Women, power, and gender: A critical analysis of feminist perspectives in anthropology

The purpose of this study is to present a critique of feminist perspectives in anthropology. Focusing on the topical issue of women and power, the critique addresses efforts to construct an 'anthropology of women'. The discussion argues that feminist perspectives in anthropology are built around assumptions of Western feminist thinking rather than anthropological understanding. The first part of the study identifies three general themes underlying feminist anthropology. The first theme concerns the association of female status with female biology and the idea that women's 'biological superiority' is everywhere translated into social inferiority. The second theme concerns the use of male bias both as a form of explanation for anthropology's lack of attention to women, and as a premise guiding women-focused research. The third theme centers on the idea that manifestations of women's power and their social value as individuals are to be found in specifically female domains of social life, in what is frequently referred to as 'women's culture'. The discussion shows how each of these themes combine to create a general picture of 'women' that can accommodate intellectual commitments to Western feminist ideology but cannot, at the same time, accommodate the ethnographic problematics with which anthropology must deal. Drawing on ethnographic data from the culture area of Melanesia, the latter part of the discussion looks to recent anthropological frameworks for the study of gender construction as an alternative to feminist frameworks for the study of women.