Ortner - Is Male to Female as Nature is to Culture

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Is Female to Male as Nature Is to Culture?Author(s): Sherry B. OrtnerSource: Feminist Studies, Vol. 1, No. 2 (Autumn, 1972), pp. 5-31Published by: Feminist Studies, Inc.Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3177638.

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IS FEMALE TO MALE AS NATURE IS TO CULTURE?1

Sherry B. Ortner

Much of the creativity of anthropology derivesfrom the tension between the demands for explanationof human universals on the one hand and cultural par-ticulars on the other. By this canon, woman providesus with one of the more challenging problems to bedealt with. The secondary status of woman in societyis one of the true universals, a pan-cultural fact.Yet within that universal fact, the specific culturalconceptions and symbolizations of woman are incredi-bly diverse and even mutually contradictory. Further,the actual treatment of women, and the relative powerand contribution of women, vary enormously from cul-ture to culture, and over different periods in thehistory of particular cultural traditions. Both ofthese points--the universal fact, and the culturalvariation--constitute problems for explanation.It goes without saying that my interest in theproblem is more than academic: I wish to see genuinechange come about, the emergence of a social and cul-tural order in which as much of the range of humanpotential is open to women as to men. The universali-ty of female subordination, the fact that it existswithin every type of social and economic arrangement,

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and in societies of every degree of complexity, indi-cates to me that we are up against something veryprofound, very stubborn, something that can not beremedied merely by rearranging a few tasks and rolesin the social system, nor even by rearranging thewhole economic structure.First, it is important to sort out the levels ofthe problem. The confusion can be enormous. For ex-ample, depending on which aspect of Chinese culturewe looked at, we might extrapolate entirely differentguesses concerning the status of women in China. Inthe ideology of Taoism, yin, the female principle,and yang, the male principle, are given equal weight;The opposition, alternation, and interaction of thesetwo forces give rise to all phenomena in the universe. 2Hence we might guess that maleness and femaleness areequally valued in the general ideology of Chinese cul-ture. Looking at the social structure, on the otherhand, we see the strong patrilineal descent principle,the importance of sons, and the patripotestal structureof the family. Thus we might conclude that China isthe archetypal patriarchal society. Next, lookingat the actual roles played, power and influence wield-ed, and material contributions made by women in Chinesesociety, all of which are, upon observation, quitesubstantial, we are tempted to say that women reallyare allotted a great deal of (unspoken) status in thesystem. Or again, we might focus on the fact that agoddess, Kuan-yin, is the central (most-worshipped,most depicted) deity in Chinese Buddhism, and we mightbe tempted to say, as many have tried to say aboutgoddess-worshipping cultures in pre- and early-historical societies, that actually China is asort of matriarchy. In short, we must be absolutelyclear about what we are trying to explain, beforeexplaining it.We may isolate three levels of the problem. (1) Theuniversal fact of culturally attributed second-classstatus to woman in every society. Two questions areimportant here. First, what do we mean by this, whatis our evidence that this is a universal fact? Andsecond, how are we to explain the fact having estab-lished it? (2) Specific ideologies, symbolizations,and social structural arrangements pertaining to

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women which vary widely from culture to culture.The problem at this level is to account for anyparticular cultural complex in terms of factorsspecific to that culture--the standard level ofanthropological analysis. And (3) observable on-the-ground details of women's activities, contribu-tions, powers, etc., often at variance with culturalideology, and always constrained within the assump-tion that women may never be officially pre-eminentin the total system. This is the level of directobservation, often adopted now by feminist-orientedanthropologists.This paper is primarily concerned with the firstlevel of the problem: the universal devaluation ofwomen. It thus depends not upon specific culturaldata but rather upon an analysis of culture takengenerically as a special sort of process in the world.A discussion of the second level, the problem ofcross-cultural variation in conceptions and relativevaluations of women, must be postponed for anotherpaper, since it will entail a great deal of cross-cultural research. As for the third level, it willbe obvious from my approach that I would considerit a misguided endeavor to focus only upon women'sactual, though culturally unrecognized and unvalued,powers in any given society, without first understand-ing the overarching ideology and deeper assumptionsof the culture that renders such powers trivial.

What do I mean when I say that everywhere, inevery known culture, woman is considered in some degreeinferior to man? First of all I must stress that Iam talking about cultural evaluations; I am sayingthat each culture, in its own way and in its own terms,makes this evaluation. What would constitute evidence,when we look at any particular society, that it con-siders women inferior?

Three types of data would be evidence: a) elementsof cultural ideology and informants' statements thatexlicitly devalue women, according them,their roles,their tasks, their products, and their social milieuless prestige than men and the male correlates; b) sym-bolic devices, such as the attribution of defilement,which may be interpreted as making a statement of in-

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ferior valuation; and c) social rules that prohibitwomen from participating in or having contact with somerealm in which the highest powers of the society arefelt to reside. These three types of data may all ofcourse be interrelated in any particular system,but not necessarily. Further, any one of them willusually be sufficient to make the point of female in-feriority in any given culture. Certainly female ex-clusion from the most sacred rite or the highest politi-cal council is sufficient evidence. Certainly explicitcultural ideology devaluing women (and their tasks,roles, products, etc.) is sufficient evidence. Symbolicindicators such as defilement are usually sufficient,although in a few cases in which men and women areequally polluting to one another, a further indicatoris required--and is, as far as my researches haveascertained, always available.On any or all of these counts, we find women subordi-nated to men in every known society. The search fora genuinely egalitarian, let alone matriarchal, culture,has proven fruitless, and it is important for the woman'smovement at large to face up to this fact. An examplefrom one society that has traditionally been on the goodside of the ledger vis-a-vis the status of their womenwill suffice. Among the matrilineal Crow, Lowie pointsout that Women...had highly honorific offices in theSun Dance; they could become directors of the Tobaccoceremony and played, if anything, a more conspicuouspart in it than the men; they sometimes played thehostess in the Cooked Meat Festival; they were notdebarred from sweating or doctoring nor from seekinga vision. Nonetheless, Women [during menstruation]formerly rode inferior horses and evidently thisloomed as a source of contamination, for they werenot allowed to approach either a wounded man or menstarting on a war party. A taboo still lingers againsttheir coming near sacred objects at these times.Further, Lowie mentions, just before enumeratingwomen's rights of participation in the various ritualsnoted above, that there was one particular Sun DanceDoll bundle that was not supposed to be unwrapped bya woman. Pursuing this trail we find: Accordingto all Lodge Grass informants and most others, thedoll owned by Wrinkle-face took precedence not only

