Alice Kehoe describes her course

CC: Well, why don't we kick around some questions before we hear about another course someone is teaching. Are there any burning questions that someone who's contemplating teaching a course has?

SH: Did you have any negative reactions to your course?

AK: The overt reaction that I got was an article, half page, in the conservative student newspaper which first of all made it appear that I gave this handout--Woman Which Includes Man of Course--in my introductory anthropology class of 100 students, which I had not. The gender class is an upper division course and carries graduate credit. It said that professorettes like Kehoe should not be allowed to teach, to brainwash students into thinking that this rubbish had any value at all.

Other Attendees Describe Courses
CC: Both Joan and I have taught an archaeology and women or archaeology and gender course--what did you call yours?

JG: Women in Prehistory.

CC: I called mine Archaeology/Women (Appendix 1) so that I could talk about women doing archaeology and women in archaeology. At Appalachian State it is fairly easy to introduce a new course. We just come up with a special topic number and get it approved at the department level. But finding the three hours in a schedule is sometimes a problem. Maggie McFadden instituted, as director of Women's Studies here, the one hour course. There are creative ways that even if it requires an overload on your part, that you can bring the subject matter into the classroom and do it. In my situation it was an overload for five weeks--a one hour course is taught for five weeks. So you can assure whomever that yes, you will do your regular load and then tell yourself that its only for 5 weeks.

AK: Let me tell you what happened when we tried that. We had an assistant dean of women who wanted to teach a course on gender but couldn't teach so she asked me to offer the course and she would have people from different disciplines come in and talk about women as a research topic in that field of study. It was an overload for my schedule. We got a board together, with senior men on it, and we talked about which departments should be invited to participate in the course. The chair of the political science department, as we were talking about the structure of offering this, said, it should not be offered as somebody's overload. It should be paid. I said, well, that would be nice but it's important for me to get to offer this. He said no. You devalue it if you're not getting paid. Whatever isn't paid, is of less value than that which does get money. Probably you have to offer it as an overload but every minute you're doing it as an overload, you are devaluing it in the eyes of conservative people. So you've really got a catch 22 situation.

CC: Alice mentioned several books she uses in her course. What other books have people used in gender courses. What kinds of reactions have you gotten to them?

JG: I prefer to use a wide range of anthropology and archaeology materials in two different ways. One way is that I've asked them to turn to the materials that have gender assumptions built into them which have never been examined. And the second is that I've asked them to take apart things like Kent Flannery's Early Mesoamerican Village which does deal with male and female activity areas. We look at his unexamined gender assumptions.

RJ: Or to take Flannery's 1968 article and engender that.

AK: Flannery, that's a very good choice, that 1968 classic, because Flannery assumes that the entire community goes here and then goes there. He makes no opening for the high probability that some people are here which others are there which means that his entire hypothesis and development is very seriously flawed.

RJ: I haven't taught a course on gender per se. I teach an introductory course in Mesoamerica that was offered for the first time this year. In planning out the course what I did was make it gendered the whole way through so that a lot of the readings, I used primary sources from central Mexico like the Aztec Florentine Codex and in their source book , had descriptions of women's activities and descriptions of men's activities. We had 270 students which turned it into one of the mammoth lecture things. Normally there was no discussion but one session, when we were talking about the household as a basic economic unit, the students started talking. I started by saying, okay, people live in these multigenerational households and agriculture is a given, how do these people work? The students started reacting to the presence of different gendered laborers and different gendered labors. What I was trying to stress was that with agriculture field labor intensive and with cooperative male workers engaged in agriculture, female labor was available in the household and that therefore if we're talking about civilization as something beyond agriculture, it was based on women's labor, the only excess labor. And I got this very strange reaction which I still don't entirely understand, the dynamics within this group of students. There were a number of students who seemed to react that, yes, this is natural--women's excess labor from within the household setting--because women work there. I kept saying, no, no, no, you're not understanding. They're working in the household but not like they're doing things in their free time. The stuff that they make is what supports the whole society. And there was one student who put it very clearly to me, raising the dilemma for the kind of course I want to teach, who said, well, it is natural because women have to take care of babies--evolutionarily it has always been this way. And I stood there and I thought, do I spend an entire lecture trying to explain how that is reading into the past something that simply isn't objective fact? Do I start by saying, let's talk about gender? I think that next year I'm going to have a class that is just intrusive, that starts with "now here's what gender is and here's what we can and cannot say about the way it's been stable through time". If the reaction of the students is any index, I think that in fact, students are ready for having their courses engendered. Not just having specific courses which I think are very valuable, but having gender inserted throughout the curriculum because it makes them think.

Judith Brown, mothering
AK: I actually use and just wrote up for the mid-term essay question, Brown's Rule, as I call it, which Judith Brown does not like, referring to her 1970 paper in the American Anthropologist which she submitted as a note, rather than an article thinking it was insignificant. That is the classic paper where she does cross-cultural survey and derives from that the observation that women will be assigned tasks that are repetitive, non-dangerous and close to home and that the assignment of tasks to women by these criteria is to accommodate pregnant and nursing women for the survival of the species. Well, the majority of my students this semester gave lots of examples that Brown's Rule is flawed or too limited. Only one, and that was the one taking it for graduate credit, actually went and looked up the whole article and realized she'd said a lot more than that. I wanted it to be provocative. But this sociobiology type of notion certainly is something you have to bring up directly in order to then bring all the counter examples of all the societies in which women are not as restricted as one would guess if nurturing babies and small children were the dominant concerns.
    A student came in just yesterday who wanted to talk because she was really still worked up about her visit to the Rosebud Indian Reservation. She came back and was all concerned because the Sioux don't feed their children, they don't care for their children. And I said, which children--the children of the families who are very active in the mission? I couldn't believe that they were that careless of their children. And I said, why do you say they don't feed their children, they don't care for their children? What she described was the classic example of American Indian respect for personal autonomy. You don't force children to sit down and eat, food is available and you offer it to them. If they choose not to eat, that's their prerogative, they'll eat when they're hungry. The children were not being put to bed, even today most reservation Indians think you can be serious when you talk about putting a child to bed. Children go to bed when they're sleepy and it's all part of the valuing of animate beings as autonomous beings.

