Langdon, E. Jean

English

Trinity University

Tipití: Journal of the Society for the Anthropology of LowlandSouth AmericaISSN: 2572-3626 (online)Volume 15Issue 1 Remembering William T. Vickers(1942–2016)Article 66-15-2017William Vickers and Gender Studies of the 1970sE. Jean LangdonUniversidade Federal de Santa Catarina, estherjeanbr@gmail.comFollow this and additional works at: https://digitalcommons.trinity.edu/tipitiPart of the Archaeological Anthropology Commons, Civic and Community EngagementCommons, Family, Life Course, and Society Commons, Folklore Commons, Gender and SexualityCommons, Human Geography Commons, Inequality and Stratification Commons, Latin AmericanStudies Commons, Linguistic Anthropology Commons, Nature and Society Relations Commons,Public Policy Commons, Social and Cultural Anthropology Commons, and the Work, Economy andOrganizations CommonsThis Article is brought to you for free and open access by Digital Commons @ Trinity. It has been accepted for inclusion in Tipití: Journal of the Societyfor the Anthropology of Lowland South America by an authorized editor of Digital Commons @ Trinity. For more information, please contactjcostanz@trinity.edu.Recommended CitationLangdon, E. Jean (2017). "William Vickers and Gender Studies of the 1970s," Tipití: Journal of the Society for the Anthropology ofLowland South America: Vol. 15: Iss. 1, Article 6, 21-25.Available at: https://digitalcommons.trinity.edu/tipiti/vol15/iss1/6 INTRODUCTION ____________________________________________________________________________________ William Vickers and Gender Studies of the 1970s   E. Jean Langdon Departament de Antropologia Universidade Federal de Santa Catarina BRAZIL  Bill Vickers originally presented the article published here in the symposium “Women and Change: The Ecuadorian Perspective,” that was organized for the 78th Annual Meeting of the American Anthropological Association in 1979. I also presented a paper on the same theme. At the time, we were the only anthropologists to have done long-term field research among the Western Tukanoans, Bill among the Siona-Secoya of Ecuador (Vickers 1976, 1989) and myself among the Siona of the Putumayo River dividing Colombia and Ecuador (Langdon 1974, 2014). Bill never stopped visiting the Siona-Secoya until his health failed shortly before his death and his lengthy output of publications and reports attests to his un-derstanding of various themes that have appeared in anthropology since his original field-work in 1972. His primary research focused on detailed subsistence patterns and ecology, and his ecological knowledge proved to be an instrument to defend territorial rights. The depth of his fieldwork and long-term engagement with the group enabled him to address a series of other themes during his life as well.  In this paper, he addresses the debates on women’s roles and status that were emerging in the 1970s and later consolidated into theories on the body, gender, production and relationships stimulated by Marilyn Strathern (1988) and Joana Overing (1986, 1989), as well as the latter’s students (Belaúnde 1992, 1994, 2000; McCallum 1999, 2001). The feminist movement of the 1960s was motive for renewed interest in these topics, giving a political focus to research that went beyond the nature/nurture debate of the culture and personality school of the 1930s (Mead 1935). Throughout the social sciences, psychology, history, and the humanities new questions were being asked. This growing literature in the 1970s became known as the “new scholarship about women” (Howe 1982), and academic debates examined women’s education, their lower economic, political and social status in industrialized societies and searched for determining factors.  In anthropology, there was a call for research that focused specifically on women and female perspectives. Ethnographies describing the female experience and sociality multiplied and challenged the male bias in which men were perceived as the central actors and primary source of cultural knowledge and experience. These new studies coupled political concerns with daily practices, ideologies, and symbolic meanings present in rituals and myth. Their contribution was fundamental for the new analytical models that emerged in the 1980s and 1990s, as well as for the examination of women’s gardening activities, plants, and ontologies in ethnobiology (Daly et al. 2016).  