Invisibility and Incarnation:

The Importance of Gender to Anthropological Studies

Robert Walker
ID# 2351768
ANTH 375 Anthropology of Gender, Assignment 1
Natalie Sharpe
July 31, 2007

When I was growing up, the relationship between sex, gender, and sexual
orientation was straightforward. In fundamentalist Christianitys usual take on the
teachings of the Bible, God creates mankind in the divine image as male or female,
blessing both reproduction and the institution of patriarchal marriage. Ones gender
identity correlates directly to ones biological sex, and differences between women
and men root themselves in the objective revelation of God revealed by sound
empirical science, but especially in the stable, written text of the Western Protestant
Bible. Even as a moderate Evangelical feminist student at a non-fundamentalist Bible
College, I was surprised to learn (especially upon leaving the college to deal with
issues surrounding my own sexual orientation) that this view does not correspond with
mainstream anthropological research (especially after the initial feminist critiques of
gender and fieldwork). Though the question of the interaction between biology and
culture is a live question, the increasing consensus of the discipline of anthropology
seems to indicate a very different answer than the one with which I grew up. This
essay will seek to explore how different scholars construct the interactions, the
similarities and differences of their views, and what evidence they cite to support their
positions. Finally, and perhaps more personally, I will explain why I find the new
consensus persuasive.
In contemporary anthropological thought, the differences between men and
women may be biological, cultural, or the result of complex and complicated interaction
between the two. In fact, many scholars conclude that although there is something sensate
and perhaps stable about physical bodies, the categories of male and female, sex and
reproductionas well as their attendant and interrelated gender identitiesare cultural
or symbolic constructs, as researchers Ortner and Whitehead claim (Nelson 1990: 87).

In other words, these natural realities are not just bare facts; human beings construct
meanings given what they experience, and their meaning-making shapes their experience.
Cultural or symbolic constructs come to be in many ways. Increasingly,
anthropologists realise that the construct of patriarchywith its attendant assumption that
the male perspective is always representative of humanity writ largerenders other ways
of constructing meaning, and other persons who wish to have input into these
constructions, effectively invisible. This applies, especially, to women, who in the last
few decades have mounted an impressive critique of the meanings and methods used to
construct anthropological research. While each researcher approaches the construction (or
deconstruction) from a different angle, clearly one of the goals of contemporary
anthropology is to end the invisibility of women in order to make the discipline more
rigorous and self-reflective. Although some readers might protest that such ideological
concerns detract from the scientific enterprise, hardly anyone in the discipline contests
the view that there is no such thing as scholarly objectivity, if what one means is a valuefree, narrative free judgment of phenomena. Women- and feminist-scholars themselves
are our major sources of evidence for this realization. We now turn to several overlapping
ways of ending the invisibility of women by examining how people can symbolize the
differences between men and women.
The first way women become visible again, and potentially re-symbolized within
a more inclusive framework, is simply to point them out in historical records.
Anthropological research conducted solely from a male perspective may miss the
contribution of women to the development of all civilizations and cultures by relegating
women to the margins of anthropological study or by not including them in written texts.
Researchers David Freidel and Linda Schele argue that in ancient Mayan civilization,
the performance of royal women proved decisive to the destiny of particular late Classic

periodkingdoms (2001: 89-90). They go on to tell the story of Lady Eveningstar and
Lady Shark, who both have claims to the throne of their kingdom; both have produced a
potential male heir. When the king declared for the younger son, the situation
deteriorated almost to civil war. Attempting to resolve the dispute, the king had Lady
Shark dedicate an important temple. The catch was that due to an important symbolic
conjunction in Mayan astrology, Bird-Jaguar would become the heir, although the temple
art would forever memorialize Lady Shark. Friedel and Schele claim: It is only because
Bird-Jaguar won his struggle for the throne and inscribed retrospective history about his
mother that we know of her (2001: 92). Despite the contributions of women throughout
history, these researchers hint at a major problem: women throughout history seem to be
at the mercy of male historians for their inclusion in the histories. Socio-economic class
(if I may be permitted an anachronism) hampers the availability of women to historians
and anthropologists, too: higher-class women seem to be present most often, rendering
the majority of women invisible (Mason 2007; Dixon 2007).
Males who are doing the history, then, are a large part of the problem of female
invisibility, or of particular slants on research that render a rather more narrow
interpretation than may be warranted. The second way that males1 contribute to the
problem is by projecting unexamined cultural biases onto the women with whom they
interact, or onto the gathered information, both in interpretation and in what they consider
a valid part of their data sets. Even when anthropologists adjust their views, they may still
fall victim to covert narratives and metaphors that exclude the experiences of women.
Emily Martin argues this way regarding the narrative of the reproductive process often
taught to high-school or college students: a passive female egg is saved from
1 I choose the pronoun advisedly. Female, researchers, too, are capable of reading data from a malerepresentative perspective; however, it does seem that the vast majority of challenges to androcentric
readings come from feminist women researchers who have done a great deal of personal reflection while
calling their male colleagues to own up to their own mistakes and perspectives.

