Gender and Anthropology

Gender and Anthropology. Frances E. Mascia-Lees and Nancy Johnson Black. Prospect Heights, IL: Waveland Press, 2000. 128 pp.

In 1989 Sandra Morgen outlined the impact of feminism on the anthropological study of gender in her introduction to Gender and Anthropology: Critical Reviews for Research and Teaching. Two years later, Micaela di Leonardo undertook a more detailed analysis and assessment in her introduction to Gender at the Crossroads of Knowledge: Feminist Anthropology in the Postmodern Era (1991). Whereas both essays provide excellent appraisals of gender and anthropology and the impact of feminism, their intended audience is professional anthropologists. Their essays would be tough going for most undergraduate students, especially those taking a course in gender who are not anthropology majors.

In Gender and Anthropology, authors Frances Mascia-Lees and Nancy Johnson Black provide a concise, critical, and lucidly written guide to the last 30 years' research and theory in gender within anthropology that is explicitly directed to undergraduate students. As stated in the preface, their goals are twofold: "First, we want to introduce students to how anthropologists using different theoretical orientations have approached the study of gender roles and gender inequality" (p. xii), and "our second concern is to provide students with techniques of analysis that will help them make their own critical assessments of studies of gender" (p. xiii).

Second-wave feminism of the 1960s and 1970s made women visible in a new way, leaving in its wake new ways of looking at the relations between the sexes and the power of politics and oppression. There was an immediate response within anthropology, a discipline that with a few notable exceptions had taken gender for granted as universal - part of the cultural landscape but not a category of social organization that might prove a fruitful subject of inquiry in and of itself. Sociocultural anthropologists led the way with ethnographic...