One issue that engaged anthropological gender discussion of the decade was the search for factors determining female status. Throughout the 1970s, research focused on this ques-tion and resulted in a diversity of proposals. Such questions as to whether women were uni-versally subordinated and the possible factors determining their status with respect to that of men were explored (Quinn 1977; Sanday 1973). One important question in debate was women’s association with nature (Ortner 1974) as a key factor determining their universal subordination. Exploration of the nature/culture binary led to the recognition that such an opposition entailed an occidental philosophical construction (MacCormack and Strathern 1980). The concepts of status, prestige, and power resisted a purely materialist explanation, and research agendas began to explore the symbolic aspects of women’s daily activities and ritual roles in order to understand the interplay between symbolic structures and social life (Ortner and Whitehead 1981; Sanday 1980). Allied to the question of female status were a 21Published by Digital Commons @ Trinity, 2017series of studies that questioned the assumption that modernization was a force of liberation for subordinated females (Leacock 1975).  During this period gender relations in Amazonian and New Guinea highlands groups were considered to be characterized by sexual antagonism and male domination. Researchers cited as evidence the hostile and antagonistic interpersonal relations expressed in gang rape and “a concern with female pollution, a preoccupation with male sexual depletion, and elab-orate male ceremonial activities, knowledge of which must be kept secret from women . . .” (Quinn 1977:296). Concurrently, ethnographic research among South American lowland groups was undergoing a new surge (Jackson 1975; Overing Kaplan 1981; Seeger et. al 1979), and the women undertaking ethnographic research with a focus on the female roles and ide-ology demonstrated the complexity of such generalizations (Bamberger 1974; Dole 1974, 1979; Hugh-Jones 1979; Shapiro 1972, 1973; Siskind 1975; Murphy 1972; Murphy and Mur-phy 1974). Discussions about these issues animated debates at the annual Lowland South American meetings at Bennington College organized by Ken Kensinger. This led to group-sponsored symposia on themes in lowland South America at the Annual Meetings of the American Anthropological Association. In 1982 the Bennington group sponsored one on sexual ideologies, and the papers were subsequently published Working Papers on South American Indians edited by Kensinger (1984). The Bennington gatherings laid the groundwork for the subsequent formation of the Society for the Anthropology of Lowland South America (SALSA).  Western Tukanoans, including the Siona-Secoya, provided important evidence to chal-lenge generalizations about sex antagonism current in the 1970s. Both Bill and I recognized the complementarity and equalitarianism of sex roles based on reciprocity (Langdon 1978, 1984a; Vickers 1975). However, ethnographic research specifically focusing on the female experience and gender among the Western Tukanoans did not begin until the 1980s with Irene Bellier’s (1986) doctoral research, followed later by Luisa Elvira Belaúnde (1992).  The article reproduced here is the second of two articles that Bill wrote on female status. The first (Vickers 1975) was in response to Janet Siskind’s (1973a, 1973b) support of the universality of sexual antagonism in the Amazon and the relation between sexual favors and hunting prowess—females trading sex for meat. Through the documentation of individual hunting yields, he demonstrates that hunting yields do not play a role in sexual relations among the Siona-Secoya. Comparing the amount of meat shot by each hunter with the dis-tribution of unfaithful wives, he found that the difference in yield between a good and bad hunter is slight, a positive increment of about 11 percent, and superior hunting ability does not necessarily ensure a faithful wife. He concluded that the assumption of the universality of trading meat for sex among tropical forest hunters should be questioned and subjected to more quantitative research.  