The Construction of Gender in Mid-Century British Social Anthropology

The historical construction and fieldwork exploits of the B.S.A. are well known. Here, an exploration of the position or constitution of what is perhaps a more contemporary construction, that of gender, within a set of key texts from the period of 1940-1970. Such an exploration presents at first no great difficulty. Whether male or female the authorship of the objects described, that is, ethnographically or historically known societies, is taken for granted to be neutral, which is to say the same thing as being male. The male in all societies was the giver of important information, the female a given. Yet things are more subtle than they at first appear, and the politics and the science of the sources of such a construction can be clarified by understanding such texts within the apparatus of Western kin structures that at the time were undergoing serious challenges.