labrys,
études féministes/ estudos feministas
juillet/décembre 2012 - julho /dezembro 2012
In her paper, "GENDER AND ARCHAEOLOGY" on line, Cheryl Claassen wrote:
" What feminism has brought to archaeology is a renewed focus on the people in the past, people who negotiated gender, ethnic, power, and spiritual relations. It has moved us away somewhat from a twenty-year focus on the environment and the natural sciences. This explicitly feminist archaeology has gained great momentum in the past decade. Far from being faddish or marginalized in the community of archaeologists who do not call themselves “feminist,” these writings are influencing their work as well. What we are finding is that a gendered perspective is offering new vigor to research as it has in many other academic fields. Without a doubt, gender impacts the archaeological record as well as archaeologists; gender must be an issue for all of us who study the past and work in this profession."
Cheryl Claassen- interview
Cheryl Claassen- interview
tania n. swain. What did Gender as a category, bring to Archeology?
Cheryl Claassen For a lot of us, gender led us to think about factions including differences among women, labor issues, and use of landscape and place. The move by editors to gender neutral language often forced us to explore just who we thought we were talking about when making statements about life in the past. Most importantly for the shape of archaeology, gender issues have revealed unexplored realms and reproblematized many shelved explanations. Many universalist claims or normative statements have been struck down. Several methods have been differentially employed or introduced because of gender investigations. Here I think of amino acid studies of feces, the use of site catchment analysis to talk about women’s contribution to the archaeological record, and DNA studies to sex subadults.
tania n. swain. Do you think that Feminism has influenced the development of Archeology, its premises and the narratives on human prehistory?
Cheryl Claassen. Feminism certainly has made non-feminists much more aware of gender in the archaeological record, and this awareness of women, even men, and children, has helped solidify the turn to questions of social life in the past.
tania n. swain. In the actuality, what are the feminist perspectives in Archeology?
Cheryl Claassen The fundamental element of a feminist perspective is that people are not homogenizable into a norm or average individual. Secondarily this perspective implies a conscious awareness of women--looking for them in the archaeological record and then posing questions about their lives for study. Other elements of the feminist perspective (meaning that there will be different concerns and expressions of feminism within archaeology) that I see in recent publications have to do with gender writ large, performance, factions.
tania n. swain . Based on your research, do you believe that totally different gender relations might have existed in the so-called prehistoric societies?
Cheryl Claassen Totally different—yes if we are talking about hunter-gatherer daily lives compared to my academic life, no if we are talking about life cycle development, rites of passage, pregnancy, mothering. Different yes, but not unrecognizable. Certainly one element of life that was different for hunter-gatherer women than for my students is the independence of women from men. When I ask a class, who thinks the landscape held more dangers for women in the past than today, it is inevitably men who think the past was more dangerous and women who think the present is more dangerous. The ideas that women made overnight forays in work parties or alone, created extraction camps, utilized menstrual and birthing rockshelter retreats, had their own places for ritualizing on mountaintops, on islands, paddled canoes for months as long distance traders is shocking to men and even women. Even the idea that women foraged for different types of food and probably consumed greater quantities of those foods than did men—and vice versa-- is surprising to them.
tania n. swain. Is Archeology a recent working activity for women?
Cheryl Claassen No, not from the perspective of AD2012. In fact, we have come full cycle in academic programs. In the US in the 1930s there were more women in academic programs than men and the same is true again now. Conversely, women seem to be less obvious now among amateur archaeology than they were before the 1990s and certain before the 1960s in the US. Women are proportionally more visible at archaeology conferences now it seems.
tania n. swain. +You have mentioned that new perspectives arose in the analysis of skeletons as from the nineties. What results did they bring up and was Feminist Archeology, in some way, responsible for them?
Cheryl Claassen A significant new perspective is in paleodemography. After decades of use of the Weiss life tables that reduced all populations to basically the same age distributions based on mortality, McCaa developed the fertility approach which is focused solely on women and their fertility. Nevertheless I have rarely seen this demographic technique applied in the Eastern US where I work. Was feminism behind this development? Certainly the public awareness of feminism and feminist issues was in place to stimulate such thinking.
More significant among the archaeologists working in the eastern US are the revised means of sexing and aging. Where skeletal populations have been resexed with these new criteria and bone targets, there have been interesting changes in artifact distributions and skeletal trauma. But because of legislation and the fear of ? confrontation with native representatives? by some Federal archaeologists and some museum collections managers, most of the skeletal material that needs reanalysis in the US has been sequestered. I suspect that in other countries in America reanalysis is hindered by inadequate personnel trained in bioarchaeology, lab space, and lack of concern with resexing.
tania n. swain. After re-classifying the skeletons sexes and the tools found in the tombs, would you say that social roles are independent of the sex of the person?