RJ: But your student's conception of parenting is one students take as natural, and that's the hard part. Parenting is for mother and more specifically, it's natural and necessary for mothers to do this. Mothering is this compulsive taking care every instant and, therefore, because mothering requires constant attending, mothers have no free time to do anything else and they have to be protective. The one book that works nicely for countering this notion, although I don't think any student I've suggested it to has read it, is Ruth Hubbard's Politics of Women's Biology which is short, and very straight forward, very readable. She is an eminent biologist herself in terms of trying to detect the basic sociobiological presumption.

CC: We have a paper on the program, by Kathy Bolen, about constructing mothering.

LS: When I teach general anthropology I usually take one class to talk about so-called natural categories of others and I tend to concentrate more on racism but I'd like to bring gender in a lot more. I think it's entirely appropriate to take that one class near the beginning to set the tone for the whole class. And basically what I do is I have all the students sit down and write what so-called natural racial categories are and then I'll show 70 some slides of different people from all over the world and I make them stick each image within those categories and of course they never can. And then I have them look at each other's classifications, and talk about them and they realize how these are culturally constructed categories. It's very helpful for the rest of the course.

RJ: I think you can do the same thing with gender. I was an informal unpaid teaching fellow for a course called Cultural Images of Women and that was the first thing we did in that course. We asked the students to tell us what women were and what men were and you get the strangest words. Some people suggest things that others will object to such as women are circles. I think you can use that sort of approach--you get a lot of dialogue which is nice.

Legal Studies literature AK: Just less than two weeks ago I got an offprint of Robert A. Williams Jr. who is professor of law in the Indian law program at University of Arizona. Rob Williams is a Lumbee, he's still quite young, mid-to-late 30s. He sent me a copy of the recent issue of The Georgia Law Review Vol. 24, 1990 which has Feminist Jurisprudence Symposium and his own paper on Gender Checks and Balances, Understanding the Legacy of White Patriarchy in an American Indian cultural Context. I strongly recommend Vol. 24. Rob Williams has a terrific bibliography in his very long footnote.

    In the footnote, I found an article by Joan C. Williams who teaches at the American University, on deconstructing gender in The Michigan Law Review, Vol. 87, February 1989. It's really exciting to read these papers. And another by Rob Williams, In Law and Inequality, Taking Rights Aggressively: the Perils and Promise of Critical Legal Theory for People of Color. And another, by Patricia Williams, Reconstructing Ideals from Deconstructed Rights, The Harvard Civil Rights Civil Liberties Law Review, Vol. 22, 1987. (As far as I know all these Williams are not related.) This is one of the most beautifully written papers I have ever read. She gets to thinking about her great, great grandmother who was purchased when she was 12 years old by a 35 year old white man who was planning to marry a wealthy widow and who wanted to practice his sex technique before he consummated the marriage.After I put it down, I thought about this 12 year old black girl, the great, great grandmother of this brilliant legal scholar, who very possibly had a mind like her great granddaughter. Well, I just found out that this wonderful, critical legal studies literature exists.

CC: Maggie McFadden and Melissa Barth are seasoned Women's Studies course teachers. Have you some comments?

MM: I was glad that we talked about courses that were not exclusively about Women's Studies or gender because I think it's very important that we work in both areas, otherwise you get a situation in the institution whereby the Women's Studies courses are the only place women are mentioned and then those courses become ghettoized and you don't get a large enough audience generally to which to bring this material which is so important. But the job of integrating the new scholarship into the regular curriculum is a really tough one--all of you know that otherwise you wouldn't even be here probably because of the even more difficult task of working with our colleagues to do that in courses like Cultural Anthropology, World Civ, Intro to Literature and whatever else. I think those problems are really, really tough ones--maybe some other people would have some things to share here on ways to integrate material, like Lynne Getz in our history department. How do you bring gender issues into World Civ?

LG: I do have some lectures on the role of women in World Civ. It's harder in World Civ. because you have so much more to cover than in American Civ., but I devote readings and lectures and discussions on the readings to gender. The students are very receptive. I think as you said, that students are now open to engendering of coursework. They're actually quite enthusiastic about it. They find social history a lot more interesting than the Federalist Papers.

