Feminist Thinking in Anthropology After the 1960s

Discuss the ways that either Marxism or feminism, or both, was brought into Anthropological thinking after the 1960s.

Marlies Gielissen

The discourses of gender after the 1960s frequently established that relationships between men and women were based on imbalances of power and domination. Initially, the feminist theories that were applied to these studies came out of a time when 'scholar-activists' were looking to explore the root causes of oppression against women through the analysis of universal categorizations. There was heavy emphasis placed on the consideration of the ‘self’ and the construction of identity as a reflection of the dichotomous relationship between the ‘active, aggressive’ male holding power and authority over the ‘submissive, passive’ female. Even status acquired through economic production, through the consult of Marx and Engels, questioned women’s ability to control the products of their own labor. Since then, there have been many ‘reformulations’ of these theoretical structures of what defines autonomy and the layers of complexity through and beyond gender that are responsible for its creation. Through the decades, anthropologists would contest the legitimacy of these assumptions for their Western origin insofar as women’s principles of self determination do not translate seamlessly across all cultures. We will discover that there can not be a singular definition on the disparity of influence between gendered persons for many reasons including the dimensionality of individual and collective agencies. Therefore, I’ll consider the implications of feminist theory in anthropology from its early formulations of power and domination to the criticisms that would later develop its discourse.

We may begin in 1975, when anthropologist, Rayna Reiter, conducted a study which raised the issue of class system and whether or not it was a direct duplication of kinship hierarchy. In Men and Women in the South of France: Public...