What makes this so sad is that the original descriptive use is completely subsumed by the double modeclass="underline" “Much of society works by the exchange of human beings,” and “In most cases, the human beings who do the exchanging are men and the human beings exchanged are women.” Without resorting to information theory (which tells us that the interplay between two limited descriptive models generates much more information about the context surrounding the elements of all of them than any one absolute statement of the same elements possibly can), I think most native English speakers hear the margin for self-criticism allowed. And I don’t see how the informative usefulness of this complex model is any less than that of the absolute statement.
But if I thought anthropological sexism were merely a manifestation of a single, clumsily thought-out descriptive model, I would not be as distressed as I am. It appears again and again; the profusion alone suggests that it is inherent in the context. Three more examples:
In Lévi-Strauss’s most exemplary short piece, La Geste d’ Asdiwal (his analysis of a myth that has a range of male and female characters), we find statements like: “… the women [in this myth] are more profitably seen as natural forces…” (More profitably than what? Than as human beings? And who is this profitable to? But let us continue.) The myth, in its several versions collated in the forty-odd-page essay, begins with a mother and daughter, whose husbands have died in the current famine, traveling from their respective villages, till they meet, midway along a river. They have only a rotten berry between them to eat. A magic bird appears, turns into a man, marries the daughter, provides food for the two women, and the daughter and her supernatural husband have a child, Asdiwal, the hero of the myth. Some time later in the myth, Asdiwal, as an adult, meets a magic bear on a mountain who turns into a woman and reveals she is the daughter of the sun. After Asdiwal passes a series of tests set by the bear-woman’s supernatural father, the bear-woman marries Asdiwal and they live for a while, happily, in the sky. Later they return to earth, to Asdiwal’s own village, where Asdiwal commits adultery with a woman of his people. The bear-woman leaves him over this and returns to her father. Asdiwal marries another woman of his village, and the myth continues through a series of adventures involving several other female figures, some human, some not, their brothers (who tend to come in groups of five), the king of the seals, Asdiwal’s own son by a mortal woman, and finally ends when Asdiwal, in a magic situation on top of a mountain, calls down to his second wife to sacrifice some animal fat, and she, misunderstanding his instructions, eats it; as a result, Asdiwal is turned to stone. I do not claim, in so short a synopsis, to have covered all the salient points of the myth in all its variations; for what it’s worth, neither does Lévi-Strauss. There is a whole branch of the myth devoted to Asdiwal’s son’s adventures, which has many parallels with his father’s story. Still, I cannot see what, in the myth, or in the Timshian culture which produced it, suggests the interpretation “… all the women…” in the tale are natural forces. The bird-man, the bear-woman, her father the sun, as well as various seal-men and mouse-women, may well represent natural forces. But to restrict this unilaterally to the women seems to be nothing but a projection of part of our own society’s rather warped sexist context. I have no idea if the society of the Timshian Indians who produced this myth is as sexist as modern Western society, less sexist, or more so. I might have made an educated guess from the myth itself. But even Malinowski’s original reports, taken several times over several years, here and there resort to synopsis, at noticeably more places where women are the agents of the action than where men are. And I can certainly get no idea from the final critical model Lévi-Strauss constructs: a binary grid of repeated, symmetrical patterns, high/low, upstream/dow- stream, mountain/water, etc. By dissolving any possibility of male/female symmetiicality with the asymmetrical men = human/women = forces, he makes it impossible to judge (nor does he try to judge in his final model) any such symmetricalities that do exist in the myth — i.e., I think everyone, from the parts recounted, can see a symmetricality between Asdiwal’s mother’s marriage with the bird-man who brings plenty and Asdiwal’s with the bear-woman who brings good times in the sky. Just how important this symmetricality is in terms of Timshian society, I have no way of knowing. My point is, neither does Lévi-Strauss — if he is going to impose the artificial asymmetricalities of our culture on others. Lévi-Strauss’s avowed point in the essay is merely to show that there is some order in the myth; and this he succeeds in. But has anyone ever seriously maintained that any society has produced myths with no order at all? And it is implicit in his approach to show as much order as possible in the myth and then show how it reflects or is reflected by, and lent meaning and value by (and lends meaning and value to), the social context it exists in. There are certainly plenty of asymmetrical elements in both situations (as there are in all of the elements that he pairs as symmetrical), i.e., one marriage produces a child, the other doesn’t; one involves inlaws, the other doesn’t. But Lévi-Strauss’s sexist context puts the whole topic beyond discussion.
Another example: During Lévi-Strauss’s conversations with Char- bonnier, Charbonnier asks Lévi-Strauss if sometimes an anthropologist does not identify so much that he biases his observations in ways not even he is aware of. Lévi-Strauss counters with an anecdote of a United States anthropologist who recounted to Lévi-Strauss that he felt much more at home working with one Amerind tribe than another. In one tribe, this man reported, if a wife is unfaithful to her husband, the husband cuts off her nose. In the other, if a wife is unfaithful to her husband, the husband goes to sit in the central square, bemoans his fate loudly to all who pass by, calls down imprecations from the gods to destroy the world that has brought things to this dreadful impasse, then curses the gods themselves for having allowed the world to become such a terrible place. He then gets up and returns to his wife, presumably much relieved, and life continues on. The second tribe, the American said, filled him with a sense of revulsion: Trying to “destroy the world, or the whole universe, for a personal injury” struck him as, somehow, “immoral.” He preferred working with the former tribe because their responses somehow seemed much “more human.” Now I have no idea whether either tribe was particularly sexist or not. Presumably if the women of the first tribe cut off the noses of their unfaithful husbands, whereas we might call them violent, we could not call them sexist. I do know enough of the social context of America to be sure that if this were the case, our United States anthropologist would have felt nowhere as “at home” with them as he did. And in terms of any of the tribes involved, including my own U.S. of A., I don’t think I would trust this man to give an objective report on sexuality, sexual politics, morality, or humanity, as conceived subjectively, in terms of their own culture, by any of the three. In the context of the conversation, however, Lévi-Strauss uses the anecdote to point out, as politely as possible, that Charbonnier’s question is mildly impertinent and that somehow this man is more equipped to be objective about the tribe he identifies with most than anyone else.
Somewhere, in the sciences, especially the human ones, we have to commit ourselves to objectivity. And, especially in the human ones, objectivity cannot be the same as disinterest. It must be a whole galaxy of attractions and repulsions, approvals and disapprovals, curiosities and disinterests, deployed in a context of self-critical checks and balances which, itself, must constantly be criticized as an abstract form capable of holding all these elements, and as specific elemental configurations. (Indeed, “objectivity” may well be the wrong word for it.) One of my commitments is that self-critical models are desirable things. I would even submit that cultures, be they Amerind or European or African or Indian or Chinese, are civilized to the extent that they possess them. Now “civilization” is only a small part of “culture.” Culture, in all its variety, is a desirable thing because, among other things, it provides a variety of material from which self-critical models can be made. Lévi-Strauss himself has pointed out that one purpose of anthropology is to provide a model with which to criticize our own culture. But an anthropological model that only provides a way of seeing how other cultures are structurally similar to ours but literally erases all evidence pertaining to their differences, doesn’t, in the long run, strike me as anthropologically very useful.