Gender, Archaeology and Gender Archaeology

I’ve written this as Natalie Bennett has been asking for feminist contributions for the History Carnival. It’s one of the comments I feel slightly guilty about as I write it. One reason is that I’m not really sure what feminism is. It’s a handy tag for a variety movements and philosophies which perhaps share little other than a concious thought of females in their construction. On the other hand I have an idea of what it isn’t. ‘Feminism’ certainly isn’t interchangable with the word ‘gender’.

This is where I think the archaeologist Paul Bahn goes wrong. I like the book Archaeology: A Very Short Introduction by Paul Bahn a lot. I also think that Paul Bahn is a good writer and an interesting archaeologist. But I struggle with his views on Gender Archaeology. The following is part of a section on a wider range of archaeological theory. It picks up from a bit where he says why Gender Archaeology arose.

The explicit emphasis now being placed on gender studies is therefore welcome not only for its attempt to create a much greater awareness of the need to extend gender equality into all aspects of contemporary life, including academia, but also for the substantial contribution that it is making to our understanding of how ancient societies may have worked. However, what is called ‘Gender Archaeology’ is actually feminist archaeology – sisters are doing it for themselves.

The avowed aim is to focus on gender (in the sense of social and cultural, rather than biological, distinctions between the sexes) in the archaeological record. But despite assurances to the contrary it is clear that the major aim is not so much to reclaim women and men in non-sexist ways in prehistory, as to make women visible in the past. A perfectly laudable aim, and one that is highly fashionable at present, with books proliferating on Women in Prehistory, in Ancient Egypt, in the Roman period, in the Viking period, or any other era. Part of the ‘feminist’ approach to the past, whose goal is to shed new light on hitherto neglected aspects of the archaeological record, this phenomenon is accompanied by an ever-increasing number of conferences around the world, usually organized by or starring the same cast of characters. Although billed as concerning ‘gender in archaeology’, these events concentrate overwhelmingly on the female gender, and are attended by a host of female archaeologists, plus a few brave males who perhaps aspire to political correctness. The very word ‘gender’, therefore, is in serious danger of being hijacked, like the word ‘gay’ before it.

…

The proper antidote to male chauvinism about the past is an egalitarian and neutral archaeology, not a feminist archaeology. If, as the proponents claim, they are not simply trying to make women visible in the archaeological record, is a ‘feminist archaeology’ needed at all? There is still a long way to go, but the real way forward is a balanced, non-sexist archaeology rather than a feminist kind, which is just the flip-side of the traditional coin.

Archaeology: A Very Short Introduction by Paul Bahn. pages 83-5 and 87

The reason I find the above interesting and worth disagreeing with is that some of it is founded in truth. Take the line …this phenomenon is accompanied by an ever-increasing number of conferences around the world, usually organized by or starring the same cast of characters. I think that’s true. But it’s also true of any new sub-discipline. GIS conferences are usually attended by people with an interest in GIS. Reception is a big growth area in Classics and you can predict a lot of the delegates and often the titles of some of the papers. One reason for this is partly ignorance by the mainstream of how useful a sub-discipline can be to someone who is not immersed in it. Another reason is that people tend to be more comfortable in cliques. For sensible reasons it’s a lot more fun to present a paper to an audience who can appreciate your work than spend half of your limited time slot explaining the basics and trying to explain why people should be excited about what they’re about to be told. It’s a problem. How do you deal with it?

When I attended the 2004 AMPAH conference at Manchester, pretty much the only thing that disappointed me was the lack of attendance in the “Women in Antiquity” session. AMPAH is an annual conference for Classics post-grads and this could have been an opportunity for two speakers with two very good papers to get used to speaking to a large audience. Instead it was poorly attended.

For the 2005 meeting Anna McCullough offered, “Not a Pretty Girl: Female Gladiators in the Roman World, Augustus to 200 A.D.” and Michelle Davy “Nero’s women – powerful inversions of the traditional female role?” We had two papers in each session, so the women could have been put in their own session to talk about femininity and so on. Instead Michelle went in a session discussing Roman politics and Anna was paired with a paper on the Spartacan Revolt*. It’s the one thing from the meeting I was most pleased about because it created two well-attended gender sessions. I don’t know if anyone noticed. Rather than just talking about female gladiators as something feminine people or the man in politics people were able to contrast the genders and think about both.