MB: You would think that the English Department would be one of the first places you could have a women focused course. I've been here 9 years and just three years ago we put a Studies in Women's literature course in the curriculum but it was not offered until I asked to teach it last fall. Part of what's going on in English these days is challenging the cannon of dead, boring white men's literature and trying to make the study of English more cross-cultural, more gender different. When we began discussing how we wanted to number this course or at what level we wished to teach it, some of my colleagues, two-thirds of whom are male, said, well, let's put it at the sophomore level where the black literature course is. I said, "But it's an advanced course". And they said, "Well, we're afraid that it will take away from our majors taking the more difficult courses". And the reason they had put the black literature course at the 2000 level, the sophomore level, many, many years ago was , and they actually said this, that they were afraid that it would scare away the black students if it was at the junior level. And so they were going to ghettoize yet another marginalized group, that is women, by putting them down at the sophomore level. But we managed to win that battle and last year we also added to the curriculum an advanced study in women's literature. So we now have a junior level and a senior/graduate level course that we're offering. It's very difficult.
    I get remarks like, "My, you're teaching a lot of women". In my British Lit survey I engender every class I teach and I've taught 37 writers in the survey class, 3 of whom were men. And I was told that I was teaching a lot of women. So it's an uphill battle, even in areas where you think it would be very easy. One justification for my sabbatical, was that I have time to catch up on reading feminist theory. And one of my colleagues said, "Well, I'll vote to approve you if you won't read that damn feminist stuff. If you'll do everything else you said you'd do, but not that".

CC: We've talked about the popularity that some of you are noticing for a gender perspective in courses. I'm finding the same sort of reaction not only in the gender sections of the classes that I'm teaching but also in the post processual parts. For those of you who don't know what post processual is, it's general post modernist stuff, you know, asking the hard questions about the sources of our knowledge. I think what is so attractive to students is that finally they can do "it" too, they can evaluate, critique, create. No longer is it the passive recipient-donor classroom situation. As soon as you start telling them where the problems are--in the observer, in class, sex, race, subjectivity masquerading as objectivity, scientism--they can start finding those problems too in everything they read or hear. A gender course is almost by definition, if not actual practice, a research course and they can see immediately how they can have something to say, because we have finally given them some tools to do something with on their own--some critical insights.

An archaeology of gender or feminist archaeology
KS: That brings up a question that arose at the Plenary session of the Mid-Atlantic meetings where Cheryl was a discussant and Linda and I gave papers. I got up at the end of my paper and said that I was just interested in doing better anthropology than archaeology and that gender was an important variable we needed to start dealing with. Barbara Little got up right after me and said I'm not doing the archaeology of gender, I'm doing feminist archaeology. And I think I understand what she was saying but I'm not quite sure. And you, Cheryl, raised the connection between gender and post processual stuff which in my mind is a very politicized agenda in archaeology. What is the relationship between the two? I know that they certainly can't be divorced from one another.

AK: I've struggled with this because I know how easily my course could be devalued. The archaeology of gender is looking at the data which imply or from which you can infer the role of persons who are ascribed those goals on the basis of biological characteristics which are made significant by their culture. Actually, one of the things that makes my course at Marquette generally cross cultural is that I start right off talking about gender referring to animate versus inanimate entities. To me an archaeology of gender is looking at the ascription of roles on the basis of whether people are biologically male or female to find out whether there is any data from which we can infer certain ascriptions. There may not be. Whereas feminist archaeology uses the framework and agenda of contemporary feminists which focuses on the inequality suffered by women without having it mean archaeology of gender. An archaeology of gender must look at men and women's roles. When you adequately do that you get things like one of the most satisfying and exciting moments over the ten years I've been teaching this one course. A young man in the course said, about two thirds through the course that he realized now how vulnerable and indeed how weak he would be if he followed conventional masculine roles. If he couldn't do his own laundry and he didn't know how to clean his apartment properly and he couldn't grocery shop and he couldn't cook, well, he was so weak and so vulnerable and so dependent, so childish. That, he felt, was totally incompatible with being a man in our society. Archaeology of gender I think, would make you see what are conventional man's roles, from that young man's point of view, rather than with the way we ascribe higher value to it.

CC: Ken, I though you question was the relationship between gender research and post processual archaeology?

KS: I think that Barbara Little and her characterization of it would position herself, situate herself, within a post processual milieu and that she's doing feminist archaeology as a politicized archaeology. I think she was very explicit and up front about it. The other think I'm thinking about is a paper that I read by Alison Wylie, her latest thinking, maybe she'd written it in January or February where I think she says that the interest in gender and archaeology was born from a feminist perspective but that now it is time to deal with it in the world of science, apart from feminists. It's time to start playing these things out. That's my interest in it. I want to contribute to that and I think that I can contribute to that way of doing archaeology. I'm hoping that by doing that, that it will solve some of the problems. So it's not apolitical certainly, because it's active. It's going to contribute to a revision of our thinking about women in society hopefully. I was very uncomfortable with the way she drew the dichotomy. I felt she thought that what she saw going on at that session was wrong or that it wasn't what she preferred to do at least and that we couldn't work together.

JG: If I remember Alison's paper correctly, she was looking forward to sunsetting, sunset clausing, some of the exclusivity in the feminist approach(es). But I'm not sure that the way to think about that best is to circle a date on your calendar and say, after this date, we'll be done with feminism and we'll start this other project. I think it's actually something in your own personal development where you say, I've had to really think like a female and I really had to think maybe a little bit like this Woman Which Includes Man Of Course. You really have to go through this process. 1991 is not going to be the beginning of being able to do archaeology of gender. It's rather, where were you in this process and have you really understood a perspective that would undermine truth as we know it which is built entirely from a male understanding.

