The purpose of this book is to offer an intellectual perspective that might be useful to those students and professionals who wish to expand their knowledge so that they can operate effectively outside of academe. Working in a nonacademic setting does not mean that the academic commitment to the advancement of knowledge is rejected or neglected. On the contrary, intelligent and effective social action both requires and stimulates an ever expanding base of understanding and knowledge. Those presently operating in the arena where power is negotiated and public goods and services allocated-- lawyers, legislators, and school officials--will find in this book rigorous empirical and theoretical studies of the range of cultural variation in the United States, its historical dimensions, and its effect on behavior, particularly behavior leading to inclusion or exclusion of various segments of our pluralistic society in the public domain of political and economic power.
One of the several commitments determining the perspective to be developed here is to an anthropology that serves the needs of both science and society. This requires formulating research problems that can be conducted sequentially or simultaneously at the basic and applied research levels. I would define basic research as contributing to knowledge, theory, and method--and hence to the advancement of social science. At this level, one is not necessarily concerned with the isolation of variables that can be manipulated by intervention strategies but with the understanding of all the factors contributing in some significant way to the phenomena under study. In addition, one also would be interested in developing theory and method that result in the most parsimonious descriptive statement of cause-and-effect relationships. The applied research level would be concerned with the isolation of variables that can be manipulated by public policy and with the identification of the point at which the cost of changing inputs outweighs the expected benefits. The choice of these variables--the intervention strategies--is based on underlying notions of how things are and how they should be. As many of the chapters in this book suggest, these notions are more often than not based on a narrow understanding of the American society and culture. Commitment to the democratic ideology demands knowledge of the full range of American sociocultural processes and how these processes-- albeit, inadvertently as with a life of their own--may work for or against an egalitarian ideology [xvi-xvii].
Ward H. Goodenough: "Intercultural Expertise and Public Policy."
Charles R. McGimsey III: "The Past, the Present, the Future: Public Policy as a Dynamic Interface."
E.A. Hammel: "Training Anthropologists for Effective Roles in Public Policy."
Winthrop D. Jordan: "A Sense of Success: Heredity, Intelligence, and Race in American History and Culture."
Peggy Reeves Sanday:"Cultural and Structural Pluralism in the United
States."
with Anthony E. Boardman and Otto A. Davis: "The Cultural Context of American
Education."
with Evelyn Jacob:"Dropping Out: A Strategy for Coping with Cultural
Pluralism."
Frederick Erickson:"Gatekeeping Encounters: A Social Selection Process."
Lucy Garretson: "The ERA:Law, Custom, and Change."
John R. Lombardi and Carol B. Stack:"Economically Cooperating Units in an Urban Black Community."
Henry A. Selby and Gary G. Hendrix: "Policy Planning and Poverty: Notes on a Mexican Case."
Patricia Lee Engle: "The Language Debate:Education in First or Second Language."
John J. Gumperz: "Language, Communication, and Public Negotiation."
Lilyan A. Brudner, Douglas R. White, and Anthony S. Walters: "National Policy Programming: A Prototype Model from Language Planning."
Other articles by: Marcus Alexis, William D. Morris, Otto A. Davis and Margaret A. Frederking, Roxann A. Van Dusen and Robert Parke.
In this book, Professor Peggy Sanday [examines] power and dominance in male-female relationships. How does socially approved interaction between the sexes originate? why are women viewed as a necessary part of political, economic, and religious affairs in some societies but not in others? why do some societies clothe sacred symbols of creative power in the guise of one sex and not of the other?
Professor Sanday offers solutions to these cultural puzzles by using cross-cultural research on over 150 tribal societies. She systematically establishes the full range of variation in male and female power roles and then suggests a theoretical framework for explaining this variation.
