Is female to male as nature is to culture?

20.10.04 Jenny Söderlind, Wadham

Gender relations form an integral part of human social interactions and are of great interest to anthropologists. Since the feminist movement in the late 1960s, one question that has been discussed is to what extent the opposition between women and men can be thought of in terms of the dichotomy between nature and culture and what implications this has for the position of women in society. This structuralist perspective was first formulated by Ortner (1974), drawing on Levi-Strauss and de Beauvoir, but has since been criticised for being simplistic and ethnocentric. I will delineate Ortner’s argument and look at its application to male and female roles in childbirth before examining the ways in which her line of reasoning has been found wanting. The universality of the opposition between nature and culture is questioned, and the cultural specificity and complexity of gender, power relations and sex is explored before concluding that the parallel dichotomy of nature / culture and female / male is a relatively recent Western concept which does not necessarily help us understand other societies’ gender relations.

Ortner (1974, in Rosaldo & Lamphere) attempts to answer the questions why women, as she sees it, are universally subordinate to men. She admits that the relative power women wield and the actual treatment they receive vary widely between societies, that each society’s concept of the female position is likely to consist of several layers and that the cultural ideology may well be distinct from the observable state of affairs, but sets out nonetheless from the premise that women have secondary status in all human societies. After rejecting biological determinism as an explanation, she posits that the answer to her question must lie instead in some cultural universal. She argues that human culture’s universal devaluation of nature and the association within all cultures of women with nature is the clue to the problem. Culture is the tool through which humans are able to ‘transcend the givens of natural existence, bend them to its purposes, control them in its interests’ and it is this ‘human ability to act upon and regulate, rather than passively move with and be moved by’ nature which Ortner considers evidence that humankind regards itself as inherently superior to our natural surroundings. She admits that this opposition is not equally clear in all societies but maintains that the universal presence of ritual practices is evidence of human awareness of our ability to manipulate the natural world.

Further, woman is in all cultures viewed as closer to nature than man, Ortner postulates, due to her physiology, the social roles she is confined to as a result of her physiology and the psyche she develops through living her social role. Drawing heavily on de Beauvoir (1953) she highlights the constraints placed upon women by their reproductive biology; that menstruation, pregnancy and childbirth are not only detrimental to her physical strength and health but also confine her to the ‘mere reproduction of life’. This stands in contrast to man, who is free to assert his creativity externally, ‘through the medium of technology and symbols’, which Ortner contends is held in higher esteem in all cultures. Woman’s social role is defined by her physiology in that she, through lactating and nurturing for her offspring, is enclosed in the domestic family context. Her resulting associated with children (who are regarded as unsocialised, not yet fully human) and symbolic opposition to the ‘public’ (which form the higher orders of social organisation and represents culture) reinforce her association with nature. In discussing the female psyche, Ortner refers to Chodorow who wrote that women are more subjective, think less in abstract terms than men do due to their limited social sphere and greater involvement with concrete feelings and people. Ortner asserts that this positioning of women, who as human beings clearly are part of culture, close to nature entails a mediating function between the two as well as endowing femaleness with symbolic ambiguity, ‘sometimes utterly exalted sometimes utterly debased’. She maintains that due to their role of mediator between nature and culture, as socialisers of children into full cultural beings, women will be placed under heavy restrictions in order to ensure the stability of the domestic unit and the continued reproduction of society’s values. Callaway (1978, in Ardener) agrees that to be female entails being identified with biological reproduction while fatherhood only forms an incidental part of male identity. Highlighting childbirth as a ‘focus of social rules and strategies which define and reinforce the classification of male and female’ she explores how women’s natural functions are dominated by men. She points to relatively recent examples from our own culture, citing supposedly ‘neutral’ publications on gynaecology such as James (1963) who states that ‘childbirth should be the crowning fulfillment of a woman’s sexual development, her physical and psychological destiny have been achieved’. Callaway cites La Fontaine‘s (1972) work in the Bugisu region of Uganda where the physical stages in the development of a girl into a woman is marked by rituals overtly expressing the predominance of men. Gisu women are subject to various taboos on the onset of menstruation and there is a parallel ceremony of circumcision for boys, which La Fontaine argues represents the relationship between men and women; ‘in women it is the natural, uncontrolled bleeding that denotes their (reproductive) power, in men it is social, controlled bleeding that symbolises and creates superior social power’. It seems then, that male-female relations among the Gisu are expressed in culture-nature symbolism, supporting Ortner’s argument.