RJ: It struck me as you've been discussing this, Monday this week we had a graduate method and theory seminar which I do not teach but the topic was gender so I was invited. All the students were male and the professor was male. The students had read several of the things from Gender and Anthropology and the same tension that you're describing came up which I saw as confusion on their part between a feminist analysis of the past which is clearly one kind of research, an important kind which I see as being crucial particularly in looking at changes in power relations through time which is sort of the area that I'm interested in. And on the other hand a study of gender. One of the students said to me, I don't see any point in this gender business because what I'm interested in is who got to be king in Shang Dynasty China. And I said, well, who could be king--could women be king? He said no. And I said, well, see that's why you have to have gender first. Because to know who's going to be king, you have to know about gender. And he said, well, let's just leave the king business alone and let's talk about clans because really, the important thing in China wasn't the individual but clan membership and how that related to daily life. And I said, well, how do you know what clan you're in? He said, it's patrilineal. I said, so you have to have gender to do that. What I was trying to argue is that gender comes before all these other social classes. For that reason alone, regardless of a feminist perspective, gender has to be part of any anthropology and part of any archaeology.

KS: That's the realization I had about a year ago. I study hunters and gatherers when gender is probably the basic fundamental social category for economic organization and many other things.

RJ: Every organization.

JG: Are you going to adopt an archaeology of gender approach which uses, especially deep in prehistory, a standardized notion of male and female roles?

KS: I hope not. I hope that in prehistory we're going to see this incredible variation that we don't even have before us now at all. And I thought that if I was going to design a course I would probably use a lot of ethnography to lay out the range of gender relations and values in societies from the Arctic to the desert, from hunters and gatherers to state level groups and see if there are things we can draw from that that would inform us about prehistoric variation. But then look at prehistory where we should see things out there that we don't see today. Tomorrow I'm going to have hunters and gatherers on the coast who are organized very differently than hunters and gatherers in the interior where gender relations are completely different. I read that into the record without analogues for it from variation in material culture. My colleagues want empirical verification or at least analogues for the interpretations, or else these ideas are heresy, bullshit. They don't see it, they will never understand it.

AK: Alice Singer's paper in Man 1973, takes Evans-Pritchard's data on the Nuer and says that what he described is not patrilocal, not patrilineal but gives very significant status to women. He himself, describes women leading Nuer villages. She used only his published data but from a feminist perspective. One can distinguish an archaeology of gender from a feminist archaeology but in fact it is a dialectical relationship. I started thinking about it back when I was analyzing a fur trading post in 1964. It seemed to me that the only way I could explain why some artifacts were her and others there was to pick up on a line out of the Hudson Bay Co. journal which mentioned that one of the peddlers was in the canoe with his wife and son. I discovered other peddlers had country wives as well as ladies in Montreal. How do you explain certain types of artifacts clustered here and not there? The Indian country wives and their activities. How come none of the other accounts mentioned the country wife and her activities?

KS: My personal dilemma with doing archaeology wasn't born from reading feminist literature. I think it came more from being around good anthropologists in grad school. They were always questioning the sorts of conclusions and assumptions we would make about the archaeological record.

JG: I'm remembering that Alison Wylie paper from Chacmool--she makes such a good argument when she argued that feminist archaeology was better archaeology and the idea that it proceeded from a political perspective improved the science that was done rather than undermined it because it was political. Just as Binford argued in 1962 that good methodology started by making your assumptions clear-by defining very clearly your hypothesis, Wylie argued that feminist archaeology would be an antidote to unexamined assumptions. Feminism is very good at this. One begins by saying I'm looking for women, I'm looking from a feminist perspective--an incisive knife into a muddle. Not that it meant we could say anything, but that what you said would be coming from a clearly defined position and go as far as the evidence allowed. This helps us distinguish between an archaeology of gender and a feminist archaeology. One risks, with an archaeology of gender, living in the same muddle.

RJ: But I think that brings us back to post processual or post modern, essentially that one version of standpoint theory. Even if one is not feminist, it is still important to make clear that you have a theory and that the data are theory laden still--most classical works come with their theory obscured.

AK: If you look in the history of archaeology, critically, particularly Americanist archaeology beginning with 19th Century evolutionism, it is developed entirely within the framework of imperialism, western European imperialism. That is the unstated framework which constrains and structures Americanist archaeology. If you say it, you either get ignored or people are angry. Bruce Trigger, publishing in American Antiquity in 1980, said it straight out in his very nice way yet people act like it was never published when I mention it. But this is the way dominant discourse dominates, and the class that produces dominant discourse dominates, by not articulating their paradigm. As soon as they articulate that structure they of course reveal themselves to be immoral. I mean everybody has grown up with the Judeo-Christian Bible and if you say I am supporting the founding myth of domination of the world by WASP American men using billions of dollars to murder thousands and hundreds of thousands of others to maintain their status quo, it's grossly immoral of course. So the structure cannot be stated.

Anger from men
LS: Can we talk about anger a minute. How do you deal with your students' anger? Someone I work with as a co-principal investigator, has a lot of anger and says, that as a white man feminists say he is supposed to be dominating but he doesn't feel like he's dominating anyone. There's a lot of frustration with some of the students as well. I know it's self-revelation. How do you deal with their anger and insecurity?

RJ: A student just came back from the SAAs where there were the round tables for women in archaeology and he felt excluded, so strongly so that he brought it up in class. He felt excluded from something that he thought was important--if it was important he should have been included. I felt like the token woman to represent all the women in the world and I said "I think you need to understand that it is important for women to have opportunities to talk, connect, to other women and you have those opportunities every day". He didn't like that.

MB: Some of these reactions are predicated I think, because for the first time these males are feeling excluded. A response that a colleague told me that she routinely makes is, "Congratulations, you've had your first female experience". That's a wonderful flip-flop. That's part of what you're experiencing in the classroom, for the first time they're disenfranchised and they don't like it and that's too bad.

AK: If you're not part of the answer, you're part of the problem. If you don't enter the fray on the side of justice, then you are on the side of injustice. The world does not let you be outside.

