Lecture 4 on Nature

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Lecture 4 on Nature

• People in the Land, Land in the People

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Things

• Artifact Presentation/s Begin this week
• Reminder you may choose your own artifact,
  especially if you want to do your mid-term paper
  on it and/or if you already know about it for
  example, one student will present on the social
  artifact, JEANS, because she knows about it and
  wants to do her mid-term paper on this.
• Artifacts are distributed to the students ONE
  WEEK (on the Monday) before their presentation
• Syllabus Correction
• Reading for next week Wednesday, January 30
• SMUO Bye, C.G. (2004). I like to hoe my own row
  A Saskatchewan farm womans notions about work
  and womanhood during the great depression.
  Frontiers A Journal of Women Studies, 25 (3),
  135-167. It should read 26. Apologies.

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• This is Leap Year Sadie Hawkins Day, February 29
• Chinese Baby Calendar
• Paper You can either write it knowing there are
  strong gender implications OR just start writing
  about something and if there are gender
  implications, explore them, but dont force the
  issue and exhaust yourself in looking for
  something that just isnt there. If you couldnt
  find any, mention it in your paperthat is a
  finding.
• Paper ideas
• Inventions and discoveries wheel, fire,
  cartography
• Personal reflections on your place in nature as
  you grew up.
• Gender IN nature Survivor and other TV shows,
  including Medicine Woman Gilligans Island
• Final Exam Ill be giving you explicit guidance
  about sections of the articles you should be
  familiar with.

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Today

• Participation Marks Recalling your own
  experiences of the nature-culture assumption
• Discussion CP Strathern, M. (1995). No nature,
  no culture The Hagen case. In C. MacCormack and
  Marilyn Strathern (Eds.), Nature,Culture and
  Gender (pp. 175-222). New York, NY Cambridge
  University Press.

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THE MUDDY WATERS OF GENDER, SEX, AND NATURE
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• Layers of meaning
• - We are not raised in a social vacuum many
  ideological forces at work

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Some say culture is the opposite of nature.What
do you think?What is/where is culture?Consider
some ideological forces in the following?
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• www.kellogg.northwestern.edu

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• cubswin5 (1) 02/27/2007 Canada's best
  contribution to society. 0 comment(s) - Reply to
  this Review - Email to a Friend
• An Americans entry in a chat room on The TP
  Boys. (www.rateitall.com)

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Is there an idea of a natural cultural ideal
here?

• (www.nancarrow-webdesk.com )

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Some definitions

• CULTURE      The generally shared knowledge,
  beliefs and values of members of society. Culture
  is conveyed from generation to generation through
  the process of socialization. While culture is
  made up of ideas, some sociologists also argue
  that it is not exclusively ideational but can be
  found in human-made material objects. They define
  a separate "material culture". This distinction
  appears weak, since human-made material objects
  must embody human ideas. Culture and social
  structure are considered as the two key
  components of society and are therefore the
  foundation concepts of sociology.
  (socialsciencedictionary.nelson.com)

• Socialization Learning the patterns and
  behaviours of a cultures way of life.
• Culture  The totality of learned, socially
  transmitted behavior.(highered.mcgraw-hill.com)

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• All too often, natural landscapes, including
  animals and raw materials, are NOT included in
  definitions of culture or the ways we think about
  culture and our gender/sex/sexuality norms.

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Your Nature-Culture Timeline

• Handout participation marks
• Think back to your relationship with what we take
  for granted as the natural world
• Start plotting on the timeline, writing words to
  represent what brought you into that world or
  kept you out of it
• Think about school trips, parties, summer
  camp/cottages, when you first started driving,
  rituals/initiations, summer jobs

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TODAYS READING to help us 1. read between the
lines for research assumptions around gender,
nature, and culture 2. cultural comparison of
the nature-culture divide Strathern, M.
(1995). No nature, no culture The Hagen case. In
C. MacCormack and Marilyn Strathern (Eds.),
Nature, Culture and Gender (pp. 175-222). New
York, NY Cambridge University Press.

• Papua New Guinea Highlands
• Hagen People as you read this article, what
  ideas did you form about their culture, their
  natural world?
• Was it this?Or this?
• Or this?
• Or this?
• What were the assumptions you made?
• How would you describe your culture to others?

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• Strathern offers us an ethnographic perspective
  of how the Hagen people of these Highlands
  symbolize/make meaning of their culture according
  to two pairs of contrasts wild and domestic AND
  male and female.
• Consider how you learn about opposites
• School games like
• Hot potato where teachers line up children in
  girl boy girl boy patterns
• Songs and Books for children
• Parties
• Chat Rooms

• Drawing from the conclusions of other researchers
  on the topic, Strathern also considers whether it
  is the people, themselves (the experts in their
  own reality D. Smith), who are making that
  meaning, or if those studying them are
  constructing meanings not intended to be there in
  that culture.

