Gender, Agency and Change: Anthropological Perspectives

304 Pages·2000·0.62 MB·English

by  Victoria Goddard

Gender, Agency and Change
People’s engagement with change is mediated by social and cultural factors that shape
their experience and inform their identities. In this edited volume gender provides the
main focus for exploring the processes through which the construction and performance
of identity and agency take place. The chapters show that agency is complex, and is often
expressed in contradictory ways, for example in strategies of accommodation and
adaptation that can nevertheless generate new institutional arrangements. Alternatively,
there may be an outright rejection of these processes while incorporating specific
elements associated with them. The cases examined in this volume explore the ways in
which different subjects engage in the reformulation of spaces, roles and identities,
redefining the boundaries between, and the content of, the ‘public’ and the ‘private’. The
examples also provide an account of how gendered discourses are deployed to convey
new meanings, a new sense of place and time, confirming or challenging ideas of
‘tradition’ and ‘modernity’.
This collection will be of particular interest to students of anthropology and gender
studies.
Victoria Ana Goddard was born in Argentina and trained as an anthropologist at
University College, London. She is currently a lecturer in Anthropology at Goldsmiths
College, London.
European Association of Social Anthropologists
Series facilitator: Jon P.Mitchell
University of Sussex
The European Association of Social Anthropologists (EASA) was inaugurated in January
1989, in response to a widely felt need for a professional association which would
represent social anthropologists in Europe and foster cooperation and interchange in
teaching and research. As Europe transforms itself in the 1990s, the EASA is dedicated to
the renewal of the distinctive European tradition in social anthropology.
Other titles in the series:
Conceptualizing Society
Adam Kuper
Other Histories
Kristen Hastrup
Alcohol, Gender and Culture
Dimitra Gefou-Madianou
Understanding Rituals
Daniel de Coppet
Gendered Anthropology
Teresa del Valle
Social Experience and Anthropological Knowedge
Kirsten Hastrup and Peter Hervik
Fieldwork and Footnotes
Han F.Vermeulen and Arturo Alvarez Roldan
Syncretism/Anti-Syncretism
Charles Stewart and Rosalind Shaw
Grasping the Changing World
Václav Hubinger
Civil Society
Chris Hann and Elizabeth Dunn
Nature and Society
Philippe Descola and Gisli Pálsson
The Ethnography of Moralities
Signe Howell
Inside and Outside the Law
Olivia Harris
Locality and Belonging
Nadia Lovell
Recasting Ritual
Felicia Hughes-Freeland and Mary M.Crain
Anthropological Perspectives on Local Development
Simone Abrom and Jacqueline Waldren
Dividends of Kinship: Meanings and Uses of Social Relatedness
Edited by Peter Schweitzer
Constructing the Field: Ethographic Fieldwork in the Contemporary World
Edited by Vered Amit
Audit Cultures: Anthropological Studies in Accountability, Ethics, and the
Academy
Edited by Marilyn Strathern
Gender, Agency and Change
Anthropological Perspectives
Edited by Victoria Ana Goddard

London and New York
First published 2000
by Routledge
11 New Fetter Lane, London EC4P 4EE
Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada
by Routledge
29 West 35th Street, New York, NY 10001
Routledge is an imprint of the Toylor & Francis Group
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© 2000 selection and editorial matter, EASA; individual chapters,
the contributors
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or
reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical,
or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including
photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or
retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers.
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is availabe from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
Gender, agency, and change: anthropological perspectives/edited by
Victoria Ana Goddard.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
1. Social change—Cross-cultural studies. 2. Sex role—Cross-cultural
studies. 3. Globalization—Cross-cultural studies. 1. Goddard, Victoria A.
GN358.G45 2000
303.4–dc21 00–025487
ISBN 0-203-44966-5 Master e-book ISBN
ISBN 0-203-45713-7 (Adobe e-Reader Format)
ISBN 0-415-22827-1 (hbk)
ISBN 0-415-22828-X (pbk)
Contents
List of figures vii
List of tables viii
List of contributors ix
Preface xi
1 Introduction

VICTORIA ANA GODDARD 1
2 Gender and difference: youth, bodies and clothing in Zambia

KAREN TRANBERG HANSEN 26
3 Women are women or how to please your husband: initiation
ceremonies and the politics of ‘tradition’ in Southern Africa
GISELA GEISLER 45
4 Kinship, gender and work in socialist and post-socialist rural
Poland
FRANCES PINE 69
5 Properties of identity: gender, agency and livelihood in
Central Nepal
BEN CAMPBELL 82
6 Gendered houses: kinship, class and identity in a German
village
GERTRUD HUWELMEIER 99
7 Gender and politics through language practices among urban
Cape Verde men
GUY MASSART 116
8 Out of the house—to do what? Women in the Spanish
neighbourhood movement
BRITT-MARIE THURÉN 134
9 The ‘old red woman’ against the ‘young blue hooligan’:
gender stereotyping of economic and political processes in

post-communist Bulgaria
SIYKA KOVATCHEVA 158
10 ‘The virgin and the state’: gender and politics in Argentina

VICTORIA ANA GODDARD 179
11 Writing the usual love story: the fashioning of conjugal and
national subjects in Turkey
NÜKHET SIRMAN 202
Index 220
Figures
5.1 Tamang ‘rit cheeba’ marriage rites and dowry 89
5.2 The variable of village origin and women’s receipt of livestock

dowry 90
Tables
9.1 Student attitudes to gender roles, 1992 167
9.2 Newly enrolled students in higher education 168
9.3 Approval of student participation in forms of university

governance 170
9.4 Forms of student protest 174
Contributors
Ben Campbell currently holds an award from the ESRC at the University of
Manchester.
Gisela Geisler is Associate Professor of Anthropology at the University of
Durban-Westville in South Africa and Research Fellow of the Chr. Michelsen
Institute in Bergen, Norway.
Victoria Ana Goddard is a lecturer at the Department of Anthropology at
Goldsmiths College, University of London.
Karen Tranberg Hansen is Professor of Anthropology at Northwestern
University in the United States.
Gertrud Hüwelmeier is a social anthropologist and research fellow at the
Humboldt University, Berlin, Institute of European Ethnology.
Siyka Kovatcheva is the organiser of a youth research network for Central and
Eastern Europe and is a lecturer at Plovdiv University, Bulgaria.
Guy Massart is currently a doctoral student and a member of the Laboratoire
d’Anthropologie de la Communication at the State University of Liège,
Belgium.
Frances Pine teaches social anthropology at Cambridge University.
Nükhet Sirman is a social anthropologist at Boğaziçi University, Istanbul,
working on the construction of gender in and through nationalist discourses.
Britt-Marie Thurén is Professor of Gender Studies at the Centre for Women’s
Studies, Umëa University, Sweden.