AN324 Lecture Notes - Lecture 6: Marxist Feminism, Bourgeoisie, Human Nature
Document Summary
October 22, 2013: pioneer in bringing a feminist approach to anthropological thinking, 1970s. Women anthropologists: began to question male-centered assumptions within anthropology, focus their research on women"s statuses and roles in societies around the world. Studies assumed universal sexual asymmetry- the worldwide subordination of women- and sought to explain this situation: nurture vs. nature debate, because they bore children, didn"t engage in the public sphere as males did, 1980s. Experimental forms of ethnographic writing, emphasizing multivocality and autoethnography: eleanor burke leacock. Approaches and interests were not considered scientific and. Initially harshly excluded from academe objective enough: in the 1950s. Showed that the assumption that women had inferior status in traditional societies reflected poor ethnographic research and anthropologists" biases. If women were considered subordinate, then this was carried onto other societies as a natural finding: materialist feminist. Analyzed gender-related activities using measures of social, economic, and political power.
