More on gender

photo © 2008 Graham Crumb | more info (via: Wylio)

 

I have been proofreading my paper about gender that I wrote earlier, so I can turn it in for some essay contest that the soc/anthro dept. is having. Exciting, huh. So I remembered that I found out some more interesting things about gender, especially from ethnographic studies. Again, it’s evident that gender is construed differently cross-culturally. I’ve already discussed how US American definitions of femininity and masculinity are foreign to many cultures throughout the world. But in fact, the very way that the West has conceptualized a notion of “gender” may be foreign to many cultures.

We speak of gender as a cultural “construct,” but many Melanesian societies, for example, view gender in terms of dismantling and deconstructing an androgynous person into a single-sexed male or female. Anthropologists point out that the Mur­ik of Papua New Guinea tend to eschew Western categories of gender. For instance, if an outsider asks if women have a certain characteristic, the usual Murik response includes the asser­tion that men too can have this characteristic. In Murik society, being human seems to transcend being a woman or a man.

So we have to be careful in our cross-cultural examina­tion of gender, lest we take for granted Western notions of approaching gender. The Murik certainly experience gender in a way that contrasts with the experience of North Am­er­i­cans. Women along with men can show overt aggression that is socially acceptable, while an American woman’s aggressiveness may often be perceived negatively. When babies are born in Murik society, they are not automatically assigned a gender; instead, they are later, more gradually made into males or females.

In another Melanesian society, a person is a mosaic of male and female characteris­tics. Internally, the body is divided into parts that are male and female, and a person’s gender is not evident and constant. Among the Mukkuvar of south India, a man is responsible for his wife’s family after marriage, and women are the locus of the kinship system. Women control the finances of the household, rather than men. To the Maasai of Kenya, gender is worked out within the framework of age. Addi­tion­ally, ownership of property is connected with both gender and age. The age categories that the Maasai pass through are contingent upon how much property they have. Women pass through girlhood and womanhood, while men pass through three stages: boyhood, warriorhood, and manhood.

Suffice it to say that many notions of gender exist. What little research I’ve done of cultures that are not US American demonstrates the differen­ces in gender roles and, on a more basic level, constructs of gender. Many factors contribute to egalitarian societies, such as the amount of subsistence that women contribute. Even so, no global consensus exists regarding gender roles. The US American construct of gender and gen­der roles is not the norm, and it certainly does not line up with the notions of gender roles in the Bible. Why, then, do some North American conservative evangelicals take on the role of arbiters of gender? Why is their standard the US American notion of gender?

Comments

[Wasp Jerky]

So, Natalie, how does that play into the way that we talk and think about God? Does God really have a gender? Or is that a reflection of ancient Hebraic society? And what about the Holy Spirit, who I believe is spoken of in the original language as female? I'm just curious what your anthropological take on that is.

[jvpastor]

very interesting...does God have a gender? Did Jesus have a gender?

Isn't that missing the point? If you find it necessary to distinguish between the two genders are you not presuming the need for gender rolls?

[Natalie]

Kevin, I don't know about the Holy Spirit thing. Just because a word is feminine in a language does not mean the person or thing is.

I do think that it is kind of missing the point if we try to gender God, but isn't there still something to be said about the way that we so masculinize God?

[Leighton]

The HS is feminine in Hebrew, but masculine in Greek (pneumatos with some appropriate adjectives). As Natalie points out, it doesn't necessarily have any connection to the "gender" (if any) of the object in question.

A better way to think about gendered nouns is that there are "A" nouns, "B" nouns, and "C" nouns (sometimes called 'neuter'), and in most languages, things with actual masculine gender might be, say, type B nouns and things with actual feminine gender are type A nouns. This doesn't mean that every type A noun is somehow feminine. I got a pretty good dirty look last year when I asked a native Greek speaker if he thought of houses (oikoi) as masculine. "Of course not. Don't be ridiculous."

Linguistically, it's entirely inappropriate to make arguments of the form "God [theos] is a masculine noun, therefore God is masculine." The etymological argument that God is feminine is just as suspect, but perhaps it's necessary as a response to the widespread misconceptions that grammatical categories dictate metaphysical reality. That's the kind of thing that can happen when you make language a vitally important object of study without actually coming to understand how it works.

[Jil]

I don't know beans about Hebrew, so I am returning to the original question. Their standard is the US American definition of gender because they think it is so and because they are US Americans and because they get some say in the matter. Think about it: we all think we know what is cool and what is not, but who decided that? Definitions of cool vary from person to person. Only sometimes there is a common consensus.

So these people think they get to decide because they are part of this society. It wouldn't really be fair if the people from Uruguay got to decide our notion of gender, would it now?

[Natalie]

Jil, I think the problem is that some are presupposing our cultural ideas about gender roles with what scripture says about them. Sometimes that leaves no room for other things, and it is leaving uncriticized a part of our culture that the church should really be speaking to and trying to redeem, to use Dr. McMinn's language.

[jvpastor]

Their is always the issue that Jesus being a man probably factors in on our concept of God's gender.