ABSTRACT
This chapter proposes that we attribute a centrality to gender, both as discourse and as social practice— not in old sense of causal primacy, but rather in sense of field in which a process of ‘transcoding’ occurs. The most striking feature of the sexual division of labour in the fishing community is the complete exclusion of women from the work of fishing and from access to the economic and cultural capital required to perform this task. In contrast with agricultural society, where patriarchal cultural rules are buttressed by the actual physical presence of the menfolk, the sexual division of labour in a fishing society leaves women in charge of all activities based in the household. Cultural constructions of gender and female sexuality in particular are therefore crucial not only in mediating relations of power and legitimacy in the more archaic framework of caste hierarchy, but in shaping the nature of capitalism itself, rendering it a gender-specific historical process.
