Making Gender

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

Ortner, a feminist anthropologist and winner of a MacArthur Foundation "genius" award, mixes her pathbreaking papers and specialized academic pieces in this collection of eight essays spanning the last 25 years. In one influential 1972 article she argues that in every society women are viewed as closer to nature, whereas men are identified with culture, a prejudice that she blames for the universal second-class status of women. Another major essay looks at men's obsession with female chastity, and their systematic control of women's social and sexual behavior in traditional societies. This ideology, she contends, was bound up with the emergence of patriarchal extended families, social hierarchies and the state. Drawing on her fieldwork in Nepal, Ortner, a professor at UC-Berkeley, offers some unusual perspectives on the roles of women, such as the entry of European, American and Tibetan women since the 1970s into Himalayan mountaineering and their interactions with Sherpa guides. Another provocative essay contrasts the popular image of Polynesia as a haven of sexual liberation with less familiar realities: low status of women, a high incidence of rape and sexual violence, an elaborate prestige system regulating personal status. (Nov.)

Library Journal

Ortner (Univ. of California, Berkeley), a MacArthur Award-winning anthropologist and a founder of the school of feminist anthropology, writes on gender theory in a series of eight essays. She attempts to explain the anthropological universal of the subordination of women, with the answer found in a nature/culture dichotomy. Using cooking as an example, in the same manner as did Claude Lvi Strauss, Ortner suggests in her first essay that because cooking symbolizes "lower-level conversions from nature to culture," it thus serves as a metaphor for the male perception of women as being closer to nature and therefore on a lower level. Other articles examine this subordination in terms of examples gleaned from Ortner's research with the Sherpas of Nepal and other cultures. Written in an academic but readable style, Ortner's thought-provoking book would be an excellent addition to women's studies collections in academic libraries.-Cynthia D. Bertelsen, Indexing Svces., Blacksburg, Va.

Booknews

A collection of eight essays by a pioneering feminist anthropologist, illuminating 25 years of her theories about gender, culture, and women's roles. She argues that "practice theory" omits crucial questions in the arena of feminist theory, and discusses issues including the origins of the idea of the protection of female virginity, women in high-altitude Himalayan mountaineering, and women's agency within and apart from patriarchal structures. Includes her now-classic essay, "Is Female to Male as Nature is to Culture?." Annotation c. by Book News, Inc., Portland, Or.