Reading Notes: Roscoe, _The Zuni Man-Woman_
This is an entire book and I don't have to present on it, so expect notes to be pretty sparse.
PREFACE:
"Anthropology, perhaps more than other disciplines, maintains a lively oral tradition that includes many unpublished (and unpublishable) anecdotes regarding the gender and sex practices of both natives and anthropologists." Heeeeeeeee. He talks about how lots of the anthropologists who went to study the Zuni did so because they were "American refugees from the American Way of Life." (that's an internal quote from Jacquetta Hawkes) So they were inclined to view them in a particularly positive light and have some identification there --- and the Zuni eventually got pretty tired of this. Apparently the anthropologists in the late 1800s took photographs of sacred things, caused political schisms in the Zun community, and basically tried to kill their culture by declaring it dead so that they could study it as such. Uggggggh. He talks in the preface about his attempts to do better, which is a good example for a folio of "studying cultures as an outsider done like not a total ass" (see also Mohanty).
PROLOGUE:
"Berdache" actually comes originally from Persian or Arabic for "kept boy," which is... kind of odd! Colonists were "forced... to make a choice between labeling the gender variation of berdaches or their sexual variation."
THE MIDDLE PLACE:
The concept of the "middle" is central; Zuni traditionally see themselves and their land as in the center of all things; big focus on the number six. This is interesting in a sort of staring into other peoples' heads way; I guess genderwise maybe this foreshadows a sort of middle path between genders in the berdache role? I dunno, normally that's the kind of sentence I'd be skeptical of.
Matrilineal inheritance system means there is no such thing as an illegitimate child. Fascinating.
The term in Zuni is "lhamana;" there are apparently "female lhamanas" as well although fewer and with less evidence. Some suggestion that this may be because the female role was more powerful in society.
WE'WHA:
Was apparently taken as female by everyone in Washington, DC when he (the pronoun the book prefers) traveled there with an anthropologist. Sort of interesting given the photographs; then again this was the 1870s and also people's expectations of what a non-white woman would like like may not have been based on very much evidence. (To put it charitably.) It sounds like he made at least somewhat informed and intentional decisions about the revealing or teaching of tribal information and participation in... objectification? of rituals. Exoticization, maybe.
They went into the national archives to get authentic materials for herhim to make prayer sticks with? That's actually way better than I would have expected. Also, I am really resistant to this whole "he" pronoun and this almost certainly has more to do with me than with We'wha.
Their handling of aggression or failing to fit in as "witchcraft" is interesting; it definitely doesn't fit the model a lot of the early anthropologists gave of a peaceful and "perfect" society, it reminds me more of scifi dystopias. Perceived intent is treated as a crime. (I mean, not like there aren't other cultures that work this way sometimes, I'm looking at you Catholicism.) Pages 109-110 are really interesting --- the witch figure and We'wha were both misifts, but in the Zuni paradigm, there was a berdache role for We'wha and no role except witch for Dumaka; in the dominant American paradigm, Dumaka would have done exceptionally well but there would have been no role for We'wha.
CHAPTER 5:
Oh wow I'm just gonna paraphrase this whole first section: "So the most appropriate term, you might think, would be transsexual. And there are good reasons for that and some similarities, but if you look at the handling, really this was a combined masculine/feminine role, and (male, at least) berdaches were buried as men, and while they wore women's clothing and took some feminine responsibilities on they didn't actually act like men all of the time." (All of the examples here are historical, so I use past tense, as it may not be the same now; I know the conceptualization of trans identity has changed the way other non-binary roles have evolved over time too.)
CHAPTER 6:
Roscoe has mostly avoided being proscriptive but the end of this chapter does not: "Given the increasingly ominous implications of what Jung termed the hypermasculinity of the patriarchal hero, Kolhamana [the Zuni mythical berdache figure] represents possibilities of male identity and gender reconciliation that Western societies can no longer afford to ignore."
CHAPTER 7:
Spanish colonizers thought the berdaches and people in similar roles were sodomites and mass-murdered them, and used this as an excuse to engage in further violence and conquest. They didn't particularly track whether sodomy was happening between men and men or men and berdaches because the activity bothered them and they didn't recognize the gender role. Ugggh.
CHAPTER 8:
Here he talks about the big problem I have when reading this kind of work: How should I relate this to contemporary identities, if at all? Some people (Les Feinberg, for instance, not that a lot of their work isn't amazing) draw direct comparisons and appropriate the berdache and other non-binary gendered identities in ways I find problematic; I'm also skeptical of attempts to paint trans people as being non-binary gendered in cases where we don't want to be. [0] At the same time, I'm skeptical that there's no connection, you know, and it's hard to tell how suspicious I should be of the affinities I feel and the sense of familiarity I get when I read about certain cultural traditions or roles. Is that a false familiarity? Am I just looking for something to hang these feelings on that gives a sense of authenticity? I don't know, but I really like Roscoe's take on this, saying that some people "go too far when they deny the possibility of continuity between the cultural forms of different societies and different historical periods," and later "...while labels are necessary for discourse and self-awareness, the patterns of behavior they refer to can and do occur without them." He talks about parallels between berdache and gay identity and how these things have started to mingle with each other for some people.
[0] And of course I'm never sure just how non-binary-gendered I want to be, anyway; but I am sure that I don't want someone else deciding for me by taking someone else's cultural identity, warping it, and shoving it on top of me in a way that isn't respectful to them or to me.
