CROSS CULTURAL RESEARCHES, POLITICAL ECONOMIES and the GENDERS of ANTHROPOLOGIES

by Hugh M. Lewis

A Thematic History of Anthropology as Collectivizing/Relativizing Dialectic:

Crudely, a thematic history of anthropological thought maybe set in six ages. The Classical-Ecclesiastical Age endured form Herodotus into the Renaissance. The Age of Discovery renewed curiosity in the Noble Savage and the Garden of Eden, becoming the Romantic Age of Montesquieu and Rousseau. The Industrial Revolutionary Age brought the Age of Enlightenment-Evolutionary Theory of Lewis Henry Morgan, Auguste Comte, George Spencer, Emile Durkheim, Edward Tylor and James Fraser. Then followed German American culture-history of Franz Boas and British structural-functionalism of B. Malinowski and R. Radcliffe-Brown. World War 2 witnessed the reinvention of technology and the renewed importance of the Age of Comparative Eco-evolutionary Systems Science. The Vietnam Experience ushered us into the Post-modern Age with a new convergence of Marxist, Feminist, Ecological, Ethnic and Structuralist Theory, destructing down to the present "Reflexiveness'. During each age something important was happening in the world which reverberated in things important in Anthropological Thought--it has been a western history of contact with the nonwestern world. The ages were constituted by an unfolding dialectic of Anthropological Geist between collectivizing and relativizing periods and images of the world and anthropology's place within it--from its development Anthropological Thought emerged from the mists of crude stereotypes into the mystifications of sophisticated metaphors of Identity and Difference.

The dialectic has always been continuous through the ages. The main theme has always been a collectivizing orientation of a cross cultural, evolutionary framework--from the Great Chain of Being to modern multi-linear evolutionary frameworks--within which the western ego could be conveniently configured in context with the 'other'. Relativizing Ages were defined in antithetical reaction to preceding collectivizing orientations and were followed by a new collectivizing synthesis. Each age contains its own contrapuntal contradictions between collectivizing and relativizing tendencies in any context of anthropological discourse, but collectivizing orientations are always predominant. What determines an Age is anthropology's primary relationship to the world. The disciplinary development of anthropology as a 'scientific paradigm' is reflected by this dialectical movement between collectivizing and relativizing orientations.

We have been in a relativizing Age of Anthropology that has thematic representation in ideologies of cross-cultural Research, Political Economy and an Anthropology of Gender among other perspectives and it is in terms of these themes that the collectivizing/relativizing dialectics of Anthropology Thought will be explored.

Anthropology will next come upon a new collectivizing Synthesis in which schemes of cultural evolution and cross cultural comparison will be reinvented and revitalized. This development must await the steady March of Global Events which will fundamentally change the west's relationship within the world. Standing upon the edge of history, we can only speculate on what such transformations might be like. The History of Anthropological Thought has not only been a History of Enlightenment about Humankind, but it has been a record of humankind's struggle toward Collective Emancipation from the tyranny of World Evil, reflected in the Emancipation of Anthropology from the intellectual/methodological bondage of its own collective ignorance.

******

1. Broadly, cross-cultural method is comparison between cultures, premised upon the principle that social phenomena is determined by general laws. Anthropology has always been 'cross cultural' in the implicit and explicit comparison of other cultures with our own--this is one of its distinguishing hallmarks. Even at its most Boasian, anthropology still promoted a narrow inductive historical particularism only within a grander strategy of eventually mastering cross-cultural comparison of groups, their aspects or attributes. But anthropology was also interested in more than merely exporting preconceptions and constructions of culture, society and personality primarily derived from a western European tradition. Trying to account for a wide range of cultural variation, anthropology has long sought a broader based cross-cultural framework by which to configure its general principles.