It is within this context that the dual goal of Bill Vicker’s paper on sex roles can be situ-ated: it examines the status of women in Siona-Secoya communities and analyzes the impact of development on their status. The first part of the article challenges the “male-dominance syndrome” from a comparative approach and then specifically examines gender relations among the Siona-Secoya. Citing detailed ethnographies on the Yãnomamö, Siriono, Mundu-rucu, Tapirapé, Akwē-Shavante, Mehinaku, Jívaro, and Western Tukanoans he argues that the issue of female subordination is not as clear cut as argued by some authors. Male domi-nation does not express itself uniformly in the different groups, although there is a tendency for women to have higher status and suffer less aggression in matrilocal societies. He pre-sents important data with regard to gender relations among the Siona-Secoya in which reci-procity and cooperation prevails over a conflict model and in which male and female roles and activities are not radically separated, as is the case the Eastern Tukanoans (Hugh-Jones 1978, 1979; Langdon 1982). Although the Siona-Secoya are a patrilineal and patrilocal society and their traditional leaders are male, there is no evidence of female infanticide and chil-dren’s play groups include both boys and girls. He also describes adolescent girls’ puberty rituals, bride service, and childbirth practices, including the male couvade, that support Belaúnde’s (1992) thesis and later writings on the body, commensality, substantiality, and so-ciality among the Airo-Pai, a Western Tukanoan group of Peru (Belaúnde 1994, 2000). If traditional gender relations among Siona-Secoya are primarily characterized by reciprocity and cooperation, the second part of the article demonstrates that increasing interethnic contact has had primarily a negative impact upon women’s roles, as I have argued 22Tipití: Journal of the Society for the Anthropology of Lowland South Americahttps://digitalcommons.trinity.edu/tipiti/vol15/iss1/6for the Siona of the Putumayo (Langdon 1984b). By the 1970s, the Western Tukanoans were integrating into the market economy and petroleum extraction was developing in the region. Siona-Secoya women were suffering sexual abuse and rape by military personnel, river traders, and others. Interethnic marriages were increasing and were apparently less successful than those with Siona partners. Finally, Bill observes that missionary efforts to prepare the youth for new leadership roles, those of teaching and health-promoters, followed the male bias of Western society. Today such conclusions are quite obvious, as studies on the importance of gender have multiplied. But at the time of Bill’s initial research, such considerations were only beginning. 	  References  Bamberger, Joan  1974 The Myth of Matriarchy: Why Men Rule in Primitive Society. In Michelle Zimbalist Rosaldo and Louise Lamphere (eds), Woman, Culture and Society. Stanford: Stanford University Press, pp. 263–280.  Belaúnde Olschewski, Luisa Elvira  1992 “Gender, Commensality and Community among the Airo-Pai of West Amazonia (Secoya, Western-Tukanoan Speaking).” Ph.D. dissertation, Department of Anthropology, University of London.  1994 “Parrots and Oropendolas: the Aesthetics of Gender Relations among the Airo-Pai of the Peruvian Amazon.” Journal de la Société des Américanistes de Paris 80: 95–11.  2000 The Convivial Self and the Fear of Anger Amongst the Airo-Pai of Amazonian Peru. In Overing, Joanna and Alan Passes (eds), The Anthropology of Love and Anger: The Aesthetics of Conviviality in Native Amazonia. New York: Routledge, pp. 209–234.  Bellier, Irene  1986 “La Part des Femmes: Essai Sur Les Rapports Entre Les Femmes et Les Homes MAI HUNA (Amazonie Péruvienne).” Ph.D. dissertation, École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, Paris.  Daly, Lewis, Katherine French, Theresa L. Miller, and Luíseach Nic Eoin  2016 “Integrating Ontology into Ethnobotanical Research.” Journal of Ethnobiology 36(1): 1–9.  Dole, Gertrude E.  1974 “The Marriages of Pacho.” In Carolyn Mathiasson (ed), Many Sisters: Women in Cross Cultural Perspective. New York: The Free Press, pp. 3–35.  1979 “Amahuaca Women in Social Change.” In Ann McElroy and Carolyn Mathiasson (eds), Sex Roles in Changing Cultures. Department of Anthropology, State University of New York at Buffalo.  Howe, Florence 1982 “The New Scholarship about Women: The Extent of the Revolution.” Women’s Studies Quarterly 10(1): 26–29.  Hugh-Jones, Christine  1978 “Food for Thought: Patterns of Production and Consumption in Pirá-Paraná Society.” In Jean Sybil LaFontaine (ed), Sex and Age as Principles of Social Differentiation, ASA Monograph 17. London: Economic Press, pp. 41–66.  1979 From the Milk River: Spatial and Temporal Processes in Northwest Amazonia. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.  Jackson, Jean 1975 “Recent Ethnography of Indigenous Northern Lowland South America.” Annual Review of Anthropology 4: 307–340. Kensinger, Kenneth (ed) 1984 “Sex and Ideology in Amazonian Societies.” Working Papers on South American Indians 5. Bennington: Bennington College.  23Vickers & Gender StudiesPublished by Digital Commons @ Trinity, 2017Langdon, E. Jean 1974 “Siona Medical System: Beliefs and Behavior.” Ph.D. dissertation, Department of Anthropology, Tulane University.  