This is why I think Gender is fascinating. It’s not about scoring PC points, it’s because history and archaeology thrive on difference. We study the transition to farming or Romanisation or any other change between what was and what followed. Gender is a constant difference in humanity. Rather than ignoring it for a neutral approach surely there’s a richer understanding of the past if differences are explored.

It’s certainly hard to see how an understanding of colonisation is possible without acknowledging gender differences. The Spartan colonisation of Taras, modern Taranto in Southern Italy, was a deliberate action to get rid of a troubling group of males who didn’t fit into Sparta’s social order. The colonists of Taras took with them a command from the Delphic Oracle to be a plague on the natives. This is a very different form of colonisation to the settling of Alalia in Corsica or Marseilles by Greeks from Phocaea (a Greek city on the shores of what is now Turkey). The Phocaeans are said to have abandoned their city rather than be conquered by the Persian empire. They took with them at least some women to perform the relevant rituals in honour of Artemis. Ironically by reducing conflict with the natives the Phocaeans may have remained more ‘Greek’ than the Tarantines. What would a conquered Italian woman know about the correct Greek female rituals? Only what she was taught. Who would teach her proper Greek female behaviour?

This I think is the flaw in ‘an egalitarian and neutral archaeology’. That the past probably wasn’t egalitarian isn’t a problem for us, but fact that it certainly wasn’t gender-neutral is. If a convenient plague had struck the Roman Empire and killed all males above the age of twelve months, then the next generation of men would not be like the previous generations. There was no neutral ‘Roman’ culture there was arguably a Roman extelligence, but individuals could only access specific parts of it. At the very least there were tandem and symbiotic Roman male and female cultures. The problem with a neutral archaeology is that there has been a tendency in the past to perceive the male culture as the norm and the female as being defined in relation to that. Given that young children of both sexes were usually cared for by a woman in the early stages of life there is at least a strong an argument that female culture is the norm and male defined as what is not female.

You can probably come up with your own examples of something supposedly neutral that is in fact male. If you can’t it’s Olympic time. The study of games and competition in the ancient world is an example of gender studies that concentrates on the male. Any classicist will be able to tell you that’s because women didn’t compete at the ancient Olympics. Isn’t that a clue that there’s something really interesting going on in how you define masculinity? There are certainly plenty of conferences that concentrate on exclusively male experiences but because of the equation “male=normal” they’re not recognised as gender studies events.

I also feel a bit bad about taking this one section of Bahn’s book and attacking it, because it is an excellent book. If you read the whole section on gender it’s also clear that Bahn isn’t a dinosaur protecting male interests. I think the biggest difference between his position and mine is that we have different perspectives. I’ll finish with his comment “…is a ‘feminist archaeology’ needed at all?”

Archaeology was largely the preserve of rich white males. Put them in an environment where they can research anything they like and what is it that they’re likely to find interesting? I wouldn’t ask “is an ‘androcentric archaeology’ needed at all?” I’d ask “is an ‘androcentric archaeology’ inevitable?” One of the spurs for interest in a subject is identification with those you study and both archaeology and classics have, in the past, been really good at drawing attention to the experience of educated male elites in antiquity. The widening of access to higher education has increased the diversity of people doing archaeology and will continue to do so. Around half of them are going to be women and, even today, their experience of society is going to be different to mine. I don’t think the real question is “is a ‘feminist archaeology’ needed at all?” It’s “is a ‘feminist archaeology’ inevitable?” The future belongs to those who can combine the experiences of the genders to produce a gendered history or archaeology.

If you’re interested in reading more of the Gender Archaeology section in Paul Bahn’s book, Amazon UK allows you to search inside. If you visit the book’s page and click the search inside link and then search for gender it’ll bring up pages 83 and 85-7. Page 84 is a cartoon. This is an attempt to a direct link to the search results, but I don’t know if it’ll work.

* I half regret the session title “I’m Spartacus and so’s my wife”. —–