Cross-cultural research in the narrower, explicit sense of empirical testing of theories of cultural patterning by systematic correlation of traits of a worldwide sample was first applied in anthropology by Edward Tylor in his 'adhesions'--cross-cultural correspondences of associated traits. It was Tylor as well who first confronted 'Galton's problem' of distinguishing independent traits from correspondences due to cultural transmission. The 'California's School' of Alfred Kroeber then applied cross-cultural research in a regional framework--gathering as much data as possible on as many cultures within regions and applying a variety of coefficients to measure this intercultural relationships. The symmetrical matrices resulting from this collection were then manipulated in order to define trait clusters of closely related cultures, the aim of which was the reconstruction of the histories of the 'culture areas'.

This empirical, inductive regional approach is distinguished from the 'Hologeistic' or 'Whole World' method based on a worldwide sample of cultural data selected in accordance with a priori postulates drawn from functionalist and psychological theory, often subsequently revised. The 'Yale School' of Hologeistic Studies, associated with George Peter Murdock, culminated in the Human Relations Area Files (HRAF). This approach was more interested in functional interrelationships of parts of specific cultures than in the problem of history, based upon factor analysis and correlational matrices of a worldwide sample of data ordered into indexical tables and tabulated with standard codes. With this system a researcher works with second hand information, depending upon the skill of the original encoder. It has been applied to a wide range of theoretical problems from studies of warfare to socialization, medical beliefs, and disease attribution. 'Proxy measures'--'instruments of the indirect observation of the past'--such as floor-plan as evidence of kinship pattern and household organization and dwelling area for estimates of population, have enabled cross-cultural research to be applied within an archaeological framework.

Murdock's HRAF is a cross-disciplinary approach, based upon a wide variety of data drawn from many different sources and forming a sample of standardized variables indexing and cross referencing a range of cultural traits--allowing key variables to be randomly or selectively 'lifted' from their cultural context to be related to similar variables from other cultures. This approach remains 'synchronic' and 'a-historical' in needing to 'control' for the 'confounding effects' of history. "Causal inferences from cross-sectional data are weaker than causal inferences from longitudinal data, yet cross-cultural data sets are basically cross-sectional, with the added quirk that the societies are all observed at different points in time. Time is in some ways the most difficult problem to deal with, and one that anthropology tends to ignore, perhaps because of the functionalist tradition of synchronic analysis." (Burton and White: 148) It was recognition of this weakness of comparative studies that lead Franz Boas to caution against premature classification and comparison, and which led to the notion of Cultural Relativism, the second important contribution of Anthropological Thought, as an antidote to intellectual ethnocentrism. The collectivizing/relativizing dialectic between cross-cultural methods and the particularistic methodologies of cultural relativism unfolded about a central axis of Anthropological Thought as both a successive excoriation and liberation of theory from its own implicit biases and in the refinement and sophistication of more precise and valid comparative techniques and methodologies.

Drawbacks to the Hologeistic method include: 1) The unwieldy volume of data of any 'global compendium'. 2) Nonequivalence of data derived from non-contemporaneous colonial era sources. 3) Unevenness between encoders and encodings. 4) High/low inference values of different kinds of variables. 5) Unevenness between different users of the data. These problems are the dilemma of the definitional ambiguity of classificational constructs (variables) used for encoding which results in less than 'standard' outcomes. 'Standardization' of data leads to a dilemma in which increasing reliability is counterbalanced by decreasing validity--the statistical 'Galton's problem' of confounding 'independent variables' due to historical influence. This is the problem of 'real world relevance' related to the criticism of functional relativity, or the problems of comparing 'apples and oranges'.

"Cross-cultural research provides an essential component of valid generalizations about human societies. It relies on continual rethinking and reintegration with other streams in anthropology and comparative social science by practitioners from a wide range of social sciences. The articulation of different theoretical positions often leads to the cumulative integration of research findings…" (Burton and White; 144) No authentic anthropologist can avoid 'cross-cultural' research in either the implicit or explicit sense, or deny the contributions of comparative studies to Anthropological Theory. The strengths of the HRAF, its breadth and comprehensivity, its analytical rigor and precision, its cross-sectional and polythetical classificatory design and idexical and cross referencing framework, allow the anthropologists to discover plausible linkages between 'variables' which might have otherwise never been imagined. Its conclusions and contributions far outweigh the disadvantages of its use. But it remains in the final analysis a limited system that is an indispensable component of any research program as long as it is used in conjunction with other methodologies and as long as it is used to support (or refute) conclusions derived by other means. The system itself cannot ask or answer its central dilemma of real world relevance. Like any other system, it will be only as useful as the person who uses it wisely.

