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The Meaning of Difference and Women in Belize

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The Meaning of Difference and Women in Belize Irma McClaurin. Women of Belize: Gender and Change in Central America. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1996. xii + 220 pp. $59.00, cloth, ISBN 978-0-8135-2307-1. Reviewed by Michael Stone Published on H-LatAm (December, 1996) The literature on gender relations in Latin sion of labor have produced distinct outcomes America and the Caribbean offers abundant his‐ from one society to the next, but insofar as patri‐ torical and contemporary evidence of women's archal control prevails over cultural and societal exploitation under prevailing patriarchal social institutions, the systematic under-valuation of formations. But an exhaustive catalog of the ev‐ women and their work reinforces their material eryday exercise of male domination cannot in it‐ and ideological vulnerability as marginalized so‐ self reveal why women in any given society con‐ cial, economic, and political actors. tinue to endure their subordination or how and This fact impinges most heavily upon poor under what conditions some women mobilize, women, whose need to work, as a matter of objec‐ successfully or not, to redress their individual and tive survival, entails diverse and invidious forms collective predicaments. To elaborate such an un‐ of exploitation, exacerbated by the constancy of derstanding requires clarifying how gender, race, women's culturally prescribed domestic and re‐ ethnicity, class, and nation interpenetrate, often in productive responsibilities. The pressure to bal‐ contradictory fashion, in the simultaneously local ance income production against labor-intensive and global historical processes of their sociocul‐ domestic roles and to maintain one's public repu‐ tural, ideological, and political-economic transac‐ tation imposes severe constraints on women's so‐ tions. cial and economic autonomy, and induces their Throughout Latin American history, the eco‐ ideological collusion to perpetuate the normative nomic roles of women and men respectively illus‐ conditions of female subservience. Given system‐ trate structural disparities that have conditioned atic economic, political, and legal gender disad‐ gender values and ideology in everyday social vantages, women's accommodation to their subor‐ practice to subvert women's potential equality dinate cultural, socioeconomic, and political sta‐ and autonomy. Variables of history, race, ethnicity, tus is usefully approached by analyzing the sur‐ class, nationalism, and the effective sexual divi‐ vival value that their ideologically and historically H-Net Reviews conditioned behavior patterns confer within the most articulate" narratives "form the core of this prevailing societal matrix. work." McClaurin thus acknowledges that her These observations are clearly borne out in ethnography is "biased toward women who are Irma McClaurin's ethnography, Women of Belize: activists" (p. 7). Gender and Change in Central America, a contri‐ McClaurin's analytical concern is with gender bution to Latin American women's testimonial lit‐ theory, oral narrativity, and ethnographic reflex‐ erature from one of the region's most diverse but ivity. In her approach, the scrutiny of self in least noted cultural and historical crossroads. Be‐ recitals of female transformation is intended to lize (a former British colonial enclave carved serve didactically as a means of individual and from the Caribbean littoral of Spanish imperial collective liberation. Rather than "an elaborate Yucatan and Guatemala) remains enmeshed in an study of kinship, political institutions, systems of often antagonistic effort to reconcile its hybrid reciprocity, or the exotic 'Other,'" McClaurin Anglo-African, Latin, and Amerindian cultural builds on narratives of "the individual lives of a and social-historical pedigree with its Central few Belizean women." Her conclusions "emerge American geopolitical destiny, and a growing eco‐ from their voices, their experiences, and the sense nomic and cultural dependence upon the United that they make out of how the culture of gender States. in Belize is both constructed and lived" (p. 9). Drawing on women's life narratives, McClau‐ The work comprises an eclectic blend of in‐ rin explores how her subjects assign cultural and terviews, feld-note transcriptions, ethnographic political meaning to their experiences, how reflection, a survey of NGO and official reports on changing self-understandings serve to refashion women's status in Belize and the region, an inter‐ the social category "woman," and how they work rogation of Belizean fction, and the author's own to alter the material conditions of women's lives. poetry. This is a reflexive, deeply personal, and She describes the culture of gender in terms of