Can archaeologists see gender
CC: Moving on to perhaps a more central question--we've skirted around it--can archaeologists see gender? Joan in her article in Engendering Archaeology talks about women using expedient tools in a prehistoric Peruvian situation. In my article I talk about women and men and shellfishing and possible change in a particular prehistoric case. Nobody in this book has tackled, I think, substantively, whether we can see gender in prehistory. We have collapsed sex and gender, we talk about gender, but can we see gender? Isn't all we ever see sex and isn't that why all we ever talk about are two genders? What is the possibility of seeing gender, how do we see gender in the past when material culture and spatial relationships are our data?

SH: I've been trying desperately to do that as a physical anthropologist. I haven't come up with anything fantastically definitive yet. I specifically look for gender in everything that I work with. The two groups I work with--Chumash and Arikara--both have ethnohistoric and ethnographic literature that talk about third and fourth genders. I can only get at two sexes. I characterize gender as a dynamic, as a concept. However many gender categories, gender itself is culturally loaded, emotionally loaded and has a life unto itself. I don't know what I'd do if I was dealing with physical remains from a culture I didn't know about.

CC: So, if you are pinned down, you are going to have to say that all you have is sex.

SH: That's right. I'm the first person to admit that what I deal with is sex. I'd like to be able to say something about gender but I haven't been able to.

AK: This is why I, again and again, emphasize to my students and why I engender other courses as well. If you're speaking Algonquin it's very easy to engender archaeological data. They either come from organic beings or they come from inanimate beings and while there are a few that appear to be inanimate that in fact are animated, that's very few. Gender is a grammatical device and my linguist friend, Allen Taylor, tells me Siouan languages have no gender at all. Algonquin languages have animate and inanimate. IndoEuropean languages have masculine, feminine and masculine/feminine neuter. If we're really talking about gendering archaeology, we have to talk about which language group's gender we are thinking of. It's another example of the domination of Eurocentric culture. We don't even mention that there are millions of people in this world right now, even on the continent, who don't have masculine or feminine as their gender.

CC: Marilyn Smith (in the room) said something very astute the other night I thought. She said, if gender can be constructed, in an archaeological situation who's doing the constructing?

RJ: What I am dealing with [glyphs] is only gender. I am not dealing with biological sex because I'm dealing with images. When you deal with images you are dealing with cultural construction of categories and one major problem in Maya studies is that people who are more concerned with biological sexual identity of the actors have gotten really upset by the existence of more than two neat categories. It seems in the imagery and also textual data from Mesoamerica there are multiple gender categories with an axis that isn't biological but has more to do with actions and roles. What I'm doing is using gender categories that have specific activities and tools and that might actually get us back to gender in the archaeological record.

SH: That's what I've tried to do.

CC: But how do you know that you're not looking at a specialist? How do you know you're not looking at an elite or a servant?

SH: Among the Chumash the berdache is the undertaker.

CC: We have other social relationship categories that can be confused with the category gender.

SH: Plus you have to have pretty close to a 100% dichotomy between things considered male and things considered female in mortuary context. Theoretically you can identify the berdache who is biologically male buried with female tools or vice versa.

CC: So we could come up with, by doing those cross association, four genders.

SH: That's right.

KS: [To CC] Doesn't gender become meaningless at that point?

AK: [To CC] As long as you're speaking IndoEuropean languages but not if you're speaking Blackfoot. Berdache doesn't have anything to do with gender in Blackfoot.

CC: I'm saying that if we encounter the one biological sex and its tool kit and the second biological sex and its tool kit, there are two genders. Now if you exchange the tool kits we archaeologists could define a third and fourth gender, but we can't go beyond 4 this way.

AK: You have four categories.

KS: Gender becomes a meaningless category at that point.

??: That's what we're talking about are categories of social differentiation.

SH: We don't have enough documentary evidence to understand how Chumash characterized gender. What does it mean to them to be a woman, a man. How do we get away from an etic assignment of those meanings?

RJ: But Alice's observation is that grammatical gender in these cultures doesn't suggest the same thing. Gender categorizations, once you accept that they're not biological essentials, can be many and you can expect multiple gender categorizations which are a major part of social dynamics. So you can have in fact what really should be called gender categories as long as they are associated with--well, it gets a little weird. I understand what you're saying Ken, doesn't it get meaningless? But it doesn't get meaningless as long as you can define the categories along some domain along which biological females and biological males sort themselves out and then find that the language doesn't discriminate the same way--that's a really interesting dynamic.

KS: I shouldn't have said meaningless but its relationship to sex becomes totally weak, obscure.

RJ: Arbitrary, conventional which is part of the definition I use for gender.

The Social function of gender
CC: Well, let's crank the screws a little tighter here. What's the social function of gender?

RJ: In what society at what time?

