Moving by the Spirit by Haynes Naomi

Author:Haynes, Naomi
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780520294240
Publisher: University of California Press

GENDER IN SOCIAL AND STRUCTURAL PERSPECTIVE

Although my discussion in this chapter focuses on specific women and men, and on practices that might be considered by people on the Copperbelt to be (stereo)typically male or female, my argument turns on an understanding of gender that extends beyond bodies or persons. To wit, in what follows I treat gender as “a social and structural category” (Eriksen 2009: 89). By referring to gender as a social category, I mean that different kinds of social action are gendered. As Marilyn Strathern puts it in her now-classic treatment of gender and exchange in Melanesia, “Gender demarcates different types of agency. Persons differently impinge upon one another, and imagining ‘male’ or ‘female’ ranges of efficacy becomes a way of eliciting these diverse types” (1988: 93). Gender in this definition serves as a way of marking different social orientations or relational modalities, which are not the exclusive province of men or women, but are nevertheless gendered male or female. Indeed, in Strathern’s framework these relational models are not only gendered but gendering—that is, through male or female ways of “[impinging] upon” others a person emerges, at least in a given relational instance, as gendered. Put yet another way, persons are not by themselves male or female (in Strathern’s treatment they are androgynous), but rather appear as such through and in different relationships. This means, of course, that a person with a male body might be male in some relationships, female in others, and that the same is true for someone with a female body.4 It is this definition of gender as relational practice that I am drawing on when I refer to gender as a social (rather than simply sociological) category. To illustrate what I mean by gender as a structural category, I turn to Annelin Eriksen’s work on Christianity on Ambrym Island, Vanuatu.

Although Eriksen draws on Strathern, at least insofar as she also approaches gender in relational terms, gender in her analysis is also a mechanism for differentiation and ranking, and as such a framework of value. In her work male and female forms of social action gain or lose importance—emerge as more or less valued—with changes in Ambrym’s religious landscape (Eriksen 2009, 2012). Eriksen’s model of value is informed by Dumont, particularly his notions of “encompassment” and “levels,” which in Eriksen’s analysis become tools for understanding how gender is operationalized in Ambrym Pentecostalism (Eriksen 2014). As noted in the introduction, hierarchy for Dumont is defined by encompassment. As he describes it, the relationship of encompassment is the relation “between a whole (or a set) and an element of this whole (or set): the element belongs to the set and is in this sense consubstantial or identical with it.” At the same time, the element is distinct from the set and therefore also “stands in opposition to it” (Dumont 1980: 240). According to Dumont, this relationship is sometimes reversed: the lower-ranked or encompassed value can become the more highly ranked or encompassing value (see Dumont 1986: 252–53).

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