politically engaged ethnography. As such it joins a prevailing beliefs, values, and behaviors, and long tradition of frst-person narratives, especially seeks to articulate how conventional and emer‐ by female anthropologists, written against the gent understandings of gender roles, relations, grain in a critique of the norms of positivist social and stereotypes inform women's varied respons‐ science. In this era of postmodern scholarship the es. Hence McClaurin's work is a pioneering contri‐ researcher's self-positioning is obligatory, and Mc‐ bution that marks out the terrain for the future Claurin states her political position unapologeti‐ study of gender in Belize. cally: "In this work I do not pretend to be de‐ McClaurin's initial interest was women's tached--I owe no allegiance to scientific objectivi‐ grassroots organization, and, consistent with oth‐ ty. Instead I insist that in any feldwork experi‐ er regional studies, she fnds that activism re‐ ence we are always involved, despite any postur‐ duces women's sense of social isolation, creates ing we may do to the contrary" (p. 17). new opportunities, and expands their cultural McClaurin's experimental approach asserts, horizons, while also engendering new cultural as most anthropologists and historians may agree, and political challenges. But in a survey of some that the boundaries between ethnography, fction, sixty participants in women's groups and their and personal narrative are often difficult to per‐ awareness of Belizean public policy on women, ceive. As Kamala Visweswaran (1994) notes, an‐ McClaurin was taken with the personal insights of thropologists as diverse as Sapir, Kroeber, Mali‐ several especially eloquent respondents. These nowski, Boas, Benedict, Zora Neale Hurston, and women she interviewed in depth, and "the three Elsie Clews Parsons all experimented with narra‐ 2 H-Net Reviews tive and fctional modes, establishing a little-noted ically Spanish-speaking and of Mexican, tradition that persists into the present. McClaurin Guatemalan, Honduran, or Salvadoran descent), herself makes instructive use of the classic Be‐ and of Maya and Mennonite women (the two lizean coming-of-age novel, Beka Lamb (Edgell, most endogamous ethnic groups, and those least 1982) to illustrate how young girls are socialized likely to be drawn into political activism). Collec‐ to domestic compliance, to examine "Creole" no‐ tively, these largely rural groups now comprise tions of gender respectability and sanctions well over half the total Belizean population, so against unwed motherhood, and to take note of this ethnography of urbanized women who assert women's involvement in the Belizean nationalist Creole, Garifuna, and East Indian ethnicity cannot movement. be taken as representative of the overall national But a deeper interrogation of Edgell's novel situation, as McClaurin herself acknowledges. would further elaborate the contradictory gender, McClaurin is candid regarding her research racial, ethnic, class, and nationalist complexities interests and methods, which predilections in‐ of Belizean society and history. The country's long evitably curtail other potentially productive in‐ and uneasy relationship with its Spanish-speaking vestigative avenues. Compare Visweswaran, who neighbors (dating from the seventeenth-century suggests the value of a feminist ethnography genesis of the Anglo-Spanish imperial regional keyed on analyzing women's relationships with struggle) informs the vexed nature of ethnic dis‐ one another, and the inevitable power differential course and cultural-nationalist politics into the that conditions all such encounters. Such an ap‐ present. The fction of Edgell and such other Be‐ proach she contrasts with feminist anthropology's lizean writers as Zoila Ellis (1988) illustrates the early positing of a universal sisterhood, which en‐ multiple dimensions of women's subordination in dowed an untenable position. To counterpoise a Belize, including such matters as Creole identity universal gendered or racial self against a domi‐ (cf. Bolland, 1992); prevailing ideologies of femi‐ nant (i.e., male) "other" undercuts a sense for the nine beauty (cf. Wilk, 1993); sexuality and prosti‐ basic integrity of cultural difference, and favors tution (cf. Kane, 1993); race, class, and gender in appropriation in the guise of an empathetic iden‐ the social context of domestic service (cf. Moore, tification with and "rescuing" of subordinate voic‐ 1988); kinship and class (cf. Smith, 1990); the sup‐ es. posed "Spanish" plague of machismo and the The potency of McClaurin's research relation‐ plight of Mestizo women (cf. Ehlers, 1991); and ships with the women she interviews cannot be the Guatemalan diplomatic impasse (cf. Payne, diminished, built as they were upon the parallel 1990), as each informs the social-historical con‐ autobiographies
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