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of other dolls but of all other Crow medicines what-soever....This particular doll was not supposed tobe handled by a woman....3In sum, the Crow probably provide a fairly typicalcase. Yes, women have certain powers and rights, inthis case some that place them in comparatively highpositions. Yet ultimately the line is drawn; menstrua-tion is a threat to warfare, one of the most valuedinstitutions of the tribe--one central to their selfdefinition--and the most sacred object of the tribeis tabooed to the direct sight and touch of women.Similiar examples could be multiplied ad infinitum,but I think it is time to turn the tables. The onusis no longer upon us to demonstrate that female subor-dination is a cultural universal; it is up to thosewho would argue against the point to bring forth counter-examples. I shall take the universal secondary statusof women as a given, and proceed from there.

If the devaluation of women relative to men is acultural universal, how are we to explain this fact?We could of course rest the case on biological determi-nism: There is something genetically inherent in themales of the species that makes them the naturallydominant sex; that something is lacking in females,and, as a result, women are not only naturally subor-dinate but, in general, quite satisfied with theirposition, since it affords them protection and theopportunity to maximize the maternal pleasures thatto them are the most satisfying experiences of life.Without going into a detailed refutation of this posi-tion, it is fair to say that it has failed to convincevery few in academic anthropology. This is not tosay that biological facts are irrelevant, nor thatmen and women are not different; but it is to saythat these facts and differences only take on signifi-cance of superior/inferior within the framework ofculturally defined value systems.If we are not willing to rest the case on geneticdeterminism, it seems to me that we have only oneother way to proceed. We must attempt to interpretfemale subordination in light of other universals ofthe human condition, factors built into the structureof the most generalized situation that all human beings,

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in whatever culture, find themselves in. For example,every human being has a physical body and a sense ofnon-physical mind, is part of a society of other indi-viduals and an inheritor of a cultural tradition, andmu3t engage in some relationship, however mediated,with nature or the non-human realm, in order tosurvive. Every human being is born (to a mother)and ultimately dies; all are assumed to have an inter-est in personal survival; and society/culture hasits own interest in (or at least momentum toward)continuity and survival that transcends the livesand deaths of particular individuals. And so forth.It is in the realm of such universals of the humancondition that we must seek an explanation for theuniversal fact of female devaluation.I translate the problem, in other words, into thefollowing simple question: What could there be in thegeneralized structure and conditions of existence,common to every culture, that would lead every cultureto devalue women? Specifically, my thesis is thatwoman is being identified with, or, if you will, seemsto be a symbol of, something that every culture devalues,something that every culture defines as being at alower order of existence than itself. Now it seemsthat there is only one thing that would fit that cate-gory, and that is nature in the most generalized sense.Every culture, or, generically, culture, is engagedin the process of generating and sustaining systemsof meaningful forms (symbols, artifacts, etc.) by meansof which humanity transcends the givens of naturalexistence, bends them to its purposes, controls themin its interest. We may thus equate culture broadlywith the notion of human consciousness, or with theproducts of human consciousness (i.e., systems ofthought and technology), by means of which humanityattempts to rise above and assert control, howeverminimally, over nature.Now the categories of nature and culture areof course categories of human thought--there is noplace out in the real world where one could find someactual boundary between the two states or realms ofbeing. And there is no question that some culturesarticulate a much stronger opposition between the twocategories than others--it has even been argued thatprimitive peoples (some or all) do not see or intuitany distinction between the human cultural state and

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the state of nature at all. Yet I would maintain thatthe universality of ritual betokens an assertion inall human cultures of the specifically human abilityto act upon and regulate, rather than passively movewith and be moved by, the givens of natural existenceIn ritual, the purposive manipulation of given formstoward regulating and sustaining order, every culturemakes the statement that proper relations between hu-man existence and natural forces depend upon culture'scontributing its special powers toward regulating theoverall process of the world.These points are often articulated in notions ofpurity and pollution. Virtually every culture hassome such notions, and they seem in large part (thoughnot, of course, entirely) to be about the relationshipbetween culture and nature.4 A well-known aspect ofpurity/pollution beliefs cross-culturally is that ofnatural contagion of pollution--polution (for thesepurposes grossly equated with the unregulated opera-tion on natural energies) left to its own devicesspreads and overpowers all it comes in contact with.Thus the old puzzle--if pollution is so strong, howcan anything be purified? When the purifying agentis introduced, why does it purify rather than becomepolluted itself? The answer in line with the presentargument, is that purification is effected in a ritualcontext--that purification ritual, as a purposive ac-tivity that pits self-conscious (symbolic) actionagainst natural energies, is more powerful than thoseenergies.In any case, my point is simply that every cul-ture implicitly recognizes and asserts the distinc-tion between the operation of nature as such and theoperation of culture (human consciousness and itsproducts), and further, that the distinctiveness ofculture rests precisely on the fact that it can undermost circumstances transcend natural givens and turnthem to its purposes. Thus culture (i.e., every cul-ture) at some level of awareness asserts itself tobe not only distinct from, but superior in power to,nature, and that sense of distinctiveness and superiorityrests precisely on the ability to transform--to socializeand culturalize --nature.