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However, Ortner’s use of the opposition between nature and culture to explain the opposition between men and women in society suffers from the fatal flaw that ‘nature’ and ‘culture’ are Western notions and their association with gender is far from clear-cut even within our own worldview. Boch and Boch (1980, in MacCormack & Strathern) examine the development of the concept of the relationship between women and nature from its roots in 18th century French writings and find great ambiguity and complexity within each writer’s exploration of the subject, let alone between different writers. They insist that there is no reason why our classifications should exist in other societies, and that the application of Western categories ‘only obscures the specificity of the different cases and hinders the task of ethnography’. Schneider (1972, cited in MacCormack & Strathern 1980) similarly stresses that nature is an entirely cultural concept, and that folk models of nature, culture and gender vary within as well as between societies. Structuralists may try to reduce observed phenomena into symbols but ‘symbols such as nature or female have meanings attached to them which are culturally relative’. Cornwall and Lindisfarne (1994) comment that postmodernism has exposed the ‘partial perspective of every commentator’, using the example of white middle-class feminists who campaigned claiming to speak for ‘everywoman’ but in fact representing a very specific viewpoint. Theories which rely on notions such as culture and gender are thus problematic because they ascribe properties to members of categories created a priori by the author of the theory.

Thus we cannot take for granted that Western ideas of culture and nature are shared by the rest of humanity and ethnographic evidence supports this sceptical view of Ortner’s supposed universals. For one, nature is not everywhere seen as being opposed to culture. Strathern (1980, in MacCormack & Strathern) found during the fieldwork on Mount Hagen, Papua New Guinea that the Hageners distinguished most clearly between ‘planted’ (mbo) which included crops, pigs, and humans rooted in clans, and ‘wild’ (rømi) which represented the solitary, exotic, and non-human. Gender was not thought of in these terms but instead as nyim, prestigious and male opposed to korpa rubbish and female. Clearly the female is attributed lower status than the male but, contrary to Ortner’s theory this difference is not expressed in terms of the nature / culture dichotomy which does not exist in the same form as it does in Euro-America. Furthermore, as Gillison (in MacCormack & Strathern 1980) illustrates using examples from the Gimi area of Papua New Guinea, nature is not universally associated with women nor is it always devalued. The Gimi associate the male with wild spirits and birds and their title of address for men of high status, kore, means ‘forest’ as well as afterlife. MacCormack and Strathern (1980) consider Ortner’s claim that the social, material is valued more than the biological (namely humans) is especially ethnocentric. They point to the often noted value placed on lineages and the continuity of the patri- or matriline where ‘each human who is born fits into a great social chain of being’. That is not to say that women are necessarily appreciated for performing this task of giving birth to new humans, but in view of the ethnographic evidence it seems untenable to argue that their lower status is due to the higher value being placed on material goods.

Having questioned the validity of Ortner’s claim that the nature versus culture opposition is universal, we now turn to the question of gender. Several authors assert that not only other societies’ but also our own notions of gender are not as easily divisible into male and female, masculine and feminine as Ortner would have it. Hoskins’ fieldwork among the Kodi of the East Indonesian island of Sumba reveals that their culture values partnership and complementarity above the individual of either sex. Focussing particularly on material culture she notes that Kodi objects are not easily divisible into male and female but appear to be ‘double-gendered’. Both exchange valuables and domestic objects are take on a male meaning in one context and female in another rather than falling into opposing categories of male and female. This idealisation of sexual union and the importance of both sexes is reflected in Kodi cosmology, whose name for the Creator is ‘Mother who bound the forelock, Father who smelted the crown’. Ancestors are also invoked as couples to the extent that ‘even famed ancestral personalities must be called along with a lesser known counterpart of the opposite sex’. Hoskins further insists that the meaning of maleness and femaleness depends on the situation and each individual’s relations with others. Rather than there being a straightforward connection between sex and gender, she states that ‘according to context, clusters of gender qualities are brought out which are variously anchored in, and expressed through, the bodies of men and women’. Cornwall and Lindisfarne (1994) make the same point, citing Gatens’ (1983) statement that ‘masculinity and femininity mean different things according to whether they are lived out in and experienced by male or female bodies’. Butch lesbians, for instance, are classed as ‘masculine‘ but this version of masculinity is clearly distinct from masculinity as applied to men. Conversely, alterations of the body can affect the ascription of masculinity or femininity, the binding of Chinese’ women’s feet regarded signifying femininity for example.

Thus masculinity and femininity are not unambiguous concepts, and this is true even for our own culture. This can be seen very clearly in Cornwall and Lindisfarne’s (1994) study of masculinity. They argue that the ‘many different images and behaviours contained in the notion of masculinity are not always coherent: they may be competing, contradictory and mutually undermining’. ‘Masculinity’ is therefore not a single set of characteristics but has multiple and ambiguous meanings which alter according to context and over time. Whether a person’s behaviour is judged as masculine depends both on the situation and on the observer’s perspective. Cornwall and Lindisfarne propose that in any society there are authoritative, ‘hegemonic’ forms of masculinity, which are ‘dominant constructions determining standards against which other masculinities are defined’ and opposed to contingent, ‘subordinate variants’ of masculinity. Several hegemonic forms may coexist, as they assert is the case in contemporary Britain where images of the sensitive, caring ‘new man’ and the ‘macho man’, physically strong and a sexual predator, are both prevalent in the media. Despite the fluidity of the notion, the relation between men and masculinity is in general discourse and by many authors made to seem incontrovertible. Similarly, power is implicitly masculinised; Cornwall and Lindisfarne criticise traditional studies of power for being male-biased and focusing on social stability and consensus at the expense of being able to account for social change. They support Davis et al (1990) in their suggestion that ‘to dislocate hegemonic masculinities we must find another way of thinking of power and attend to the experience of gendered subordination’. The situation is more complex than Ortner’s division of male into dominant and female into subordinate, with hierarchies present within each gender and across other variables.

