender divide created two specific categories and failed to account for Levi – Strauss: So good he got
individuals who did not fit into these categories (assuming such deviants existed at all). Therefore, the two names
examination of men who gathered and women who may provide large insight into how such a Hannah double dipped the chip
development of male and female role split even came about. Slocum’s analysis as well as her
criticism of the field made me feel as if sometimes, the discipline of anthropology in respects to Edmund Leach: A Synthesis
gender-based problems focuses more-so on justifying or disputing the gender divide rather than Gender, The Ultimate Binary?
looking for the forces, processes and mechanisms (essentially, the causes) that created such a divide
Sapir: The True Impact of Words
in the first place.
A Reflection on Edward Sapir
L
► February (18)
► January (4)

Posted by Unknown at 2:09 PM

Contributors

1 comment: BCB and MCB

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BCB and MCB April 9, 2014 at 12:43 PM
Unknown
Very interesting . . . Slocum is writing at a moment when it seemed (and probably was)
necessary to integrate women into the ethnographic bio anth, and archaeological pictures
 because they had been excluded. It was not yet the moment of problematizing the categories Unknown
"man" and "woman" or critiquing gender itself.
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