Returning now to the issue of women, in my ini-tial thinking on the subject, I formulated the argu-ment as follows: the pan-cultural devaluation of11



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woman could be accounted for, quite simply, by postu-lating that woman is being identified with, or symboli-cally associated with, nature, as opposed to man, whois identified with culture. Since it is always cul-ture's project to subsume and transcend nature, ifwoman is a part of nature, then culture would findit natural to subordinate, not to say oppress, her.While this argument could be shown to have considerableforce, it also seems to over-simplify the case. Theformulation I would like to defend and elaborate on,then, is that women are seen merely as being closerto nature than zmen. That is, culture still equatedmore or less unambiguously with men) recognizes thatwoman is an active participant in its special processes,but sees her as being, at the same time, more rootedin, or having more direct connection with, nature.The revision seems minor and even trivial, but Ithink it is a more accurate rendering of culturalassumptions concerning women. Further, the argumentcast in these terms has several analytic advantagesover the simpler formulation; I will discuss theselater. It might simply be stressed here that therevised argument would still account for the pan-cultural devaluation of women, for, even if womanis not equated with nature, she is still seen asrepresenting a lower order of being, less transcen-dental of nature than men. The next question is whyshe might be viewed that way.

It all begins of course with the body, and thenatural procreative functions specific to women alone.We can sort out for discussion three levels at whichthis absolute physiological fact has significance.(i) Her body and its functions, more involved moreof the time with species life, seem to place hercloser to nature, as opposed to men, whose physiologyfrees them more completely to the projects of culture.(ii) Her body and its functions put her in socialroles that are in turn considered to be at a lowerorder of culture, in opposition to the higher ordersof the cultural process. (iii) Her traditional socialroles, imposed because of her body and its functions,in turn give her a different psychic structure--andagain, this psychic structure, like her physiologicalnature and her social roles, is seen as being morelike nature.12



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My argument that woman's physiology is seen ascloser to nature has been anticipated, with greatsubtlety and cogency, and a lot of hard data, byde Beauvoir. De Beauvoir reviews the physiologicalstructure, development, and functions of the humanfemale and concludes that the female, to a greaterextent than the male, is the prey of the species.She points out that many major areas and processesof the woman's body serve no apparent function forthe health and stability of the individual woman;on the contrary, as they perform their specific or-ganic functions, they are often sources of discomfort,pain and danger. The breasts are irrelevant to per-sonal health; they may be excised at any time of awoman's life. Many of the ovarian secretions func-tion for the benefit of the egg, promoting its matura-tion and adapting the uterus to its requirements; inrespect to the organism as a whole, they make fordisequilibrium rather than for regulation--the womanis adapted to the needs of the egg rather than to herown requirements. Menstruation is often uncomfor-table, sometimes painful; it frequently has negativeemotional correlates and in any case involves bother-some tasks of cleansing and waste-disposal; and--a point that de Beauvoir does not mention--in manycultures it interrupts a woman's routine, putting herin a stigmatized state involving various restrictionson her activities and social contacts. In pregnancy,many of the woman's vitamin and mineral resources arechannelled into nourishing the fetus, depleting herown strength and energies, and finally, childbirthitself is painful and dangerous. In sum, de Beauvoirconcludes that the female is more enslaved to thespecies than the male, her animality is more manifest. 5De Beauvoir's survey is meant to be, and seems inall fairness to be, purely descriptive. It is simplya fact that proportionately more of woman's body space,for a greater percentage of her life-time, and at acertain--sometimes great--cost to her personal health,strength, and general stability, is taken up withthe natural processes surrounding the reproductionof the species. Further, in physiological structure,the woman is weaker than the man, her grasp on theworld is thus more restricted; she has less firmnessand less steadiness available for projects that ingeneral she is less capable of carrying out. 6

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De Beauvoir goes on to discuss the negative impli-cations of woman's enslavement to the species andgeneral physical weakness in relation to the projectsin which humans engage, projects through which cultureis generated and defined. She arrives thus at thecrux of her argument: Here we have the key to thewhole mystery. On the biological level a species ismaintained only by creating itself anew; but this cre-ation results only in repeating the same Life in moreindividuals. But man assures the repetition of Lifewhile transcending Life through Existence [i.e., goal-oriented, meaningful action]; by this transcendence hecreates values that deprive pure repetition of allvalue. In the animal, the freedom and variety of maleactivities are vain because no project is involved.Except for his services to the species, what he doesis immaterial. Whereas in serving the species, thehuman male also remodels the face of the earth, hecreates new instruments, he invents, he shapes thefuture.7 In other words, woman's body seems to doomher to mere reproduction of life; the male, on theother hand, lacking natural creative functions, must(or has the opportunity to) assert his creativity

externally, artifically, through the medium oftechnology and symbols. In so doing, he createsrelatively lasting, eternal, transcendent objects,while the woman creates only perishables--human beings.This formulation opens up a number of importantinsights. It explains, for example, the great puzzleof why male activities involving the destruction oflife (hunting and warfare) have more charisma, as itwere, than the female's ability to give birth, tocreate life.8 Yet within de Beauvoir's framework,we realize that it is not the killing that is therelevant and valued aspect of hunting and warfare;rather it is the transcendental (social, cultural)nature of these activities, as opposed to the natural-ness of the process of birth: For it is not in givinglife but in risking life that man is raised abovethe animal; that is why superiority has been accordedin humanity not to the sex that brings forth but tothat which kills. 9Thus, if male is everywhere (unconsciously) associ-ated with culture, and female seems closer to nature,the rationale for these associations is easy to grasp,

