Gender, Agency and Change

Gender, Agency and Change People’s engagement with change is mediated by social and cultural factors that shape their experience and inform their identities. In this edited volume gender provides the main focus for exploring the processes through which the construction and performance of identity and agency take place. The chapters show that agency is complex, and is often expressed in contradictory ways, for example in strategies of accommodation and adaptation that can nevertheless generate new institutional arrangements. Alternatively, there may be an outright rejection of these processes while incorporating specific elements associated with them. The cases examined in this volume explore the ways in which different subjects engage in the reformulation of spaces, roles and identities, redefining the boundaries between, and the content of, the ‘public’ and the ‘private’. The examples also provide an account of how gendered discourses are deployed to convey new meanings, a new sense of place and time, confirming or challenging ideas of ‘tradition’ and ‘modernity’. This collection will be of particular interest to students of anthropology and gender studies. Victoria Ana Goddard was born in Argentina and trained as an anthropologist at University College, London. She is currently a lecturer in Anthropology at Goldsmiths College, London. European Association of Social Anthropologists Series facilitator: Jon P.Mitchell University of Sussex The European Association of Social Anthropologists (EASA) was inaugurated in January 1989, in response to a widely felt need for a professional association which would represent social anthropologists in Europe and foster cooperation and interchange in teaching and research. As Europe transforms itself in the 1990s, the EASA is dedicated to the renewal of the distinctive European tradition in social anthropology. Other titles in the series: Conceptualizing Society Adam Kuper Other Histories Kristen Hastrup Alcohol, Gender and Culture Dimitra Gefou-Madianou Understanding Rituals Daniel de Coppet Gendered Anthropology Teresa del Valle Social Experience and Anthropological Knowedge Kirsten Hastrup and Peter Hervik Fieldwork and Footnotes Han F.Vermeulen and Arturo Alvarez Roldan Syncretism/Anti-Syncretism Charles Stewart and Rosalind Shaw Grasping the Changing World Václav Hubinger Civil Society Chris Hann and Elizabeth Dunn Nature and Society Philippe Descola and Gisli Pálsson The Ethnography of Moralities Signe Howell Inside and Outside the Law Olivia Harris Locality and Belonging Nadia Lovell Recasting Ritual Felicia Hughes-Freeland and Mary M.Crain Anthropological Perspectives on Local Development Simone Abrom and Jacqueline Waldren Dividends of Kinship: Meanings and Uses of Social Relatedness Edited by Peter Schweitzer Constructing the Field: Ethographic Fieldwork in the Contemporary World Edited by Vered Amit Audit Cultures: Anthropological Studies in Accountability, Ethics, and the Academy Edited by Marilyn Strathern Gender, Agency and Change Anthropological Perspectives Edited by Victoria Ana Goddard London and New York First published 2000 by Routledge 11 New Fetter Lane, London EC4P 4EE Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada by Routledge 29 West 35th Street, New York, NY 10001 Routledge is an imprint of the Toylor & Francis Group This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2005. “To purchase your own copy of this or any of Taylor & Francis or Routledge's collection of thousands of eBooks please go to www.eBookstore.tandf.co.uk.” © 2000 selection and editorial matter, EASA; individual chapters, the contributors All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is availabe from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Gender, agency, and change: anthropological perspectives/edited by Victoria Ana Goddard. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. 1. Social change—Cross-cultural studies. 2. Sex role—Cross-cultural studies. 3. Globalization—Cross-cultural studies. 1. Goddard, Victoria A. GN358.G45 2000 303.4–dc21 00–025487 ISBN 0-203-44966-5 Master e-book ISBN ISBN 0-203-45713-7 (Adobe e-Reader Format) ISBN 0-415-22827-1 (hbk) ISBN 0-415-22828-X (pbk) Contents List of figures vii List of tables viii List of contributors ix Preface xi 1 Introduction VICTORIA ANA GODDARD 1 2 Gender and difference: youth, bodies and clothing in Zambia KAREN TRANBERG HANSEN 26 3 Women are women or how to please your husband: initiation ceremonies and the politics of ‘tradition’ in Southern Africa GISELA GEISLER 45 4 Kinship, gender and work in socialist and post-socialist rural Poland FRANCES PINE 69 5 Properties of identity: gender, agency and livelihood in Central Nepal BEN CAMPBELL 82 6 Gendered houses: kinship, class and identity in a German village GERTRUD HUWELMEIER 99 7 Gender and politics through language practices among urban Cape Verde men GUY MASSART 116 8 Out of the house—to do