Readings 9/15/08

"Gender in Inuit Society"by Lee Guemple

This article looks at the levels of equality between gender in Inuit society. It realized that there is a strict gender separation in terms of labor and who performs what. There are two separate realms that people inhabit, for the men it is mainly hunting and performing labor outside the home, while women perform labor inside the home and also deal with the family.

However, within their spheres the two genders are recognized as the "experts". The men do not come home and tell the women what to do in terms of governing the house or dealing with things on a day-to-day basis, and women do not tell men what to do in terms of hunting. It makes the term "separate but equal" actually make sense, because that is what they seem to be.

Men do have more power when it comes to the society as a whole, however. They are recognized as the authority in public life. That is not to say women have no impact on the public life, however - it is widely recognized that women are just as important on the public life, though they do have different roles. They operate much more behind the scenes than men, an unseen force that still need to be reckoned with.

I thought that was interesting just because it seems like that is how the world of politics seems to run at times. There are the people at the forefront (usually white men) but then there is everybody else behind them (often their spouses or campaign) that actually get the ball running and drum up support from other people. I just thought that was an interesting comparison.

"Mother as Clanswoman: Rank and Gender in Tlingit Society" by Laura F. Klein

This article was extremely interesting to me because I am from the area the Tlingit tribe is in, and because I did not learn much about them in school, unfortunately, I feel like a newcomer to the subject. Some of the things I read resonated with me, making me realize how much of my town and its society actually has taken on some of the characteristics of the Tlingit tribe.

Wealth was status. Kinship and wealth were what made the world go around, and were seen as the criteria for individual rank, respect and authority. And according to the article, "In this highly rank-conscious society, then, both men and women had access to all the ranks and were by the definition of the ranking system itself equal as categories" (Klein, 38). That is a direct contrast to the Inuit society, where men and women had their own separate spheres but men were the dominant authority of public life. In this lifestyle, where subsistence was mainly through foraging and fishing, both men and women were involved in the entire process of both. That is, again, something that was very different from the Inuit society.

Overall, the article looked at the fact that the private life was still different from the public (in private it was a matrilineal system, in the public both men and women had equal opportunity to rise in status) as well as how different clan and house groups interacted with another based on that system. This article is also careful to point out, as the other one was too, that contemporary standards of "equal" and "private vs. public" may not do full justice to the societies we are looking at.