ABSTRACT
There is a set of activities which are prohibited to members of each sex: men are forbidden to wash dishes or laundry, to sew, to sweep the floor; women are forbidden to climb trees and prune vines…. Males are more concerned with what the peasants call… products of the air, that is, the things that grow well above ground level…. Women are generally in charge of…things which grow in or near the soil…. The following adage…points to the difference between the sexes: ‘males look up, females look down’. This adage has three distinct meanings: it refers to the differences between male and female genitalia; it refers to the sexual division of labour; and, finally, it refers to a much wider utilization of the dimension opposition above/below as analogically related to oppositions such as heaven/hell, life/death, mind or spirit/body, purity/corruption, socially beneficial/ antisocial.