AK: Let me give you an example that might be directly relevant to your [SK] burial data. This particular man no doubt wasn't buried, he was on a scaffold. (All those reburial Indians forget that even now there are northern Plains people who are horrified at putting skeletons under the ground.) Anyway, this was an actual ethnographic case. In the late 19th century there was a southern Blackfoot man named Four Bears and he died about 1889, very elderly. And because he was very important, there's a lot of ethnographic material recorded about him in the first half of the 20th century. Two elderly men of his tribe of 1940s and 1950s, actually I met one, one was Adam Whiteman, the other was Fish Wolf robe, had been assisted or helped by Four Bears when children. Four Bears had power from the moon or the way the Blackfoot put it, the moon pitied Four Bears. When you go out crying for a vision, you hope that the almighty will pity you. The moon pitied Four Bears and so assisted him with power. Through the moon's pity, Four Bears was able to give some power to youth in the community and so young men and children came to or were brought to Four Bears that he might increase their power so they would live in health and prosperity. Adam Whiteman's father had Four Bears come into the lodge to improve the power of his sons. The father gave blankets and other gifts to Four Bears and Four Bears then demonstrated in their lodge his power by spitting out a small bison-calling amulet, spitting out a lead bullet, and spitting out hailstones. He then gave the hailstones to Adam and his brother to swallow so in this way incorporating some of Four Bears power into their bodies. Fish Wolf robe also was a boy who had been given a hailstone to swallow by Four Bears. His power came from the moon. Older youth came to Four Bears to obtain power to succeed in the war raid. Four Bears would offer these youth a choice, they might gain horses, they might capture guns or they might gain glory in actual fighting. Most of the youth chose horses. Four Bears would then describe the horse that would be captured and announce that he was giving it to the youth. The youth then had to suckle like an infant at Four Bears nipple. This act bound the youth to his nurturer. When he performed as a holy person, but not in everyday life, Four Bears dressed as a woman to signify that his power came from the moon. And it was because of this feminine that he nurtured these youths by having them suckle. When a youth that he had nurtured had been gone several days on a war raid, Four Bears would put on his woman's dress, come into the center of the camp, request the sun to aid the young man and ask the sun to move visibly as a sign of the raider's success. If the sun would not move, that would be a sign that the young man died in the raid. Fish Wolf robe remembered that the people would look at the sun and Four Bears directly and they would see it move. Four Bears also had power to cause weather changes by gesturing towards the sun with a willow branch ornamented with two magpies tail feathers. His own symbolic ornaments which he wore when he was empowering people included bracelets with elk teeth reminiscent of Elk Woman who sang as she proved her power in one of the major myths of the Blackfoot. She sang, "My wristlets are elk teeth, they are powerful". On his head Four Bears wore a band of fisher. The fishers as the largest of that type of animal are seen to be like otters, beavers and the mythical water bull or water bear. These are mammals that live in the water yet they are mammals, therefore they have far more power than human beings who die in the water. They can only live on the land. So the fisher, otter, beaver, and the mythical water bull was actually the Siouan underwater panther transcend the normal order of nature by their unusually great spiritual potency. So by wearing the fisher fur, Four Bears signified that he transcended the normal order of people.
    I don't know how you would fit Four Bears into an archaeology of gender, but that's the Algonquin world.

CC: I think that the social function of gender--and I have been thinking along the lines of a cross-cultural definition, I'll have to consider your point, Rosemary,--is to mark sexually appropriate partners. Therefore, if we're talking about an archaeology of gender, we're talking about an archaeology of sexuality.

AK: Because we're talking as IndoEuropean speakers in contemporary or modern historic Western society.

CC: What other social functions for gender do you propose?

JG: A way of getting work done.

KS: Yeah, economic.

CC: But why do you need to gender people to do that?

JG: It's one logic. It's not the only logic--we've used skin color, white and black--to divide labor.

KY: It seems to me that the primacy of the sexual kind of explanation is that it's not just people and categories, it's people that are relating to one another in a particular way.

RJ: If you mean marking persons as appropriate sexual partners for the purpose of social reproduction, that would work in Mesoamerica. The basic unit of social reproduction is a male-female pair. These categories I'm working in do relate to that essential union. There are sexless dwarfs, properly sexed males, properly sexed females who are supposed to be joined. And then among the Aztecs there is a whole series of homosexual females and homosexual males which do seem to relate to proper and improper reproduction. And then above all these things are supernatural beings, male and female. So I think I can entertain that definition although I've got to admit that my assumption has always been that gender was a way to organize labor.

KS: Is it still empirically true for us or is it fair, or should I duck when I say this, that all societies have some form of sexual division of labor?

??: Sure.

KS: But beyond reproduction, for production?

AK: But you can't divorce the two because when a woman is in labor, maybe even a few days before and I think almost always for a few days after, ( I know about Plains Indian women who dropped out of the line of march, gave birth and rejoined it, but that's an extraordinary event.) camps did not move if they could help it. In the ordinary course of events, the woman who has just given birth and her baby usually have some days of rest, meaning she is not engaging in other labor.

KS: You made a connection that I'm always afraid to make. At least, I always thought it was fair to do that, but Brown's Rule follows from that observation.

AK: Brown's rule follows yes, but did Brown overstate the case? The literature that was available to her up through 1969 was literature that we would now consider grossly inadequate.

LS: Kathy didn't you bring up a point about the fact that there were a number of women that never bear children?

KB: Yes. I wanted to say that instead of saying because of childbirth mothers can't be involved in other forms of labor, if we looked at it from the other angle and said people are involved in these other labors because they can't be mothers, then it isn't a reproduction-as-determinant argument and gives way for people who aren't actually reproducing members. . .