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merely from considering the implications of the physio-logical contrast between male and female. At the sametime, however, woman cannot be consigned fully to thecategory of nature, for it is perfectly obvious thatshe is a full-fledged human being, endowed with humanconsciousness just as man is; she is half of the humanrace, without whose cooperation the whole enterprisewould callapse. She may seem more in the possessionof nature than man, but, having consciousness, she thinksand speaks; she generates, communicates, and manipulatessymbols, categories, and values. She participates inhuman dialogues not only with other women, but alsowith men. As Levi-Strauss says, woman could neverbecome just a sign and nothing more, since even in aman's world she is still a person, and since insofaras she is defined as a sign she must [still] be recognizedas a generator of signs. 10Indeed the fact of woman's full human consciousness,her full involvement in and commitment to culture's pro-ject of transcendence over nature, may, ironically enough,explain another of the great puzzles of the woman prob-lem --woman's nearly universal unquestioning acceptanceof her own devaluation. For it would seem that as aconscious human and a member of culture she has followedout the logic of culture's arguments, and reached cul-ture's conclusions along with the men. As de Beauvoirputs it: For she, too, is an existent, she feels theurge to surpass, and her project is not mere repetitionbut transcendence towards a different future--in herheart of hearts she finds confirmation of the masculinepretensions. She joins the men in the festivals thatcelebrate the successes and victories of the males.Her misfortune is to have been biologically destinedfor the repetition of Life, when even in her own viewLife does not carry within itself its reasons forbeing, reasons that are more important than life it-self.11

In other words, woman's consciousness--her member-ship, as it were, in culture--is evidenced in part bythe fact that she accepts her own devaluation and takesculture's point of view. Because of woman's greaterbodily involvement with the natural functions sur-rounding reproduction, she is seen as more a part ofnature than men. Yet, in part because of her con-sciousness and participation in human social dialogue,

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she is recognized as a participant in culture. Thusshe appears as something intermediate between cul-ture and nature,lower on the scale of transcendencethan men.Woman's physiological functions may thus tend

in themselves to motivate (in the semantic sense)a view of woman as closer to nature, a view that sheherself, as an observer of herself and the world,would tend to accept. Woman creates naturally fromwithin her own being, while men are free to, or forcedto, create artifically, that is, through culturalmeans, and in such a way as to sustain culture. Inaddition, woman's physiological functions have tendeduniversally to limit her social movement, and to con-fine her universally to certain social contextswhichin turn are seen as closer to nature. That is, notonly her bodily processes, but the social situationin which her bodily processes locate her, may havethat significance. And insofar as she is permanentlyassociated (in the eyes of the culture) with thesesocial loci, they add weight (perhaps the decisivepart of the load) to the view of woman as closer tonature. I refer hereof course to woman's confinementto the domestic family context as a natural exten-sion of her lactation processes.Woman's body, like that of all female mammals,generates milk during and after pregnancy for thefeeding of the new-born baby. The baby cannot survivewithout breast milk or some highly similiar formulaat this stage of life. Since it is in direct rela-tion to a particular pregnancy with a particular childthat the mother's body goes through its lactationprocesses, the nursing relationship between motherand child is seen as a natural bond and all otherfeeding arrangements as unnatural and makeshift.Mothers and their children, culture seems to feel,belong together. Further, since children as theyget beyond infancy are not yet strong enough to engagein major work, yet are mobile and unruly and not yetcapable of understanding various dangers, they requiresupervision and constant care. Mother is the obvi-ous person for this task, as an extension of hernatural nursing bond with the children, or becauseshe has a new infant and is involved with child-oriented activities anyway. Her own activities are

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thus circumscribed by the limitations and low levelsof her children's strengths and skills; she is con-fined to the domestic family group; woman's placeis in the home.Woman's association with the domestic circle con-tributes to her being seen as closer to nature inseveral ways. In the first place, infants and childrenmight easily be considered part of nature. Infantsare barely human and utterly unsocialized; like ani-mals they do not walk upright, they excrete withoutcontrol, they do not speak. Even slightly older chil-dren are clearly not yet fully under the sway of cul-ture; they do not yet understand social duties, respon-sibilities, and morals, their vocabulary and their rangeof learned skills is small. One can find implicit recog-nition of an association between children and naturein many cultural practices. For example, the majorityof cultures have initiation rites for adolescents (pri-marily for boys, of course--I will return to thispoint below),the point of which is to move the childritually from a less-than-fully-human state into full-fledged society and culture; and many cultures do nothold funeral rites for children who die at early ages,on the explicit notion that they are not yet full socialbeings. It is ironic that the rationale for boys'initiation rites in many cultures is that the boysmust be purged of the defilement accrued from beingaround mother and other women so much of the time, whenin fact it might be the case that some of the women'sdefilement derives from being around children so muchof the time.The second major problematic implication of women'sclose association with the domestic ambiance derivesfrom certain structural conflicts between the familyand the society at large in any social system. The im-plications of the domestic/social opposition in rela-tion to the position of women have been cogently devel-oped by Rosaldo12 and I merely wish to show its rele-vance to the present argument. The notion that thedomestic unit--the biological family charged with repro-ducing and socializing new members of the society--isopposed to the social entity--the superimposed networkof alliances and relationships which is the society,is also the basis of Levi-Strauss' argument in TheElementary Structures of Kinship. Levi-Strauss argues

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not only that this opposition is present in every socialsystem, but further that it has the significance ofthe opposition between nature and culture. The uni-versal incest prohibition and its ally, the rule ofexogamy, ensures that the risk of seeing a biologi-cal family become established as a closed system isdefinitely eliminated; the biological group can nolonger stand apart, and the bond of alliance withanother family ensures the dominance of the socialover the biological, and of the cultural over thenatural.13 And while not all cultures articulatea radical opposition between the domestic and thesocial as such, nonetheless it is hardly contestablethat the domestic is always subsumed by the social;domestic units are allied with one another throughthe enactment of rules which are logically at a higherlevel than the units themselves, and which create anemergent unit--society--which is logically at a higherlevel than the procreative units of which it is com-posed.