Power relationships are complex, especially those between men and women. Hoskins (1998) asserts that gender hegemonies very complex and shifting, stating that ‘few people would now flatly assert that female inferiority is uncontested or invariable’ and pointing out that Ortner herself (1996) has moved away from her ‘static parallelism of the categories’. Women are not universally passive and unexposed to the world outside the domestic sphere; they may be more or less active both in kin relations and economic production (MacCormack & Strathern 1980). Furthermore, a culture may articulate a certain ideal but this must not necessarily be taken at face value as reality is usually more complex. Moore (1986) argues that ‘cultural notions about men and women rarely reflect the true nature of gender relations, what men and women actually do’. She finds that among the Endo of Western Kenya ‘popular depictions of gender roles and tasks among Endo are very inadequate description of the division of agricultural tasks between women and men’. Despite an ideology of female submissiveness women exercise considerable control over household production and consumption. Scott (1990, cited in Cornwall & Lindisfarne) stresses the elusive and relational qualities of ‘power’. His exploration of the ‘mundane, informal, diffuse and often individualistic activities through which the relatively weak can influence and frame their responses to dominant ideologies’ is a good representation of the informal ways in which women have power even if ideologically considered subordinate. Scott sees all relations of power as having ‘dual transcripts’, the ‘official’ which articulates and legitimises the position of superiors and the ‘hidden’, dissenting from the dominant norms. The two are mutually constructed and dependent on each other. Cornwall and Lindisfarne point out that in our society, both men and women can refer to official transcripts of masculinity to legitimise their control of others, illustrating this with ‘power dressing’ in the business world.

Having extensively explored the complexities of the concepts of gender and power, we turn to a final point. Cornwall and Lindisfarne (1994) posit that not only is gender culturally specific but that sex itself is. They maintain that ‘biology itself is a cultural construction and that the link between a sexed body and a gendered individual is not necessary but contingent.’ and cite Rubin (1975) who argued that ‘gender is a socially imposed division of the sexes … far from being an expression of natural differences exclusive gender identity is the suppression of natural similarities’. Arguing against constructionist theories of gender being socially imposed on a biological sex they assert that in presupposing an ‘incontrovertible gender dichotomy which in turn rests on notions of essential biological difference’ such perspectives still rest on the culturally specific nature / culture dichotomy. Kaplan and Rogers (1990, cited in Cornwall & Lindisfarne) even go so far as to say that ‘biological research has focused on sexual dimorphism in response to the cultural importance of the dichotomy’ and that ‘new research points away from the polarisation of ‘male’ and ‘female’ whether in terms of anatomy, hormonal physiology or sexual attraction’. This is an interesting point but I would maintain that from the perspective of biology, there clearly are male and female members of our species and though there are cases such as Kleinfeldter’s (two X chromosomes and one Y) and Turner’s (one X and no Y) syndromes but these are divergences from the norm. However, the body not, as we in our science-focused society tend to assume, neutral and as Lindifarne and Cornwall argue, ‘sex cannot be accorded any direct referential character’.

Ortner’s essay clearly throws up a great number of issues and in examining her argument we come face to face with some of our most deeply held assumptions about ourselves and the world in which we live. It is true that in most societies women are viewed as having lesser value than men but this cannot be explained using a culturally specific Western notion of the relationship between culture and nature. Not only are these concepts variable but the very notion of gender can be found to diverge between different societies and the relationships between gender and power and sex and gender are far from clear-cut. In order to elucidate the position of women in a particular society we must examine the complexities and nuances of its social relations and culture rather than imprudently applying our own categories.

Bibliography

Callaway (1978) ‘The most essentially female function of all’ in Ardener (ed) Defining Females
Cornwall & Lindisfarne (1994) ‘Dislocating Masculinity: gender, power and anthropology’, in Cornwall & Lindisfarne (eds) Dislocating Masculitnity
Hoskins (1998) Biographical Objects
MacCormack & Strathern (1980) Nature, Culture, and Gender
Moore (1986) Space, Text and Gender
Ortner (1974) ‘Is female to male as nature is to culture?’. In Rosaldo & Lamphere (eds) Women, culture and society

Is female to male as nature is to culture?

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