AK: This is absolutely the way the Blackfoot look at it. The Blackfoot have the wonderful, wonderful myth I'll read aloud. Once upon a time the women and men were separated. The women made buffalo corrals, their lodges were fine. They tanned the buffalo hides and those were their robes. They would cut meat in slices. Their lodges all were fine inside and their things were just as fine. Now the men were very poor. They made corrals, they had no lodges. They wore rawhides for robes. They wore the gambel joint of the buffalo for moccasins. They did not know how they should make lodges. They did not know how they should tan the buffalo hides. They did not know too how they should cut dried meat, how they should sew their clothes. [So in other words the men could not reproduce anything in social life.] And they were separate from the women. They were totally non-reproductive or productive. Now the women's chief told them, over there near the corral are the men sitting in sight. All these women were cutting meat in the corral. Their chief did not take off the clothes she was cutting the meat with, she was wearing her greasiest, old house dress. The women were told by her, I shall go up there first. I shall take my choice of men. When I come back you will go up one by one. Now we will take husbands. All these poor, sad, sad looking men were all sitting up on this ridge uneasily hungering after all these fine things that the women had. So the women took pity on them. [I'm using a transliteration from 1892 Blackfoot text. The women took pity on them and that repeats the phrase that the Almighty takes pity on those who go crying for power.] So, the chief, of the women started up, then she went up to all those men. She asked them, which is your chief. The men said, this one here. She told him, now we will take you for husbands and then she walked to him and caught him. Then she started to pull him up from his sitting position. He pulled back. She let him loose. He did not like her clothes. She went back down into the camp and the other women came up one by one picking out their husbands. Meanwhile, the chief of the women took off her house dress, showing all her signs of her hard work and the fact that she was so competent and all, she took off those clothes. She put on her best costume. When she came out she looked very fine. As soon as the old man saw her, he thought, oh, there is the chief of the women, I wish to be her husband. But by this time he was standing up there alone. The chief of the women walked up to him and instead of taking him for her husband she said, turn into a pine tree right there where you stand. He got angry. He commenced to knock down the buffalo corral, but as he was trying to do this he turned into a pine tree and he is mad yet because he is always caving down the bank. [That's taking phallic imagery to a critical point.]"

But this is one of those foundational myths; it's a very popular myth and it's still told. This sets it out that women innately have all the power to produce including the power to reproduce and men have very, very limited competency in any kind of production. And they are to be pitied. And when women take men for husbands, they pity them. That's very different from the Western statuses. From the Blackfoot point of view, the flamboyance of Plains Indian men in the pow-wow dancing and so on is like little children screaming for attention because they aren't getting any. So the men flamboyantly dress up and flamboyantly dance to call attention to themselves. Meanwhile, if you've seen pow-wow dancing, the women wear non -flamboyant clothes, quiet clothing, with relatively little decoration. And instead of this fancy war dance sort of stuff, they kind of parade slowly together in a large group around the arena. They are the center of society. They innately have the power to produce and reproduce. You can't, from that kind of perspective, separate economic behavior, political behavior, and ritual behavior. You can as an archaeologist take an archaeological manifestation and say, this represents economic behavior and this represents ritual behavior. You can't do it from an ethnographic perspective.

KS: Whose myths are those? Who tells those myths--Men, women, both?

AK: Both men and women, older people.

SH: This highlights something Harriet Whitehead said about American Indian societies that reproductive capability, sexuality, take secondary importance to occupation. Coming back to Cheryl's question about the function of gender, it probably varied across cultures. When do we get gender in the archaeological record? Did Australopithecines have gender? Homo erectus? At what point is reproductive labor a concern, conceptualized by some hominid brain? Is gender ascribed? Using gender to mark appropriate sexual partners would be much more important in societies that have low population density, than in situations where you're not worried about keeping the body count up.

KB: The present day is important for us, it is relevant to us. All of what we've been talking about--appropriate partners, division of labor--thats all relevant because it is important to us. If we're not going to address those topics then we're not going to be able to do gender at all. I think part of the social function of gender, not necessarily in prehistoric context, but that it reinforces inequality, insubordination, and justifies these now for us.

Can we see gender?
CC: So how do you respond to the question, can we see gender archaeologically?

AK: I suggest that you think in terms of Bourdieu's theory of praxis that we place ascribed statuses, ascribed roles, occupations, beyond the possibility of change by the premise that it is natural that we read into the world out there our social structure and then justify our social structure by claiming you can see out there, that it's natural. Bourdieu develops this at length.

CC: So can we see gender or not?

KS: Well, as long as we're looking we see it.

AK: Bourdieu is saying that we see it. But that doesn't mean it's there or not there or might be there or whether we can objectively see it. In other words, the idea of objectivity is itself untenable.

KS: It's frustrating.

RJ: Can we be certain that we see gender, not class, or other things? And there I think we're beat. I don't see a way around it.

JG: I'd like to comment on this dialogue, if I could. I would like to think not evolutionarily about a point in hominid evolution, when . . . but rather, in terms of variability in cultures in sociohistoric context. Gender definitely varies considerably as does the degree to which it is expressed. A much more interesting question is when is gender seized upon and intensified as a social boundary and when is it relaxed, almost ignored. There are clear examples in societies who define tasks as interchangeable or largely overlapping sex. I think it is helpful to think of the size units of work that men and women tackle. If one buys this high degree of variability in the degree to which life is gendered, then it isn't even necessarily a characteristic of a given society that is invariant. I think Conkey's paper in Engendering Archaeology makes a strong case for varying gender expression. In the same society in aggregated sites of Paleolithic times--in public displays gender is brought out and marked and people become marked and all of a sudden in public society males and females begin to talk on gender toles which are actually rather neglected and invisible in the country. The public context gave rise to gender expression.

AK: But we don't actually know that that happened in the Upper Paleolithic.

CC: Or, that what is emerging is gender.

AK: I can't think of any data that unambiguously suggests that in those aggregated sites in the Upper Paleolithic that men and women are displaying themselves as differentiated. I haven't read the article in its final form so that may be the problem.

