Search for a command to run...
Thomas A. Gregor and Donald Tuzin, eds., Gender in Amazonia and Melanesia: An Exploration of the Comparative Method, Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001, 343 pages.This is a collection of 14 articles, the first of which is Thomas Gregor's and Donald Tuzin's theoretical orientation. Even from the Acknowledgments, it is clear that Gregor and Tuzin are proud, and justifiably so, to have produced ...the first book to systematically compare the cultures of Melanesia and Amazonia, and to consider the remarkable parallels and illuminating differences that exist between (p. ix). Taking the two regions as one (the imaginary Melazonia, as Hugh-Jones dubs it) is a big task, and one that I suspect many anthropologists have wondered about, but found too daunting to take further than imagining what might explain those parallels and differences. So I congratulate the editors on putting together this project. They are also to be commended, as are the other authors, for doing what is all too seldom done in relatively large collections of articles: each author specifically engages other contributors' articles; in addition, each article is introduced by a paragraph which briefly summarizes the focus of the article and recommends other articles that could fruitfully be read in relation to it.Gregor and Tuzin's introduction reviews the history of comparative method in the discipline, particularly in American anthropology. They assert that comparison is indeed possible and, in fact, is anthropology's primary contribution. They choose as the organizing principle for their comparison because ...the resemblance among the societies in Melazonia that stands out most dramatically is gender (p. 8). Moreover, [Gender] is an inherently integrative subject, bringing together intellectual perspectives derived from such diverse areas as human biology, environmental studies, psychology, social anthropology, and the humanities (p. 8).As the editors point out (p. 10), Descola is the only contributor who takes issue with this perspective, arguing that is not so central, at least in Amazonia. However, I question the conclusions of a researcher who refers to as a fashionable anthropological topic (p. 92) and who describes Jivaroan Achuar co-wives' opposition to a violent husband as culminating in ...even a strike in the kitchen (p. 100). This sort of comment implicitly degrades the extra-domestic roles of women/wives, and perhaps more so demonstrates an inappropriate application of the domestic/public dichotomy. It also implies an employer/labourer relationship between husband and co-wives which is quite thoroughly inappropriate.Many of the articles (including Bonnemere, Hill and Biersack) focus on male initiations as men (Papua New Guinea case studies) as opposed to renewing the (Amazonian examples). This difference is then related in interesting ways to differing ideas of the origins of the cosmos and of living species (Bonnemere, 41). Hill compares marked and unmarked cults across the two regions, and looks also at the parallels in childbirth rites. Biersack (rather unfairly) criticizes Turner and Van Gennep for not seeing the reproductive politics in male-focussed rituals. In her analysis of a ritual practiced by the Paiela of the Papua New Guinea Highlands in order to grow boys' hair and bodies,she makes an original point that the goal is to make them into not men, but husbands. One might reasonably ask, though, whether it is indeed making them into potential fathers instead, and whether that is an important distinction to draw. …