Anth

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ANTHROPOLOGY 125 ANTHROPOLOGY OF GENDER Dr.
Patricia Taber
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What is Anthropology?

• From Greek anthropos (human) and logia (study)
• Study of Humankind
• Who we are, how we came to be that way
• Social, cultural, and biological beings

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Four Subfields

• Archaeology
• Historical
• Prehistoric
• Resource management
• Physical Anthropology
• Paleoanthropology
• Evolutionary psychology
• Primatology
• Human variation
• Forensic
• Linguistics
• Historical
• Descriptive
• Ethnolinguistics
• Sociolinguistics
• Social/Cultural Anthropology (Ethnology)

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Five Hallmarks of Anthropology

• Cultural relativism
• Subjective understanding (emic vs. etic)
• Holism
• Fieldwork
• Comparison

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GENDER

• Social classification of feminine and masculine
• Cultural construction of sexual difference
• Meanings given to the physical traits that
  differentiate males, females, and others
• Perceptions, evaluations, behavioral
  expectations, roles
• Central to power relations, identity, kinship,
  meaning
• Conscious and unconscious practice
• Enactment, performance

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Sex, Gender, Sexuality

• Sexual dimorphism
• Sex vs. gender
• Biological difference
• Cultural construction
• Sexuality vs. gender
• Correlation
• Independent variation
• Heteronormative
• Normal vs. culturally specific
• Cross-cultural variation think outside the box

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Gender Diversity

• Universals
• Male/female distinction, but meanings vary
• Two sexes, two genders, but sometimes more
• Anthropology ethnography and theory
• Cross-cultural comparison
• Holism, subject understanding, cultural
  relativism
• Challenge Western assumptions, generalizations
• Nature/nurture, genes and environment
• Sexual dimorphism
• Overlap
• Continuum?

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Theoretical Orientations

• Set of assumptions
• Principles
• Frames of reference
• Determine
• subject of investigation
• how a problem is conceptualized
• how questions are framed
• how results are interpreted
• what conclusions are reached
• Biosocial natural selection
• Social learning - socialization

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Theories and their Social Milieux

• No laws, only hypotheses
• No value-free, objective explanations
• E.g., sexual division of labor
• If combat means living in a ditch, females have
  biological problems staying in a ditch for 30
  days because they get infections... males are
  biologically driven to go out and hunt giraffes.
  (Newt Gingrich, quoted in Newsweek 1995)
• Western vs. non-Western cultural assumptions
• Rites of passage
• Must understand the political context