ABSTRACT
The anthropological study of gender and gender relations has produced, over the last twenty years, both new ethnography and theoretical illumination. It is a notable feature of the study of gender in anthropology that new theoretical insights have been sustained by very detailed ethnographic material. In the initial stages of what came to be known as the ‘anthropology of women’, arguments about the universality of male domination gave rise to a series of new ethnographic studies of women's lives and their perceptions of their lives (Rosaldo and Lamphere 1974; Reiter 1975). Explanations for the universality of male domination were sought through the investigation of a number of analytical dichotomies which were said to characterize gender relations in all societies. These dichotomies—nature/culture, public/private (Ortner 1974; Rosaldo 1974; Ardener 1975a)—were subsequently re-examined by a number of scholars who challenged both the content of the categories and their universal applicability (MacCormack and Strathern 1980; Rosaldo 1980). Variability in the content of these categories only became clear as a result of detailed ethnographic work and, through the new data made available, it became obvious that these categories were a feature of anthropological discourse rather than of the social or symbolic systems of the societies studied by anthropologists.