Now, since women are associated with and indeedmore or less confined to the domestic milieu, theyare identified with this lower order of social/culturalorganization. What are the implications of this forthe way they are viewed? First, if the specificallybiological (reproductive) function of the family isstressed, as in Levi-Strauss' formulation, then thefamily, and hence woman, is identified with naturepure and simple, as opposed to culture. But this isobviously too pat; the point seems more adequatelyformulated as follows: the family (and hence woman)represents lower-level, socially fragmenting, particu-laristic sorts of concerns, as opposed to inter-familial relations, which represent higher-level,integrative, universalistic sorts of concerns. Sincemen lack a natural basis (nursing, generalized tochild care) for a familial orientation, their sphereof activity is defined at the level of interfamilialrelations. And hence, so the cultural reasoning seemsto go, men are the natural proprietors of religion,ritual, politics, and other realms of cultural thoughtand action in which universalistic statements of spiri-tual and social synthesis are made. Thus men are iden-tified not only with culture, in the sense of all hum-an creativity, as opposed to nature; they are identi-

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fied in particular with Culture in the old-fashionedsense of the finer and higher aspects of human thought--art, religion, law, etc.Once again, the logic of cultural reasoning here,aligning woman with infra-culture and man with culture,is clear, and, on the surface, quite compelling. Atthe same time, woman cannot be fully consigned to nature,for there are aspects of her situation, even withinthe domestic context, which undeniably demonstrate herparticipation in the cultural process. It goes withoutsaying, of course, that except for nursing new-borninfants (and even here artificial nursing devices cancut the biological tie), there is no reason why it hasto be mother as opposed to father or anyone else whoremains identified with child care. But even assumingthat other practical and emotional reasons conspireto keep woman in that sphere, it is possible to showthat her activities there could as logically put hersquarely in the category of culture, thus demonstratingthe relative arbitrariness of defining her as lesscultural than men. For example, woman not only feedsand cleans up after children in a simple caretakeroperation--she is in fact the primary agent of theirsocializati.on. It is she who transforms the newborninfant from a mere organism into a cultured human,teaching it manners and the proper ways to behavein order to be a bonafide member of the culture. Onthe basis of her socializing functions alone, sheis as purely a candidate to be a representative ofculture as anyone might be. Yet in virtually everysociety there is a point at which the socializatiorof boys is transferred to the hands of men. The boysare considered, in one set of terms or another, notto have been really socialized yet; their entreeto the realm of fully human (social, cultural) statuscan be accomplished only by men. We can still seethis in our own schools, where there is a gradualinversion of proportion of female to male teachersas one progresses up through the grades; most kinder-garten teachers are female, most university professorsare male.14

Or again, we might look at cooking. In the over-whelming majority of societies cooking is the woman'swork. No doubt this stems from practical considera-tions--since she has to stay at home with the baby,

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it is convenient that she perform the chores thatare centered in the home. But if it is true, as Levi-Strauss has argued,15 that transforming the raw intothe cooked may represent, in many systems of thought,the transition from nature to culture, then here wehave woman aligned with this important culturalizingprocess, which could easily place her in the categoryof culture, triumphing over nature. Yet when a cul-ture (e.g., France or China) develops a tradition ofhaute cuisine-- real cooking as opposed to trivialordinary domestic cooking--the high chefs are almostalways men. Thus the pattern replicates that in thearea of socialization--women perform lower-level con-versions from nature to cutture, but when the culturedcatinguishes a higher level ot the same tunctions,the higher level is restricted to men.In short, we can see once again the source ofwoman's appearing more intermediate than men withrespect to the nature/culture dichotomy. A memberof culture, yet appearing to have stronger and moredirect connections with nature, she is seen as some-thing in between the two categories.The notion that women have not only a differentbody and a different social locus from men, but alsoa different psychic structure, is most controversial.I would like to argue that she probably does have adifferent psychic structure, but I will draw heavilyon a paper by Chodorow which argues convincingly thatthat psychic structure is not innate, but rather isgenerated by the facts of the probably universal fe-male socialization experience. Nonetheless, my pointis that, if we grant such a thing as the (non-innate)feminine psyche, that psyche has certain characteris-tics that would tend to reinforce the cultural viewof woman as closer to nature.It is important that we specify that aspect ofthe feminine psyche which is really the dominant anduniversal aspect. If we say emotionality or irra-tionality, we come up against those traditions invarious parts of the world in which women functionallyare, and are seen as, more practical, pragmatic, andthis-worldly than the men. The relevant, non-ethno-centric dimension seems to be that of relative con-creteness vq. relative abs+-ractness- the (nD-ijrnate)feminine personality tends to get involved with concrete

