ABSTRACT
Among the modern academic fields commonly grouped with other area studies is Gender Studies, suggesting that academic studies of gender, understood as an identity and traditionally distinguished from biological sex or even sexual orientation, can be considered to have something in common with the field commonly known as Religious Studies. This is especially the case given the fact that religion is also considered as an identity claimed by people in specific and negotiable situations. The work of the American cultural anthropologist Margaret Mead stands as a helpful example of research on sex and gender as carried out at a time when rather more weight was being placed on the human differences that each could name. In the study of religion the trend in critical scholarship on sex/gender as an identity has had a significant impact, in part because of already-mentioned assumptions about the centrality of male leadership in the communities that are usually under study.