2. Political economy has been a fashionable catch all applicable to almost anything and therefore relevant to almost nothing. There are several brands of Political Economy, ranging from New Political Economy of political decision making and policy studies through Dependency and World Systems Theory to Marxist and neo-Marxist approaches. Political economy is not a central theoretical orientation but an interdisciplinary framework whose basic criteria is depicting of systematic interrelationships between economics and politics. It is not enough to gloss such connections as instances of 'Political Economy'--it is necessary to show precisely how and why such connections occur within specific and general contexts.

Connections between politics and economies are represented as either causally determinative or systematically interactive--the former, simplifying approach appeals to action, promotion of agendas, rhetoric and common sense satisfaction, while the second approach is more sophisticated but clumsier to deal with if 'solutions to problems' are sought. The weaknesses of each are the strengths of the other.

Political Economy has unfolded as a dialectic between the thesis of 'orthodox liberalism' of 'methodological individualism' (society is the cumulative outcome of the pursuit of individual interests) and the antithetical critique of the fundamental autonomy of individual action by 'methodological collectivism' (society shapes behavior). There is further analytical tension between 'economism' (political process is the outcome of nonpolitical social forces of class or interest groups) and 'politicism' ('political rationality' is independent of economic interest and 'power' shapes economy).

The relationship between politics and economics is a basic concern of social theory and is the central theoretical problematic of Political Economy. Economics and politics are incompatible points of view--political science focuses on conflict and coerciveness of power, while economics focuses upon the rational individual within a self maintaining equilibrium of an economic system. The virtue of Political Economy is its dialectical transcendence of the narrow presumptions embedded within either political science or economics.

Before the advent of Classical Economic Theory, social philosophy was always 'political-economic'. 'Pure' economy was the logical outcome of the rational pursuit of self interest, and 'politics' interfered with the invisible hand of the self regulating market economy. Economic Science served a legitimating function of the development of Capitalism. Such 'pure economy' based exclusively on scientific principles of 'economizing rationality' is not an incorrect approach, but it is a very restrictive understanding of economic behavior. Max Weber connected the rise of Capitalism to the 'Spirit of Protestantism', Marcel Mauss showed the metaphor of the 'gift' had broader socio-structural implications of exchange than the marketplace, B. Malinowski's description of the Kula Ring showed that 'marketplace' had other dimensionalities than stock exchanges, K. Polanyi and E. P. Thompsen showed that the rise of industrial capitalism had inexorable 'substantive' consequence more than mere formal rationalization, and John Clammer debated the functions of 'primitive' special purpose money versus the 'general purpose' money characterizing market exchange. These developments led to a formalist/substantivist dialectic within 'Economic Anthropology' until the 'return of the repressed' in the reintroduction of Marxism in the form of 'Political Economic Anthropology'.

The formalist/substantivist dialectic did not transcend the principle of economics as 'endogenously self regulating'. Reintroducing Marxist theory into economic anthropology had a catalytic effect of revitalizing its theory and practice, shifting critical focus to more relevant concerns connecting modern history, the developmental history of 'modernization' and a critique of 'capitalism/colonialism' as a Political Economic World System. This liberated theory from an 'endocentric' preoccupation with the internal dynamics and social structure of economic systems by incorporating an interregional perspective stressing the role of exogenous political economic relations of dominance and dependency between the 'core' and its 'periphery'. A special set of neo-Marxist presuppositions connected regional and local economic relations to historical problems presented by the rise of capitalism on a global scale. These new perspectives remained primarily 'economistic' in stressing the material foundations of power, but they varied in the way they emphasized economizing and politicizing aspects of capitalism.