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feelings, things. and people, rather than with abstractentities: it tends toward personalism and particularism;Chodorow accepts a view of the feminine personalityalong these lines; she states that female ego quali-ties...include more flexible ego boundaries (i.e., lessinsistent self-other distinctions), present orienta-tion rather than future orientation, and relativelygreater subjectivity and less detached objectivity.She cites various studies which have tended to con-firm that this is indeed a relatively accurate pictureof the female personality; these studies are pri-marily taken from Western society, although Chodorowsuggests that in a broad way the difference betweenmale and female personality--roughly, men as moreobjective or category-oriented, women as more sub-jective or person-oriented--are nearly universal. 16The thrust of Chodorow's very elegantly arguedpaper is that these differences are not innate orgenetically programmed, but arise from nearly uni-versal features of family structure, [namely] thatwomen are largely or entirely responsible for earlychild care and for (at least) later female socializa-tion, [and that this is] a crucial asymmetry in maleand female development. She introduces the object-relations theorists' distinction between personaland positional identification as psychological pro-cesses, personal identification being diffuseidentification with the general personality, behavioraltraits, values, and attitudes of someone one lovesor admires, positional identification being iden-tification with specific aspects of another's role,rather than with the whole person.17 Chodorow arguesthat, because the mother is the early socializer ofboth boys and girls, both develop personal identifi-cation with her. The boy however must ultimatelyshift to a masculine role identity, which involvesbuilding an identification with the father. Sincefather is almost always more remote than mother(he is rarely involved in child care, and perhapsworks away from the home much of the day), buildingan identification with father involves a positionalmale role as a collection of abstract elements,rather than a personal one with father as a realindividual. Further, as the boy enters the largersocial world, he finds a world in fact organized

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around more abstract and universalistic criteria,18as indicated in the previous section; thus his earliersocialization prepares him for, and is reinforcedby, the type of social experience he will have.For girls on the other hand the personal identi-fication with mother created in early infancy canpersist into the process of learning female roleidentity. Because mother is immediate and presentto the daughter during the learning of role identity,

learning to be a woman...involves the continuityand development of a girl's relationship to hermother, and is based on generalized personal iden-tification with her rather than on an attempt tolearn externally defined roles categories. 9This pattern of course prepares the girl for, andis fully reinforced by, her central role in laterlife--motherhood; she will become involved in theworld of women, characterized by few formal roledifferentiations,20 and specifically in relation-ships with her children involving again personalidentification, and so the cycle begins anew.Chodorow demonstrates, to my satisfaction atleast, that the source of the feminine personalitylies in social structural arrangements rather thaninnate differences. But, for my purposes, the sig-nificant point is that, insofar as a feminine per-sonality, characterized by personalism and particu-larism, has been a nearly universal fact, albeit anunconscious by-product of social rrangements, thenhaving such a psyche may have contributed to theuniversal view of women as somehow less culturalthan men. That is, woman's dominant psychic modesof relating would incline her to enter into rela-tionships with the world that culture might seeas being more like nature, immanent and embeddedin things as given, rather than, like culture, tran-scending and transforming things through the super-imposition of abstract categories and transpersonalvalues. Woman's relationships to her objects tendto be, like nature, relatively unmediated, moredirect, whereas men not only tend to relate in amore mediated way, but in fact, ultimately, oftenrelate more consistently and strongly to the mediat-ing categories and forms than to the persons orobjects themselves.

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If women indeed have this sort of psyche (albeitas a product of social arrangements), it is notdifficult to see how it would lend weight to aview of them as being closer to nature. Yetat the same time, this sort of psychic mode un-deniably plays a powerful and important role inthe cultural process. For though unmediated related-ness is in some sense at the lowest end of thespectrum of human spiritual functions, embedded andparticularizing rather than transcending and synthe-sizing, that quality of relatedness also stands atthe upper end of that spectrum. That is, motherstend to be committed to their children as individuals,regardless of sex, age, beauty, clan affiliation,or other sorts of categories in which the childmight participate. Now, any relationship whichhas this quality--not just mother and child of course,but any sort of highly personal, relatively unmedia-ted commitment--may be seen as a challenge to cul-ture and society from below, insofar as it repre-sents the fragmentary potential of individual loyal-ties over the solidarity of the group. But it mayalso be seen as embodying the cement or synthesizingagent for culture and society from above, in thatit represents generalized human values above andbeyond particular social category loyalties. Everysociety must have social categories that transcendpersonal loyalties, but every society must also gen-erate a sense of ultimate moral unity for all membersabove and beyond those social categories. Thus thatpsychic mode which seems to be typical of women, whichtends to disregard categories and to seek communion 21directly and personally with others, while appearinginfra-cultural from one point of view, is at the sametime associated with the highest levels of the cul-tural process. And thus, too, once again, we see asource of woman's apparent greater ambiguity with re-spect to culture and nature.

My primary purpose here has been to attempt toexplain the universal secondary status of women. In-tellectually and personally, I felt strongly challengedby this problem; I felt it had to be dealt with beforean analysis of woman's position in any particular so-ciety could be undertaken. Local variables of economy,

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ecology, history, political and social structure, valuesand world-view--these could explain variations withinthat universal, but they could not explain the univer-sal itself. And if we were not to accept the ideologyof biological determinism, then explanation, it seemedto me, could only proceed by reference to other uni-versals of the human cultural situation. Thus thegeneral outlines of the approach--although not ofcourse the particular solution offered--were deter-mined by the problem itself, and not by any predi-lection on my part for global abstract structuralanalysis.I argued that the universal devaluation of womencould be explained by postulating that woman is seenas closer to nature than men, men being seen asmore unequivocally occupying the high ground of cul-ture. The culture-nature scale is itself a productof culture, culture being seen as a special processthe minimum definition of which is the transcendence,by means of systems of thought and technology, ofthe natural givens of existence. This of course isan analytic definition, but I argued that at somelevel every culture incorporates this notion in oneform or another, if only through the performance ofritual as an assertion of the human ability to manipu-late those givens. In any case, the core of thepaper has been concerned with showing why woman mighttend to be assumed, over and over, in the most di-verse sorts of world-views, and in cultures of everydegree of complexity, to be closer to nature thanmen. Woman's physiology, more involved more of thetime with species life; woman's association withthe structurally subordinate domestic context, chargedwith the crucial function of transforming animal-like infants into cultured beings; woman's psyche,appropriately molded to mothering functions by herown socialization, and tending toward greater person-alism and less mediated modes of relating--all thesefactors make woman appear to be rooted more directlyand deeply in nature. At the same time, however,her membership and fully necessary participationin culture is recognized by culture and can neverbe denied. Thus she is seen as something in betweenculture and nature, occupying an intermediate posi-tion.