Cheryl Claassen No, and I say that based on my understanding of the beliefs of past populations in the Americas, not based on resexing. There are so many examples of Panamerican beliefs that associate women-caves-night-wet-left-earth, etc. and men with the opposite set of words that seem to be at least 7000 years old that I can’t see how sex and person could have been decoupled for a significant number of individuals, ever. Occasionally, certainly.
tania n. swain. +Is it possible for Archeology to free itself from the idea of sexual binarism when analyzing the data of remote past civilizations?
Cheryl Claassen Freeing ourselves of binarism might be easier for archaeologists and bioarchaeologists than any other scientists. We are constantly dealing with burials and it is in those settings where assumptions most readily meet reality. While there are alternative explanations to mismatches in the burial record such as adult men buried with infants or fire-making kits buried with women, these mismatches frequently bring to consciousness the thought “perhaps this individual was different from the binary assumption”.
Again, based on the symbol sets containing man and woman I identify above, I think the sexual binarism women and men was the referential norm throughout the history of humans in the Americas. However, where I do think there were significantly larger groups of alternative genders in hunter-gatherer societies is in the prefertile and postfertile realms, making four actual working genders. Two spirits do not seem to have constituted a separate gender in US societies as they often overachieved in their chosen normative gender rather than asserted their difference from either.
tania n. swain. +Which difficulties do women have to face when choosing Archeology as a career?
Cheryl Claassen These days it seems to be that for US women, the difficulty is most associated with family life vs. academic life. I am sure it is much more complex for women in other American countries.
tania n. swain. +In the domain of Archeology are there some fields specially reserved to women?
Cheryl Claassen Reserved for, no, populated by, yes. My data on this subject is too old now to bother citing but it is important that anyone wanting to figure this out compare the number of women doing some special inquiry to the number of women available among archaeologists to do it, not the number of women vs. the number of men. Since there are fewer women in archaeology, of course there will be fewer women producing reports on most topics. If 30% of men are working on Paleoindian issues you want to compare that to the % of women doing the same. If only 5% of women archaeologists are interested in Paleoindian topics then you can say that men “own” the topic. I suspect that one would find that 30% of women archaeologists are also producing work on Paleoindians.
tania n. swain. +You claim that homophobia is one de-stimulating factor, among other reasons, for women to choose the career of archeologist. Can you explain this assertion?
Cheryl Claassen The article that you are referring to, in World Archaeology 2000, made that case for the era before 1980 in the US. I am pleased to say that I don’t think that homophobia is relevant in women’s decisions about a career now in the US. I doubt it ever was anywhere else in America.
tania n. swain. Why would women, specifically in Archeology, be seen as lesbian?
Cheryl Claassen See the 2000 World Archaeology article for details. In short it had to do with medical thinking that strenuous activity damaged women’s sexual organs and that intellectual activity caused the uterus to dry up because heat was redirected to the brain. An inoperable uterus made a woman into a man.
tania n. swain. +Could you explain the reasons why Archeology has been an exclusive masculine domain between 1880 and 1930?
Cheryl Claassen This questions refers back to the homophobia issue and I’ll direct your readers to that article and most others that I’ve written, available online at academia.edu. Other people have made other claims—such as the lack of any war service opportunities for Western men in the years 1870 to 1910 so they took the military regimen into the field.
tania n. swain. What is the place of Feminist Archeology today?
Cheryl Claassen The same as it has been for the past 30 years. To keep our focus on people and social life, and to resist the tendency to forget about women or to portray their experiences as irrelevant to the human story. I worry now that I have begun to see book titles revert to the old language using “Man” for instance to mean, I think, “human”.
Biography
Cheryl Claassen is Professor of Anthropology, Ph.D. Harvard University. She teaches at Appalachian State Univeristy, Boone, NC for the past 31 years . Her Areas of Research/Interest are Archaeology, shell, sociology of archaeology, gender, Archaic, symbolism, caves; Eastern United States, Mexico. She teaches Archaeology, North American Archaeology, Mesoamerican Cultures, Senior Seminar, Pre-Columbian Symbolism, Mexican Art and Culture, North American Indians, Archaeological Theory, Mexican Culture and Archaeology
e-mail:
http://anthro.appstate.edu/faculty-spotlights/id/210
on line
http://anthro.appstate.edu/sites/anthro.appstate.edu/files/documents/ebooks/gender/ch01.html
other authors
http://anthro.appstate.edu/sites/anthro.appstate.edu/files/documents/ebooks/gender/toc.html
labrys,
études féministes/ estudos feministas
juillet/décembre 2012 - julho /dezembro 2012