ANTHROPOLOGY AND THE STUDY OF GENDER

Abstract

paper was prepared for a lecture series entitled "Studying Women: The Impact on the Social Sciences and Humanities." I might have followed the general theme of the series by calling my own paper "Anthropology and the Study of Women." I felt it important, however, to define my subject as the study of gender rather than the study of women. Let me begin by discussing why I considered this reformulation necessary. The anthropological studies of sex roles that have appeared in recent years have been primarily studies of women. This is not surprising, since the resurgence of feminism in the 1960s led to a growing interest in the question of gender in various academic fields.1 There are problems, however, in defining our enterprise as the study of women, and the first I would like to point out is what can be called the problem oimarkedness. I borrow this term from linguists and semioticians, who use it to refer to an asymmetrical relationship between a pair of categories that constitute complementary opposites within some larger class.2 The terms "man" and "woman," for example, serve to contrast male and female members of the larger class of human beings; as such, they appear to be complementary opposites. At the same time, the term "man," as we know, can be used in a more general sense to contrast the human species as a whole with some other category. Thus, the terms "man" and "woman" designate