wastefulness by an active, even heroic, male sperm (1991: 26). More progressive
models acknowledge that the egg is far more involved in the process, but paint the female
as dangerous or aggressive; both of these alternatives represent hidden cultural narratives
about womens roles smuggled in under the veneer of objective science (Martin 1991:
29-30). The feminist challenge, she claims, is to wake up sleeping metaphors,
(Martin 1991: 31)to bring to consciousness the hidden implications of the language
that we use in the natural and human sciences. Male researchers who investigate so-called
menstrual huts (Galloway 1997: 71) or ancientallegedly femalefigurines (despite
other ways of assembling the same data into a coherent story) likewise project their own
cultural biases onto the women they study, unconsciously naturalizing their assumptions
about gender and thereby reducing their own perceptual clarity. Sarah M. Nelsons biting
humour in displaying clearly phallic objects classified as a rod with breasts is a telling
case in point (1990: 87, fig.2). Alternatives to highly sexualised theories of the function
of Venus figurines are not lacking in the scholarly literature[but] these possibilities
are not even hinted at in [the textbooks she summarizes], with one sole exception
(Nelson 1990: 86-87). Stating that she is not questioning the integrity of her colleagues,
Nelson nevertheless notes that the unconscious nature of cultural scripts...does not make
them less pernicious (1990: 87).
Distortion of this kind is similar to the third way a researcher may make women
invisible: by failing to examine how his or her own gender influences interactions with
research subjects and the collection of data. A hidden assumption on the part of the
researcher that males are more precise or detail oriented, for example, skews the data set
and may lead to the conclusion that women are not a good source for many kinds of data.
The (male) researcher in this example did not appear to consider complex cultural

interplays that might make the precise information he seeks unavailable to him but
nevertheless accessible to a female colleague.
The emerging consensus that seeks to end the invisibility of women in
anthropological study starts at the broadest possible level and proceeds to encroach
gradually upon the individual researcher. A commitment to accurately reflecting the lives
of half the human population (drawing out womens experiences) leads to an examination
of cultural attitudes (waking up our own projections and naturalizations) and finally
causes us to take seriously our own interpersonal relationships, especially as they pertain
to the people we study (realizing the implications of gender, personal history, and social
location).
For many researchers and students, these aspects of research are, it might seem,
intuitively grasped, but for me these realizations were a long time in coming. The reason
why I find these arguments persuasive is just as much emotional as it is scholarly: I am a
gay male. Upon entering Bible College, as I mentioned, I became an evangelical feminist,
able to see more clearly and personally for the first time how male hegemony effectively
silenced women, despite their crucial ongoing roles in the Christian tradition. Realising
that we can, and should, subject the Bible to historical-critical (including anthropological)
research eventually opened the door to a renewed hermeneutical understanding of the
strangeness of the Bible and the people in it, making me (I hope) more attentive to the
details of the text. Historical-critical understanding also allowed me to drive a wedge into
the universalizing readings of my youth in order to make space for myself as a gay man
within my tradition. To my surprise, a central element of Christian tradition strengthens
my agreement with feminist arguments: the concept of incarnation. Though it applies to
the simultaneous humanity and divinity of Christ, it also encompasses the goodness, per
se, of having our own social locations, cultural scripts, and personal beliefs. Feminist

scholars challenged me to wake up the metaphors (or, speaking more personally, the
realities) sleeping at the heart of my own traditionmy experience as an embodied
person, a Christian, and a student-scholar has been the richer for it.

8
Walker 2351768 ANTH 375 Assignment One
References Cited
Dixon, Suzanne.
2007 Roman Women: Following the Clues.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/ancient/romans/roman_women_01.shtml.
Freidel, David and Schele, Linda.
2001 Maya Royal Women: A Lesson in Precolumbian History. Gender and CrossCultural Perspective, Third Edition. Caroline B. Bettrel and Carolyn F.
Sargent, eds. Pp. 89-93. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall, 2001.
Galloway, Patricia.
1997 Where Have All the Menstrual Huts Gone? The Invisibility of Menstrual
Seclusion in the Late Prehistoric Southeast. In Gender and Cross-Cultural
Perspective, Third Edition. Caroline B. Bettrel and Carolyn F. Sargent, eds.
Pp. 70-81. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall, 2001.
Martin, Emily.
1991 The Egg and the Sperm: How Science Has Constructed a Romance Based on
Stereotypical Male-Female Roles. In Constructing Sexualities: Readings in
Sexuality, Gender, and Culture. Suzanne LaFont, ed. Pp. 23-33. Upper Saddle
River, NJ: Prentice Hall, 2003.
Mason, Mona K.
2007 Roman Women: A Look at Their Lives.
http://www.moyak.com/researcher/resume/papers/roman_women.html.
Nelson, Sarah M.
1990 Diversity of the Upper Paleolithic Venus Figurines and Archeological
Mythology. In Gender and Cross-Cultural Perspective, Third Edition.
Caroline B. Bettrel and Carolyn F. Sargent, eds. Pp. 82-88. Upper Saddle
River, NJ: Prentice Hall, 2001.