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Strathern does a meta-analysis to grapple with
those two pairs of contrastsor at least what
westerners consider contrasts
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For example, Strathern draws from Langness

• It seems plain that the distinction between the
  domestic and the wildis widespread in the New
  Guinea Highlands (p. 174).
• Does this seem reasonable? That is, did you
  believe it when you read it?

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Another example, Strathern draws from Lindenbaum
on what we consider domestic and wild

• The dichotomy between domestic and wild has to
  do with control and safety which comes from
  regulation and management, in contrast to the
  danger which lies in the uncontrolled,
  unpredictable, and unregulated. Just as South
  Fore groups depend on regulated access to forest
  resources, so they depend on regulated access to
  womenWomens sexuality is the dangerous wild
  which men must bring under control (p. 175)
• Domestic versus wild
• Controlled versus uncontrolled
• Predictable versus unpredictable
• Regulated versus unregulated
• Men versus forests/wild
• Men versus women/wild

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Strathern shows that researchers like Langness
and Lindenbaum make many assumptions

• They assume universal concepts of nature and
  culture
• What makes a concept universal?

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Strathern suggests

• A non-western wild-domestic dichotomy triggers
  off an interpretation in terms of
  natureculture in the presence of explicit
  themes of environmental control or of malefemale
  symbolism.
• It is even arguable that a male-female
  distinction in western thought systems plays a
  crucial role as symbolic operator in certain
  transformations between the terms
  nature-cultureaccounting for absurd
  extrapolations that we were talking about
  nature-culture (p. 176) (original emphasis)
• During our first class, we considered what
  naturalness and unnaturalness werelast week, we
  jolted the commonsense views about doing gender
  and doing sexuality
• Do Womens Studies programs, or courses such as
  Psychology of Women further the dichotomy between
  genders? Or, do they play a role in a better
  understanding?

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• Strathern illustrates (p. 177) two problems in
  research
• 1. Researchers gaze through their own biases
• 2. These biases not only are in the form of
  assumed categories, such as male and female, but
  those labels contain assumptions about what is
  essential or inherent about the people falling
  into those categories

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Strathern raises concerns about the
natureculture dichotomy evident in western
ideology

• 1. There is no such thing as nature or culture.
  Each is a highly relatived concept (p. 177). Do
  you agree? In whose interest is it to have
  categories called nature and culture?
• 2. Social sciences themselves commonly employ
  certain constituents of the nature-culture
  matrix, including those concerned with ecological
  systems and their environments. This
  perpetuates otherness (p. 177). She claims that
  this otherness has created and maintained
  anthropology.

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• 3. We ascribe certain attributes as human
  nature. Then, we divide that into categories
  such as animal nature through an
  anthropomorphic lens (p. 178). A real animal
  Sex Kitten others?

• 4. We often accept that history is built on how
  humans have adapted in their geographical
  environments (p. 179). What would sociology look
  like if men gave birth?

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• 5. We consider culture as something man made
  out of nature, and nature as something there to
  be moulded. This can be dangerous when women
  are considered to be closer to nature (p. 180).
  Why?

• 6. We assume that men and women are two halves of
  the whole human species (p. 182). Weve learned
  last week that there are more than two genders.
• At Saint Marys University, what are women that
  men are not? What are men that women are not? See
  the mud?

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• 7. In order for the categories of Men and Women
  to function in society, we need to constantly
  shift the definition of what it means to be male
  and female (p. 183).

• This means we are always shifting meaning within
  cultural norms.
• What are your parents occupations? Your
  grandparents occupations? in just one
  generation, a lot has changed. Why?

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• 8. Strathern notes that Levi-Strauss claims the
  contrast of nature and culture should be seen as
  an artificial creation of culture (p. 187).

• Dorothy Smith believes that we are each experts
  of our own reality. What, then, is reality if we
  construct it artificially?
• Is there, then, anything real about reality?

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• 9. For many in the westernized world, gender is
  given the instant we are born if not before.

• For the Hagen people, gender is used symbolically
  .
• Mbo in general terms, things that are planted,
  bred, growing, a clan.
• Romi in general terms, wild nature, including
  control.
• These are not generally opposites in Hagen
  culture. Women and men are considered sometimes
  more social than wild and vice versa.

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But, even the Hagen have their opposites in
symbolism, though not always necessarily positive
or negative as we might think

• (p. 204)
• MALE FEMALE
• Wealth, oratory Poverty speechlessness
• Prestigious Rubbish
• Transaction Production
• Public Domestic
• Clan Family
• Social interest Self-interest
• Life Death
• Wild Domesticated
• Birds Pigs

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Stratherns Conclusion

• We cannot assume that other cultures dichotomies
  between female and male are parts of the same
  whole that we think of in the west.
• For example, Hagen categories of female and male,
  wild and domestic, and so on do not always and
  necessarily correspond to what we consider as
  those cultural norms.

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Next class reading

• CP Archer, R.L. (1964). Jean Jacques Rousseau
  His educational theories selected from Emile,
  Julie, and other writings (pp. 217-235). New
  York, NY Barrons Educational Series, Inc.
• Be perturbed.