Rejecting the argument of universal female subordination, Professor Sanday argues that male dominance is not inherent in human relations but is a solution to various kinds of social stress. Those who are thought to embody, be in touch with, or control the creative forces of nature are perceived as powerful. In isolating the behavioral and symbolic mechanisms that institute male dominance, Professor Sanday shows that a people's secular power roles are partly derived from ancient concepts of power, as exemplified by their origin myths. Power and dominance are further determined by a people's adaptation to their environment, social conflict, and emotional stress. This is illustrated through case studies of the effects of European colonialism, migration, and food stress, and supported by numerous statistical associations between sexual inequality and various social stresses.
In the Epilogue Professor Sanday examines the roots of Western male dominance and suggests that the forces contributing to the predominantly masculine system of beliefs characteristic of the Judaic and Christian traditions are similar to the forces that accompanied the development of male dominance in other cultural traditions.
Female Power and Male Dominance provides a new explanation of the origins and perpetuation of sexual inequality by using large-scale cross-cultural research on tribal societies. Yet the relevance of its discoveries extends to modern society, revealing the deep psychological and social roots of current sex-role expectations.
The practice of cannibalism is in certain societies rejected as evil, while in others it plays a central part in the ritual order. Anthropologists have offered various explanations for the existence of cannibalism, one of which Peggy Sanday claims, is adequate. In this book she presents a new approach to understanding the phenomenon. Through a detailed examination of ritual cannibalism in selected tribal societies, and a comparison of those cases with others in which the practice is absent, she shows that cannibalism is closely linked to people's orientation to the world, and that is serves as a concrete device for distinguishing the "cultural self" from the "natural other."
Combining perspectives drawn from the work of Ricoeur, Freud, Hegel, Jung, and symbolic anthropology, Sanday argues that ritual cannibalism is intimately connected both with the constructs by which the origin and continuity of life are understood and assured from one generation to the next and with the way in which that understanding is used to control the vital forces considered necessary for the reproduction of society. She reveals that the presence or absence of cannibalism in a culture derives from basic human attitudes toward life and death, combined with the realities of the material world.
As well as making an original contribution to the understanding of a significant human practice, Sanday also develops a theoretical argument of wider relevance to anthropological analysis in general. The book will appeal to anthropologists, psychologists, sociologists, and other readers interested in the function and meaning of cannibalism.
I suggest that rituals of cannibalism summarize and express an ontology, provide a model for individuation, and control violent emotions. In these rituals the human body is the medium of a conceptual framework--a physiologically based ontology that regulates as it regenerates social, psychological, and, sometimes cosmological categories. The somatically based ritual symbols of cannibalism stamp the psyche and the social order in ritual acts that transform inchoate psychic energy, formulate self-and social- consciousness and, in some cases, transmit vital essence into social categories. The basic psychological mechanism that seems to be involved here is individuating by physically differentiating oneself from primordial, inchoate energy. Inchoate psychic energy is transformed by projecting inner feelings onto outer persons where the feelings can be clarified and given social form. Usually the rituals are motivated by concerns about the replacement of personnel or about transmitting psychobiological substances from the dead to the living or from humans to the gods....
In my argument, ontological considerations take precedence over the utilitarian concerns given priority in the materialist point of view. Such considerations frame a people's response to stress. This is not to say that the environment plays a passive role; indeed, in plays a most active role. As people express a language of emotions in communicating with one another, the lexicon for this language may be inspired by attributes of the external environment as well as by attributes of significant others. It is from this process of communication that the symbols predicating the relationship between self and other emerge. Thus, I suggest that attributes of the environment play largely a symbolic, not utilitarian, role in rituals of cannibalism [pp. xii-xiii]
In Fraternity Gang Rape, Peggy Reeves Sanday tells us explicitly about sexual practices on our university campuses. Her meticulously documented and dispassionately presented evidence shows how gang rape occurs with regularity in some fraternities and athletic dorms. Beginning with an incident at a fraternity when, after a party, a female student reportedly had sex with five or six fraternity brothers, the book explores various perspectives as to what happened through interviews with the victim, the participants, onlookers, and university administrators. Professor Sanday reconstructs the daily life in the fraternity, showing the role played by pornography, male bonding, degrading jokes, and ritual dances, in shaping the fraternity's attitude toward women and toward sexuality. Two fraternity brothers were willing to share details of the humiliating initiation rituals they were compelled to undergo, and they are presented here. Professor Sanday also discusses incidents on other campuses, at other fraternities.
