ANTH1001 Lecture Notes - Lecture 5: Exogamy, Mary Douglas
17 May 2018
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Week 5: SPACES, HOUSES AND GENDER (2): Comparison Understanding and Gender
• Longhouse as a kind of whole community: aspects of our definition:
o Making a material expression of the identity of person, community and place: monsoon
o Distinguishing the monsoon from other monsoon
o Distinguishing the monsoon from the forest
o Giving spatial and architectural form to the main social distinctions with the monsoon:
gender and age.
o Mobilising the skills and organisational powers of the community to plan for and make
the monsoon.
• Monsoon as process?
o Clearing the forest
o Making the gardens and the longhouse
o Working and living within the Monsoon
o Exhausting gardens and rotting houses
o Forest Regrowth
• Two Arguments: Space and Gender:
o The realisation of worldview in space is the explicit argument
o The role of gender as key distinction within that worldview is vital but unexamined
o To understand the implications of the spatial process we need to understand the nature
of the gender distinction.
• Space Argument:
o Samo Livelihood embedded within a more encompassing world view expressed in spatial
terms:
• Domestic vs. Wild
• Male vs. Female
• Gender Argument:
o Complementarity and Separation of the genders: Men are protectors and Women are
producers
o Equating menstruation and pollution is the condition of maintaining this distinction.
o Pollution is not an absolute – it is polluting from the point of view of male power.
o It is the obligation of both men and women to maintain male power and female
productivity.
o Why do Samo need male protective power both military and magical?: Enemies and
Forest Spirits
• Gender and Boundaries:
o Women are productive and fertile within the space defined by the Monsoon
o Men protect the boundaries of the Monsoon but exogamy, women marry into other
monsoon.
o Their capacity to reproduce and feed other makes alliances
o So women connect groups
• Understanding Pollution:
o Problems of translation
o Reproductive power represented in negative terms - fertility
o Initiation - men and women are not born they need to be made
o Once made the distinction needs to be sustained
o This does also underpin male political power
• Separating out Gender and Pollution
o Some form of gender distinction is universal
o Some form of ideas about pollution is universal - Mary Douglas
o The Equation of pollution with the gender distinction is not universal
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