Assumption About Domination [Strathern]

From The Gender Of The Gift by Marilyn Strathern, 1990 [1988], pp 328-9.

Active and passive. Men's advantage does not of itself lie in the constitution of action; men and women may act with equal assertion. At once I encounter the literary problem. Going against the grain of a language is going against its own aesthetic conventions: how one makes certain forms appear. I have claimed that Melanesian men and women do not stand in an irreducibly active and passive relation to one another. Indeed, as the analysis of cause and effect relations indicated, since being a (passive) cause is to have been at an earlier stage an (active) agent, the positions are reversible. But when it comes to writing about concrete instances, the symmetry seems to disappear.

It was argued earlier in this chapter that there is a sense in which men's collective endeavours are directed towards the same reproduction of relations of domestic kinship as concern women. And here lies the intractable Western aesthetic. It conjures a quite inappropriate gender symbolism. If I say that men's exchanges are oriented towards their wives' domestic concerns, then the statement will be read as men appropriating those concerns and turning them to their own use. If I say that women's domestic work is oriented towards their husbands' exchanges, then this will be read conversely, not as their appropriating men's activities but as being subservient to them. I know of no narrative device that will overcome this skewing, because it inheres in the very form of the ideas in which we imagine men's and women's powers.

On the one hand it is important to appreciate just how Melanesian men and women may be seen to be the causes of one another's acts. On the other hand, in order to scrutinize the relationship between these ideas and domination as such, the one move to avoid is working into the analysis of these ideas any assumption about domination. Yet the active/passive (subject/object) skewing of Western gender symbolism makes this separation hard to sustain. I repeat the point. If I say Highlands men are regarded as the cause of their wives' giving birth, then this will imply in the mind of the Western reader that they exercise a superior agency. If I say that Highlands women are regarded as the cause of men's transactions with one another, then this will imply their inferior, object-like status, as instruments of men's exchanges or as provisioners of them.

This aesthetic impasse derives from the Western proclivity to personify convention, to seek the authors of rules, and to reduce images to dogma. Take the specific example of the Eastern Highlands beliefs about procreation: indigenously women are said to be vessels for men who implant the fetus. A woman's act of giving birth is thus an act 'for' her husband; this can be read by the outsider as male dogma. Indeed, it gives rise to anthropological interpretations that are paradoxical from a Melanesian point of view, namely that the the woman is acting in a passive way. Concomitantly, male dogma is also read into the way in which men imitate the act of birth in the course of initiating boys. Outsiders do not consider this female dogma or men as passive in this context; it may even be reported as a kind of afterthought that the purpose of the rites was to make the boys into husbands 'for' the women.