what? Women in the Spanish neighbourhood movement BRITT-MARIE THURÉN 134 9 The ‘old red woman’ against the ‘young blue hooligan’: gender stereotyping of economic and political processes in post-communist Bulgaria SIYKA KOVATCHEVA 158 10 ‘The virgin and the state’: gender and politics in Argentina VICTORIA ANA GODDARD 179 11 Writing the usual love story: the fashioning of conjugal and national subjects in Turkey NÜKHET SIRMAN 202 Index 220 Figures 5.1 Tamang ‘rit cheeba’ marriage rites and dowry 89 5.2 The variable of village origin and women’s receipt of livestock dowry 90 Tables 9.1 Student attitudes to gender roles, 1992 167 9.2 Newly enrolled students in higher education 168 9.3 Approval of student participation in forms of university governance 170 9.4 Forms of student protest 174 Contributors Ben Campbell currently holds an award from the ESRC at the University of Manchester. Gisela Geisler is Associate Professor of Anthropology at the University of Durban-Westville in South Africa and Research Fellow of the Chr. Michelsen Institute in Bergen, Norway. Victoria Ana Goddard is a lecturer at the Department of Anthropology at Goldsmiths College, University of London. Karen Tranberg Hansen is Professor of Anthropology at Northwestern University in the United States. Gertrud Hüwelmeier is a social anthropologist and research fellow at the Humboldt University, Berlin, Institute of European Ethnology. Siyka Kovatcheva is the organiser of a youth research network for Central and Eastern Europe and is a lecturer at Plovdiv University, Bulgaria. Guy Massart is currently a doctoral student and a member of the Laboratoire d’Anthropologie de la Communication at the State University of Liège, Belgium. Frances Pine teaches social anthropology at Cambridge University. Nükhet Sirman is a social anthropologist at Boğaziçi University, Istanbul, working on the construction of gender in and through nationalist discourses. Britt-Marie Thurén is Professor of Gender Studies at the Centre for Women’s Studies, Umëa University, Sweden. Preface The present volume grew out of the Fourth Biennial Conference of the European Association of Social Anthropologists held in Barcelona in July 1996, on the theme of ‘Culture and Economy: conflicting interests, divided loyalties’. I was invited to convene a workshop for the Conference, on gender, the remit of which was open-ended in order to attract a wide variety of analyses and participants. In fact the papers presented differed in their focus, methodology and perspective. These differences proved to be an asset and provided the basis for an exciting debate. The workshop was a success and we agreed to work towards publication of the papers. As convenor of the workshop I assumed the responsibility of editing a future volume which was also to include the contributions of those who had submitted papers for the workshop but had been unable to attend. The volume reflects many of the issues covered in the Conference, notably a concern with agency, identity and power in the context of profound global economic and political change. These issues are examined from the perspective of gender as a central axis of identity and agency and a structuring feature of social processes. Three years have elapsed since then, during which we were able to maintain the relationship established at the Conference. I would like to thank the contributors for their perseverance and enthusiasm, and for their tolerance of my all too frequent incursions into their routines. I would also like to thank Jonathan Mitchell for his thoughtful comments and advice and, particularly towards the end of the process of preparation of this text, for his patience and flexibility. My thanks go too to Vicky Peters for her unswerving support and enthusiasm. Jenny Gault and Anna Whitworth have been a constant source of support and assistance. I thank them for all their help and their good humour, without which our working environment would have been all the poorer. I wish to thank and apologise to my son Joaquin and to all my colleagues and students at Goldsmiths College for any knock-on effects they may have suffered as a result of my concern to complete this volume. And last but not least, I am grateful to Joan Bestard Camps and the other organisers of the EASA Conference, for making it such a success. Chapter 1 Introduction Victoria Ana Goddard A Southern Italian family sits around the lunch table watching a British sitcom. They are amused and comment on the exotic domestic arrangements of the characters on the screen. The discussion rapidly turns to their own lives and to the relative merits of life ‘in the South’ as opposed to life ‘in the North’. At the very moment that representatives of the Mexican government signed the treaty linking their country to the USA and Canada under the North American Free Trade Agreement, the Zapatista rebellion exploded in the state of Chiapas.

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