What this Awl Means

1. What this Awl Means Feminist Critiques of Archaeology

2. What this Awl means • Introduction to feminism in Anthropology • Feminist approaches past, present and future • Examples of feminist work in archaeology, both historic and prehistoric. • Group Discussion of readings • Discussion and Annotated Refs due Friday 4/28/06

3. The Feminist Movement • Historical contexts • Women in the labor force: The Great Depression, WWII Lead to changes in how women viewed their opportunities. • The Civil Rights movement – learned valuable lessons about how to participate in a social movement. However, could not express discontent because feminist issues had to take a backseat. • Kennedy’s commission to study the status of women in the US. Equal Pay Act 1963.

4. Feminism in Anthropology

5. Feminism in Anthropology • 1st appears in ethnology. • Rosaldo and Lamphere 1974: Woman, Culture and Society • Collection of essays that focus on women and women’s roles in society. • One of the first overt discussions of gender inequality in Anthropology. Both the structure and the universal nature of inequality.

6. Feminism in Anthropology • Criticisms • Is inequality universal? • Early feminism was rooted in western ideology. Much of the criticism came from women of color – gender could not be isolated from race, class and sexuality. • The criticisms lead to a new way of looking at gender.

7. Feminism in Archaeology

8. Feminism in Archaeology • Started out as a critique, in the early ’80’s • Conkey and Spector 1984: Archaeology and the Study of Gender. • Focused on putting women in the archaeological record. • Looking at biases within the work and within the field. • Post-modernist? Post-processualist? • Both are notably silent on the subject. • Depends on the approaches taken by the feminist authors.

9. Feminism in Archaeology • Women in prehistory were non-existent or given passive roles. • Emphasis was placed on men’s work, such as hunting, butchering, tool making, etc. • Women’s roles were seen as restricted to the domestic sphere and taken for granted. Any innovation was assumed to be a male invention. Ex: Agriculture, cooking. • Biases affected not only what was being studied, but who was studying it. Women studied pottery and men studied stone tools, women ran labs and men excavated.

10. Feminism in Archaeology • Biases trickled into main stream culture. • Man the Hunter • Greatest achievements in evolution were based on male hunting activities, disregards evolution of cooking and other advancements. • Imposes modern gender roles and ideology on early hominids.

11. Man the Hunter

12. Man the Hunter

13. Feminism in Archaeology • Women’s place in the discipline. • Victor and Beaudry 1992 • A study conducted in the late ’80’s looking at the representation of men vs women in American Antiquity and Historical Archaeology

14. Feminism in Archaeology • Necessary, but provided a very simplistic view of gender • The critiques that mentioned in ethnology apply to archaeology as well. • Western views of gender applied too liberally • Focus shifted to understanding gender