ABSTRACT
The anthropological study of ‘gender’ involves enquiring into all the ways employed by a given society to define and distinguish between individuals, as well as any other elements in the universe, by analogy with the sex difference in humans, which we usually call anatomical. The problem is that this question, while apparently universal, is in fact predetermined by a particular culture. It introduces a Western concept, that of complementarity or symmetry, as applied to an object, humanity. In this case, the opposition is distinctive and the difference symmetrical (meaning that the relationship of each of these terms is identical with re ference to the opposition). We are dealing here with ‘male’ and ‘female’, in the same way as one would distinguish between ‘right’ and ‘left’ on a horizontal axis and between even and odd numbers among the sum of integers, and so on. However, when we want to analyse this sort of difference, whether it be sexual identity, or right and left etc., within a particular society, we have to ask this society how our question, and thus our view of this difference (what we call ‘gender’ or ‘lateralization’ etc.), may be set within a specific whole. In order to obtain an answer that is expressed in terms of the society under investigation, we have to endow the society as a whole with formal epistemological status, thus allowing our question to be deduced from this whole.