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This intermediacy, further, has several implica-tions for analysis, depending upon how it is read.First, of course, it answers my primary question ofwhy woman is everywhere seen as lower than men, foreven if she is not seen as nature pure and simple,she is still seen as achieving less transcendenceof nature than men. Here intermediate simply meansmiddle status on a hierarchy of being from cultureto nature.

Second, intermediate may have the significanceof mediating, i.e., performing some sort of synthe-sizing or converting function between nature and cul-ture, here seen (by culture) not as two ends of acontinuum, but as two radically different sorts ofprocesses in the world. The domestic unit and hencewoman who in virtually every case appears as its pri-mary representative, is one of culture's crucial agen-cies for the conversion of nature into culture, especial-ly with reference to the socialization of children.Any culture's continued viability depends upon properlysocialized individuals who will see the world in thatculture's terms and adhere more or less unquestioninglyto its moral precepts. The functions of the domesticunit must be closely controlled in order to ensurethis outcome as far as possible; its stability as aninstitution must be placed as far as possible beyondquestion. We see this protection of the integrityand stability of the domestic group in the powerfultaboos against incest, matricide, parricide, fratri-cide,22 and so forth. These sorts of injunctions areclearly so vital for society that they are made toappear rooted in the fundamental order of existence;to violate them is to act unnaturally, and thesanctions are often automatic and supernatural ra-ther than merely social and dependent on the vagariesof human moral will. In any case, insofar as womanis virtually universally the primary agent of social-ization, and is seen as virtually the embodiment ofthe functions of the domestic group, she will tendto come under the heavier restrictions and circum-scriptions which surround that unit. Her (culturallydefined) intermediate position between culture andnature, here having the significance of her media-tion (i.e., performing conversion functions) betweenculture and nature, would thus account not only for

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her lower status, but for the greater restrictionsplaced upon her activities. In virtually every cul-ture, her permissible sexual activities are moreclosely circumscribed than man's, she is offereda much smaller range of role choices, and she isafforded direct access to a far more limited rangeof the social institutions. Further, she is almostuniversally socialized to have (and the contextsshe lives in as an adult reinforce her having) anarrower and generally more conservative set of atti-tudes and views than men; this of course is anothermode of restriction, and would clearly be relatedto her vital function for society of producing well-socialized members of the group.

Finally, woman's intermediate position may havethe implication of greater symbolic ambiu_ity.23The point here is not so much her location betweenculture and nature, as the fact of marginality pese in relation to the centers of culture, and theambiguity of meaning which is inherent in a margi-nal position. If we tnink of the margins of cul-ture as a continuous periphery, rather than as upperand lower boundaries, we can understand the notionthat extremes, as we say, meet--that they are easilytransformed into one another in symbolic thouqht,and hence seem unstable and ambiguous.These points are quite relevant to an understand-ing of cultural symbolism and imagery concerningwomen. As we know, female imagery in cultural con-structs of various kinds is astonishingly variablein meaning; frequently within a single cultural tra-dition it embodies radically divergent and even polar-ized ideas. In the discussion of the female psyche,I said that the psychic mode associated with womenseems to stand both at the bottom and the top ofthe scale of human modes of relating. That modetends to cause involvement more directly with othersin themselves than as as representatives of socialcategories of one kind or another; this mode canbe seen either as ignoring (and thus subverting)or transcending (and thus achieving a higher syn-thesis of) those social categories, depending uponhow culture cares to look at it for any given pur-pose. Thus we can account easily for both the sub-versive female symbols--witches, evil eye, menstrualpollution, castrating mothers--and the feminine sym-26



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bols of transcendence--mother goddesses, mercifulsavioresses, female symbols of justice, and thestrong presence of feminine symbolism (but not actualwomen) in the realms of art, religion, ritual, andlaw. Further we can understand the penchant ofpolarized feminine symbols, like all marginal symbols,to transform into one another in rather magical ways:the whore, it seems, can be redeemed to sainthoodmore easily than the faithful housewife.If woman's (culturally viewed) intermediacy betweenculture and nature has this implication of general-ized ambiguity of meaning characteristic of marginalphenomena, then we are in a better position to accountfor those cultural and historical inversions inWiiilcn womlen are in some way or another symbolicailyaligned with culture and men wlth nature. A numberot cases come to mind: the Siriono, among whom,according to Ingham, nature, the raw, and malenessare opposed to culture, the cooked, and female-ness; 24 Nazi Germany, in which women were saidto be the guardians of culture and morals; Euro-pean courtly love, in which man was said to bethe beast and woman the pristine exalted object--a pattern of thinking that persists, for example,among modern Spanish peasants;25 and there areundoubtedly other cases of this sort. These in-stances (in fact, of course, all cultural symbolicconstructs) still require detailed analysis ofcultural data, but the Roint of woman's qeneralizedmarginality with respect to culture, and particu-larly tne polarized ambiguity, from the Doint ofview of culture, of %he reminine lmoae of interper-sonal relations, may at least lay the groundworkfor such analyses.In short, the postulate that woman is viewed ascloser to nature than man has several implicationsfor further analysis, and can be read in severaldifferent ways. If femaleness is read simply asa middle position on the scale of culture to nature,then it is still seen as lower than culture andthus accounts for the pan-cultural assumption thatwomen are lower than men in the order of things.If it is read as a mediating element in the culture-nature relationship, then it may account in partfor the cultural tendency not merely to devaluewomen but to circumscribe and restrict their func-

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tions, since culture must maintain control overits (pragmatic and symbolic) mechanisms for theconversion of nature into culture. And if it isread as an ambiguous status between culture andnature, the ambiguity may help to account for thefact that, in specific cultural ideologies and sym-bolizations woman can occasionally be categorizedas culture, and can in any event be assigned widelydivergent and even polarized meanings in symbolicsystems. Middle status, mediating functions, ambig-uous meaning--all are different readings, for dif-ferent contextual purposes, of woman's assigned inter-mediate status between nature and culture.