This entry was originally posted at http://rax.dreamwidth.org/48088.html.
PREFACE:
"Anthropology, perhaps more than other disciplines, maintains a lively oral tradition that includes many unpublished (and unpublishable) anecdotes regarding the gender and sex practices of both natives and anthropologists." Heeeeeeeee. He talks about how lots of the anthropologists who went to study the Zuni did so because they were "American refugees from the American Way of Life." (that's an internal quote from Jacquetta Hawkes) So they were inclined to view them in a particularly positive light and have some identification there --- and the Zuni eventually got pretty tired of this. Apparently the anthropologists in the late 1800s took photographs of sacred things, caused political schisms in the Zun community, and basically tried to kill their culture by declaring it dead so that they could study it as such. Uggggggh. He talks in the preface about his attempts to do better, which is a good example for a folio of "studying cultures as an outsider done like not a total ass" (see also Mohanty).
PROLOGUE:
"Berdache" actually comes originally from Persian or Arabic for "kept boy," which is... kind of odd! Colonists were "forced... to make a choice between labeling the gender variation of berdaches or their sexual variation."
THE MIDDLE PLACE:
The concept of the "middle" is central; Zuni traditionally see themselves and their land as in the center of all things; big focus on the number six. This is interesting in a sort of staring into other peoples' heads way; I guess genderwise maybe this foreshadows a sort of middle path between genders in the berdache role? I dunno, normally that's the kind of sentence I'd be skeptical of.
Matrilineal inheritance system means there is no such thing as an illegitimate child. Fascinating.
The term in Zuni is "lhamana;" there are apparently "female lhamanas" as well although fewer and with less evidence. Some suggestion that this may be because the female role was more powerful in society.
WE'WHA:
Was apparently taken as female by everyone in Washington, DC when he (the pronoun the book prefers) traveled there with an anthropologist. Sort of interesting given the photographs; then again this was the 1870s and also people's expectations of what a non-white woman would like like may not have been based on very much evidence. (To put it charitably.) It sounds like he made at least somewhat informed and intentional decisions about the revealing or teaching of tribal information and participation in... objectification? of rituals. Exoticization, maybe.
They went into the national archives to get authentic materials for herhim to make prayer sticks with? That's actually way better than I would have expected. Also, I am really resistant to this whole "he" pronoun and this almost certainly has more to do with me than with We'wha.
Their handling of aggression or failing to fit in as "witchcraft" is interesting; it definitely doesn't fit the model a lot of the early anthropologists gave of a peaceful and "perfect" society, it reminds me more of scifi dystopias. Perceived intent is treated as a crime. (I mean, not like there aren't other cultures that work this way sometimes, I'm looking at you Catholicism.) Pages 109-110 are really interesting --- the witch figure and We'wha were both misifts, but in the Zuni paradigm, there was a berdache role for We'wha and no role except witch for Dumaka; in the dominant American paradigm, Dumaka would have done exceptionally well but there would have been no role for We'wha.
CHAPTER 5:
Oh wow I'm just gonna paraphrase this whole first section: "So the most appropriate term, you might think, would be transsexual. And there are good reasons for that and some similarities, but if you look at the handling, really this was a combined masculine/feminine role, and (male, at least) berdaches were buried as men, and while they wore women's clothing and took some feminine responsibilities on they didn't actually act like men all of the time." (All of the examples here are historical, so I use past tense, as it may not be the same now; I know the conceptualization of trans identity has changed the way other non-binary roles have evolved over time too.)
CHAPTER 6:
Roscoe has mostly avoided being proscriptive but the end of this chapter does not: "Given the increasingly ominous implications of what Jung termed the hypermasculinity of the patriarchal hero, Kolhamana [the Zuni mythical berdache figure] represents possibilities of male identity and gender reconciliation that Western societies can no longer afford to ignore."
CHAPTER 7:
Spanish colonizers thought the berdaches and people in similar roles were sodomites and mass-murdered them, and used this as an excuse to engage in further violence and conquest. They didn't particularly track whether sodomy was happening between men and men or men and berdaches because the activity bothered them and they didn't recognize the gender role. Ugggh.
CHAPTER 8:
Here he talks about the big problem I have when reading this kind of work: How should I relate this to contemporary identities, if at all? Some people (Les Feinberg, for instance, not that a lot of their work isn't amazing) draw direct comparisons and appropriate the berdache and other non-binary gendered identities in ways I find problematic; I'm also skeptical of attempts to paint trans people as being non-binary gendered in cases where we don't want to be. [0] At the same time, I'm skeptical that there's no connection, you know, and it's hard to tell how suspicious I should be of the affinities I feel and the sense of familiarity I get when I read about certain cultural traditions or roles. Is that a false familiarity? Am I just looking for something to hang these feelings on that gives a sense of authenticity? I don't know, but I really like Roscoe's take on this, saying that some people "go too far when they deny the possibility of continuity between the cultural forms of different societies and different historical periods," and later "...while labels are necessary for discourse and self-awareness, the patterns of behavior they refer to can and do occur without them." He talks about parallels between berdache and gay identity and how these things have started to mingle with each other for some people.
[0] And of course I'm never sure just how non-binary-gendered I want to be, anyway; but I am sure that I don't want someone else deciding for me by taking someone else's cultural identity, warping it, and shoving it on top of me in a way that isn't respectful to them or to me.
This entry was originally posted at http://rax.dreamwidth.org/48088.html.