JG: I don't even think that the case should rest on whether Meg as demonstrated that or not here. As far as the approach that might be used it seems that one at least has the promise of tacking back and forth then between archaeological evidence and ethnographic evidence and theory to go back and look at various data sets. Whether or not she has used enough data or proven it conclusively doesn't make it a less intriguing direction of research so that one might begin to develop expectations of where gender should be played out most and then do a predictive search. We may be able to find in a more robust sense instances in which gender is more likely to be found and then going back and forth, finding it there and then going back and forward finding it elsewhere. So that if it only begins in certain distributions and frequencies of material culture, patterning of material culture appears consistently where one has reason to predict gender should be expressing itself most radically, then one can begin to be confirmed in that, that indeed it is gender that one is looking at.

SH: My dissertation work did not lead me to the conclusion that gender was an unimportant organizing principle for the Chumash because when you look at health differences that's where you see something like differential access to resources.

CC: But you've assumed there are two genders.

SH: No, sexes. What that means in terms of gender is something else.

CC: And, Joan, you consistently interchange male, female, women, men. So you see an inextricable link between biology and gender?

AK: It's been brought out at least twice but I don't think it's been emphasized enough, is why are we talking about an archaeology of gender, why are we interested in cross cultural examinations of men's and women's roles? We are doing it entirely because we as political actors, as persons who live and who must find our lives in today's society are questioning the ascriptions of character on the basis of biological sex which is dominant in Western society and has been for at least 3,000 years. Aristotle spent a lot of time and effort writing down why women are inferior. And he did it on the basis of scientific observations. We may disagree with the way he construed these, but he was scientific. Discussed in 1200 BC was the occurrence of hysteria in women, caused by a displacement of the womb from its proper position which meant women could not be given responsible decision making offices because their uterus might move making them hysterical. We have 3000 solid years of this ascription of statuses and roles on the basis of biological sex and many of us are annoyed, irritated, angered by such ascription on such a basis. We are doing this praxis that Bourdieu described looking in historical documents, cross cultural surveys, archaeological data, to disprove the validity of these assertions that have been made in Western society for 3000 years.

SH: If I had just looked at the artifacts I would have thought prehistoric Chumash society was something like The Left Hand of Darkness.. These people only used gender when they had to reproduce. But using other documentary information--of course thee are problems with ethnohistoric sources such as European male bias--there is enough in there that we can get at something that was important to the Chumash themselves: gender was an important social concept however they constructed it. That made me want to look a little bit harder and see if I could find what that might have been. I don't think it's reflected very well in the mortuary context but I don't think it was absent. I don't know what it was but I think there was some component where gender was an important thing--however many genders there were.

AK: Blackfoot and apparently Chumash believe that biological sex brings with it social capacities in addition to one's reproductive role, a very common belief.

CC: So all you economic folks would say that you could not have one gender and two sex roles?

AK: You couldn't have one gender because the word is meaningless unless there's more than one. If there's no differentiation, then there's no point in talking. Gender is an obligatory. . . You must pinpoint certain characteristics in order to construct a grammatically correct sentence.

CC: Ok, can you have a genderless society and two sex roles?

RJ: I have to disagree with you Alice because if you're talking about gender from the cultural anthropologist constructionist point of view you have to allow for the construction of gender as a single inclusive category. There has to be a logical continuity which would allow for a society biologically divided into one gender with male and female roles. At least logically, you can have one gender and two sexual identities.

SH: People of this gender who have babies and those who inseminate those who have babies.

RJ: That's right.

AK: Apparently, nobody here is a linguist by profession. Gender is the linguistic term, but I don't think you could use it if there isn't more than one.

RJ: I'm not using gender as a linguistic term. I'm using gender as a specific cultural anthropological term. I agree that gender as it is expressed in different languages is related to that but it is not the same thing.

AK: It would be nice if we could find a less ambiguous and less slanted and biased term.

CC: A couple of nights ago I took all the books off my shelves that I thought would talk about gender. All of them ask when is a person gendered and how is a person gendered and only one of them-Gender Trouble-talks about what gender does.

RJ: I've thought it was the way cultural meaning was attached sexual being and that's what it does. It's the way culture attaches meaning to sexual differences. It may deny sexual difference or hyperemphisize sexual difference or divide sexual difference into multiple categories. We can assume this will differ across societies.

AK: Why can't we just talk about how societies deal with sexual differences? Why should we use the word gender other than it got in the literature somehow.

??: Is it more palatable than talking about feminist archaeology?

AK: That's a rhetorical question really. Why do we say gender instead of sex, because sex is a dirty word, and not said in polite discourse.

??: You need two different words. You need to have sex to talk about biological identity and gender to talk about cultural. . .

CC: Oh, but I think we're up the wrong tree here to assume that sex is purely biological and not cultural. Particularly in the archaeological setting. That we have to come up with M or F for that skeleton, that's a cultural decision.

SH: Which I don't.

CC: To determine the sex of a body in the ground by an archaeologist is a cultural act. There is nothing inherent in the skeleton or separate from the archaeologist. There are numerous traits, which are used in a statistical manner. One can say that 60% of the traits are female, 40% are male and I'm going to label this body female. The reliance on an implicit or explicit set of criteria is a cultured act. Both terms are cultural.

RJ: I agree with that entirely.

JG: But they're cultural categories for different things. One is a cultural category for body morphology. It may be arbitrary, it may be wrong, it may be useless, it may be whatever, but it's a category that pertains to morphology. And the other category is a category that pertains to activity or action. And I think there might be times when you want to talk about one and not the other.

CC: I think it is time to bring this workshop to a close.. . . .