Ultimately, of course, it must be stressed thatthe whole scheme is a construe of culture ratherthan a given of nature. Woman is not in realityany closer to (nor farther from) nature than man--both have consciousness, both are mortal. But thereare certainly reasons why she appears to be thatway. The result is a vicious circle: various aspectsof woman's situation (physical, social, psychological)lead to her being seen as closer to nature, whilethe view of her as closer to nature is embodied ininstitutional forms that regenerate her situation.The implications for social change are similiarlycircular: a different cultural view can grow onl,out of a different social actuality, a differentsocial actuality can grow only out of a differentcultural view.Women cannot change their bodies. But it seemsunlikely that the physiological different betweenmen and women would be adequate to motivate the de-valued view of women were that view not lent furtherweight by the social and psychological variables dis-cussed above. While I am not prepared to put fortha detailed program of social and cultural renovation,it seems clear that the way out of the circle involvessociety's allowing women to participate in, and wom-en's actively appropriating, the fullest range ofsocial roles and activities available within the cul-ture. Men and women can, and must, be equally involvedin projects of creativity and transcendence. Only thenwill women easily be seen as aligned with culture, inculture's ongoing dialectic with nature.

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Notes1. The first version of that paper was presentedin October 1972 as a lecture in the course Women:Myth and Reality at Sarah Lawrence College. I re-ceived helpful comments from the students and frommy co-teachers in the course--Joan Gadol, Eva Kollisch,and Gerda Lerner. A short version of the lecture wasdelivered at the American Anthropological Associationmeetings in Toronto, November 1972. In the interim,I received excellent critical comments from Karen Blu,Robert Paul, Michelle Rosaldo, and Terence Turner,and the present version of the paper, in which thethrust of the argument has been rather significantlychanged, was written in response to those comments.I of course retain responsibility for its final form,which will appear in Michelle Rosaldo and Louise Lam-phere, eds., Woman, Culture and Society (Stanford:Stanford University Press)later this year. The paperis dedicated to Simone de Beauvoir; The Second Sex,published in 1949, remains in my opinion the bestsingle comprehensive statement of the woman problem.

2. R. G. H. Siu, The Man_of Many Qualities (Cam-bridge: M.I.T. Press, 1968), p. 2.3. Robert Lowie, The Crow Indians (New York: Rine-hart and Co., 1956), pp. 61, 44.While we are on the subject of oppression of vari-ous kinds, we might note that Lowie secretly boughtthis doll, the most sacred object in the tribal reper-toire, from its custodian, the widow of Wrinkled-face.She asked $400 for it, but this price was far beyond[Lowie's] means, so he ultimately got it for $80 (p.300).4. Sherry B. Ortner, Sherpa Purity, American Anthro-folo ist 75:49-63; and Ortner, Purification Beliefs andPractices, Encyclopedia Britannica (forthcoming).5. Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex (New York: Ban-tam Books, 1961), pp. 60, 24, 24-27 and passim, 239.6. Ibid., p. 31.7. Ibid., pp. 58-59.

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8. Indeed, it is one of the more egregious injusticesof cultural thought that, in most cultural symbolicconcordances, woman is associated with death ratherthan with life.9. Ibid.10. Claude Levi-Strauss, The Elementary Structures ofKinship, trans., J. H. Bell and J. R. von Sturmer, ed.,R. Needham (Boston: Beacon Press, 1969), p. 496.11. De Beauvoir, Second Sex, p. 59.12. Michelle Z. Rosaldo, Introduction, in Rosaldoand Lamphere, Woman.13. Levi-Strauss, Elementary Structures, p. 479.14. I remember having my first male teacher in fifthgrade, and I remember being excited about that--itwas somehow more grown-up.15. Claude Levi-Strauss, The Raw and the Cooked,trans. J. and D. Weightman (New York: Harper andRow, 1969).16. Nancy Chodorow, Family Structure and FemininePersonality, in Rosaldo and Lamphere, Woman, pp. 14,1. (Page numbers of articles cited from Woman referto manuscript pagination.)17. Ibid., p. 26.18. Rosaldo, Introduction, pp. 17-18; Chodorow,

Family Structure, p. 15.19. Chodorow, Family Structure, p. 9.20. Rosaldo, Introduction, p. 18.21. Chodorow, Family Structure, p. 13, followingDavid Bakan, The Duality of Human Existence (Boston:Beacon Press, 1966).22. Nobody seems to care much about sororicide.

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23. Rosaldo, Introduction.24. John M. Ingham, Are the Siriono Raw or Cooked?American Anthropologist 73:1092-1099.

Ingham's discussion is rather ambiguous itself,since women are also associated with animals: ...the contrasts man/animal and man/woman are evidentlysimilar...hunting is the means of acquiring women aswell as animals. (p. 1095) A careful reading of hisdata suggests that both women and animals are mediatorsbetween nature and culture in this tradition.25. Julian Pitt-Rivers, People of the Sierra (Chicago:University of Chicago Press, 1961); and Rosaldo,Introduction.

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Ortner - Is Male to Female as Nature is to Culture

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