1978 “When the Tapir is an Anaconda: Women and Power Among the Siona.” Paper presented at the Annual Meeting of the Northeastern Anthropological Association, Quebec, Canada (published 1991 Latin American Indian Literatures Journal 7(1): 7–19).  1982 “Ideology of the Northwest Amazon: Cosmology, Ritual and Daily Life.” Reviews in Anthropology 9(4): 349–359.  1984a “Sex and Power in Siona Society.” In Ken Kensinger (ed), Sex and Ideology in Amazonian Societies, South America Indian Studies No. 5. Bennington: Bennington College, pp. 16–23. 1984b “Siona Women and Modernization: Effects on their Status and Mobility.” Working Papers on Women in International Development. East Lansing: Office of Women in International Development, Michigan State University.  2014 La Negociación de lo Oculto: Chamanismo, Medicina y Familia entre Los Siona del Bajo Putumayo. Popayán: Editora Universidade del Cauca. Leacock, Eleanor 1975 “Class, Commodity and the Status of Women. In Ruby Rohrlich-Leavitt (ed), Women Cross-Culturally: Change and Challenge. Mouton, pp. 601–616. MacCormack, Carol and Marilyn Strathern (eds)  1980 Nature, Culture and Gender. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.  McCallum, Cecilia  1999 “Aquisição de Gênero e Habilidades Produtivas: O Caso Kaxinawá. Dossiê Mulheres Indígenas.” Revista Estudos Feministas 7(2): 157–175.  2001 Gender and Sociality in Amazonia: How Real People are Made. Oxford: Berg Publishers.  Mead, Margaret  1935 Sex and Temperament in Three Primitive Societies. New York: William Morrow and Co.  Murphy, Yolanda  1972 “The Mundurucú Women of the Village of Cabruá.” Master’s thesis, Department of Anthropology, Columbia University.   Murphy, Yolanda and Robert Murphy 1974 Women of the Forest. New York: Columbia University Press.  Ortner, Sherry  1974 “Is Female to Male as Nature is to Culture?” In M. Z. Rosaldo and L. Lamphere (eds), Woman, Culture, and Society. Stanford: Stanford University Press, pp. 68–87.  Ortner, Sherry and Harriet Whitehead (eds)  1981 Sexual Meanings: The Cultural Construction of Gender and Sexuality. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.  Overing Kaplan, Joanna  1981 “Amazonian Anthropology, Review Article.” Journal of Latin American Studies 13(1): 151–164.  Overing, Joanna  1986 “Men Control Women? The Catch 22 in the Analysis of Gender.” International Journal of Moral and Social Studies 1(2): 135–156.  1989 “The Aesthetics of Production: The Sense of Community among the Cubeo and Piaroa.” Dialectical Anthropology 14: 159–175.  Quinn, Naomi  1977 “Anthropological Studies on Women’s Status.” Annual Review in Anthropology 6: 181–225.  Sanday, Peggy  1973 “Toward a Theory of the Status of Women.” American Anthropologist 75(5): 1682–1701. 1980 Female Power and Male Dominance: On the Origins of Sexual Inequality. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.  24Tipití: Journal of the Society for the Anthropology of Lowland South Americahttps://digitalcommons.trinity.edu/tipiti/vol15/iss1/6Seeger, Anthony, Roberto Da Matta, and Eduardo Viveiros de Castro  1979 “A Construção da Pessoa nas Sociedades Indígenas Brasileiras.” Boletim do Museu Nacional 32:2–19. Shapiro, Judith R.  1972 “Sex Roles and Social Structure among the Yanomama Indians of Northern Brazil.” Ph.D. dissertation, Department of Anthropology, Columbia University.  1973 “Male Bonds and Female Bonds.” Presented at the 72nd Annual Meeting of the American Anthropological. Association, New Orleans.  Siskind, Janet  1973a “Tropical Forest Hunters and the Economy of Sex.” In Daniel R. Gross (ed), Peoples and Cultures of Native South America. Garden City: Doubleday/Natural History Press, pp. 226–240.  1973b To Hunt in the Morning. Oxford: Oxford University Press.  1975 “Women of the Amazon.” Janet Siskind interviewed by Viv Sutherland. Pacifica Radio Archives.  Strathern, Marilyn  1988 The Gender of the Gift. Berkley: University of California Press.  Vickers, William T.  1975 “Meat is Meat: The Siona-Secoya and the Hunting Prowess-Sexual Reward Hypothesis.” Latinamericanist 11(1): 1–5.  1976 “Cultural Adaptation to Amazonian Habitats: The Siona-Secoya of Eastern Ecuador.” Ph. D. dissertation, Department of Anthropology, University of Florida.  1989 Los Sionas y Secoyas: su Adaptación al Ambiente Amazónico. Quito: Editorial Abya-Yala.    25Vickers & Gender StudiesPublished by Digital Commons @ Trinity, 2017

William Vickers and Gender Studies of the 1970s

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William Vickers and Gender Studies of the 1970s

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