According to the research of Professor Sanday and others--the documentation is compelling--gang rape occurs widely on our college campuses. The evidence suggests a common pattern, in which the brothers seek out a "party girl," a vulnerable young woman, one who is seeking acceptance, or is high on alcohol--sometimes her drinks have been deliberately spiked--and then take her to a room. She may or may not agree to have sex with one man. She then generally passes out and a "train" of men have sex with her. Party invitations may even suggest the possibility of a "train." Incidents of this sort are rarely prosecuted or even labeled rape, part of an institutional attitude that, according to Professor Sanday and others, privileges men and sanctions sexual power.
Peggy Reeves Sanday's sobering view of sexual life among America's youth is one that some may, despite all evidence, choose to disbelieve. Yet what cannot be denied or ignored is the struggle by college-aged men and women to define their sexuality in the terms society offers them. Taught to deny the feminine and embrace sexual power, as this view suggests, men can see it as their natural right to degrade and to assault women. And women--the unwilling victims--through their own lack of self esteem or sense of power, may seek social status by attaching themselves to men in power, in this case, the fraternity brothers. It is a complex issue and one that Professor Sanday explores with insight, sensitivity, and clarity.
Beyond the Second Sex... challenges Simone de Beauvoir's notion that women are "the second sex" in every society. Anthropological inquiry into male-female relations has evolved around debates concerning sexual inequality. Based on original field research, the essays presented in this volume are not concerned with inequality per se. Rather, the authors pose ethnographic and analytical challenges to the assumptions and definitions that, in the past, have supported judgments about sexual equality and inequality. They move away from broad labels and blanket judgments in favor of addressing the conflict, contradictions, and ambiguities that are so often encountered in field research.
These essays maintain that, in discussing the cultural construction and representation of gender, the "culture" that is abstracted from field data cannot be separated from a complex, ongoing, and everchanging local process. From this point of view, the editors conclude, the relationship of the sexes to each other is best discussed in terms of the conflicts, tensions, and paradoxes that are at the heart of daily life in many societies.
Beyond the Second Sex will be of interest to students and scholars of anthropology and women's studies.
Chapters by Alice Schlegel, Rena Lederman, Igor Kopytoff, Anna Meigs, Alma Gottlieb, Peggy Reeves Sanday, Maria Lepowsky Ruth Gallagher Goodenough, Sandra T. Barnes, Caroline Bledsoe, and Lila Abu-Lughod.
The venerable and often misquoted phrase "Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned" continues to haunt American women who accuse men of sexual harassment and rape. In this bracing study of American sexual culture and the politics of acquaintance rape, anthropologist Peggy Reeves Sanday identifies the sexual stereotypes that continue to obstruct justice and diminish women.
Beginning with a harrowing account of the St. John's rape case, Sanday reaches back through British and American landmark rape cases to explain how, with the exception of earliest colonial times, rape has been a crime notable for placing the woman on trial. Whether she is charged as a false accuser, gold digger, loose or scorned woman, stereotypes prevail. American jurisprudence and the public at large remain divided on acquaintance rape. And now, as the Violence Against Women Act--the most important legislation for women in twenty years--has been passed, a new breed of antifeminists has stepped up to the plate to subordinate women's bid for sexual autonomy and freedom.
A groundbreaking work of scholarship that coherently challenges the anti-rape backlash and its rhetoric, A Woman Scorned brings a broader perspective to our understanding of acquaintance rape and envisions, finally, a new paradigm for female sexual equality.