What this Awl Means

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What this Awl Means

• Feminist Critiques of Archaeology

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What this Awl means

• Introduction to feminism in Anthropology
• Feminist approaches past, present and future
• Examples of feminist work in archaeology, both
  historic and prehistoric.
• Group Discussion of readings
• Discussion and Annotated Refs due Friday 4/28/06

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The Feminist Movement

• Historical contexts
• Women in the labor force The Great Depression,
  WWII Lead to changes in how women viewed their
  opportunities.
• The Civil Rights movement learned valuable
  lessons about how to participate in a social
  movement. However, could not express discontent
  because feminist issues had to take a backseat.
• Kennedys commission to study the status of women
  in the US. Equal Pay Act 1963.

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Feminism in Anthropology
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Feminism in Anthropology

• 1st appears in ethnology.
• Rosaldo and Lamphere 1974 Woman, Culture and
  Society
• Collection of essays that focus on women and
  womens roles in society.
• One of the first overt discussions of gender
  inequality in Anthropology. Both the structure
  and the universal nature of inequality.

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Feminism in Anthropology

• Criticisms
• Is inequality universal?
• Early feminism was rooted in western ideology.
  Much of the criticism came from women of color
  gender could not be isolated from race, class and
  sexuality.
• The criticisms lead to a new way of looking at
  gender.

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Feminism in Archaeology
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Feminism in Archaeology

• Started out as a critique, in the early 80s
• Conkey and Spector 1984 Archaeology and the
  Study of Gender.
• Focused on putting women in the archaeological
  record.
• Looking at biases within the work and within the
  field.
• Post-modernist? Post-processualist?
• Both are notably silent on the subject.
• Depends on the approaches taken by the feminist
  authors.

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Feminism in Archaeology

• Women in prehistory were non-existent or given
  passive roles.
• Emphasis was placed on mens work, such as
  hunting, butchering, tool making, etc.
• Womens roles were seen as restricted to the
  domestic sphere and taken for granted. Any
  innovation was assumed to be a male invention.
  Ex Agriculture, cooking.
• Biases affected not only what was being studied,
  but who was studying it. Women studied pottery
  and men studied stone tools, women ran labs and
  men excavated.

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Feminism in Archaeology

• Biases trickled into main stream culture.
• Man the Hunter
• Greatest achievements in evolution were based on
  male hunting activities, disregards evolution of
  cooking and other advancements.
• Imposes modern gender roles and ideology on early
  hominids.

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Man the Hunter
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Man the Hunter
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Feminism in Archaeology

• Womens place in the discipline.
• Victor and Beaudry 1992
• A study conducted in the late 80s looking at
  the representation of men vs women in American
  Antiquity and Historical Archaeology

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Feminism in Archaeology

• Necessary, but provided a very simplistic view of
  gender
• The critiques that mentioned in ethnology apply
  to archaeology as well.
• Western views of gender applied too liberally
• Focus shifted to understanding gender