Until then Economic History was the western history of technological development--'Modernization Theory' was a Euro-American export to the 'underdeveloped' Third World so that the rest may 'catch up' with the west. The actual histories of the west did not really enter into this evolutionary formula for development. "our ignorance of their history leads us to assume that their past and indeed their present resembles earlier stages of the history of the now developed countries." (Andre Gunder-Frank) Underdevelopment was a reflection of backward social structure, curable by heavy doses of western science, seeds, fertilizer, technology, peace corps volunteers, CIA Psyops and the Green Berets, to prevent communist contamination. It is important that this paternalistic protection and promotion of capitalism abroad in the guise of evolutionary modernization was also fundamentally 'anticommunist' in orientation.

Missing was the sense of 'development of underdevelopment' as limited development and retarding structural dependency upon the very 'relations of diffusion' modernization theory promoted--Political Economic acculturation of the rest by the west. Capitalism simultaneously generated development in core metropolises and underdevelopment in peripheral colonies--underdevelopment was not an absence of capitalism but a structural presence of capitalistic development.

Neo-Marxist Political Economy brought into style a terminological theoretical framework of historical descriptivism (modes of production, social relations, forces of production, rates of exploitation, labor theory of value, surplus value, false consciousness, commodity fetishism, etc. which explained well the inequalities, inequities and relations of dominance/dependence between core and periphery, developed and underdeveloped, have's and have not's. political Economic Anthropology promised the empirical 'grounding' of Marxist theory and World Systems Analysis by actual documentation of the effects of Capitalist penetration into peripheral regions, demonstrating concisely how specific relations of local dependency/inequality were 'developed' into entrenched underdevelopment by capitalist exploitation, charting precisely the many pathways from the Third World Manual Labor Reserve to the Modern Mall Consumer Paradise, whether it is garments in LA, hammocks from Latin America or furniture from Southeast Asia.

Marxist Anthropology had the effect of giving the stereotypically village bound 'peasant' and his faithful obedient wife a VIP profile next to the proverbial hunter-gatherer, the chest beating horticulturist and blood feuding pastorialist, by demonstrating how he/she embodied domestically the conflict and tensions of a regional/global Political Economy. Economic Anthropology rediscovered 'primitive economy' and Chayanov's Law via M. Sahlins, Political Economy focused on the problem of ethnic class conflict resolution in the market place, and studies began to proliferate demonstrating unequivocally how propagation and perpetuation of rural urban polarization of poverty and wealth was indirectly linked to political economic domination, bureaucratic encapsulation and economic exploitation. Such studies in the new field of Political Economic Anthropology have now become legend.

3. The rise of Anthropologies of the Gender has been ground shaking, as most anthropology has been virtually written by men, in the male voice, about the male gender. Like Political Economies, it offered a new way of envisioning the world and promised to some a new version of the world. Though always fundamental and universal, gender had remained one of the few facts of difference which anthropology, left for granted. Anthropology underwent a masculine 'crises of identity' when it realized the possible importance of what had been known all along--that the entire world was 50% female and was thus evenly divided into apparently quite unequal halves. For the first time anthropologists had to face the fact of andocentrism and to reconsider the consequences of such male bias for anthropological thought and praxis--Man the Hunter now had to compete with Woman the Gatherer for attention in the world.

An example of such bias is the critique of the representation of 'Venus' figurines in introductory textbooks as symbols of fertility, maternity, procreation and eroticism, highlighted by 'pendulous breasts', 'steatophygyous buttocks', 'broad hips' and 'vulvae', presumably manufactured by males for male purposes associated with 'Mother Goddess', Pleistocene 'pinups' and the sexuality of marked nakedness. This generalizing view predominates in textbooks to the critical absence of alternative interpretations based upon the variability and diversity of shape, pose, somatic detail, ornamentation and provenience of the range of figurines. Failure to account for such variability promotes loose generalizations which reaffirms our own folk models of gender--they represent a 'naturalization' of our own generalizations gender roles and sexuality--and provides no reason for critical reexamination or reveal anything about actual prehistoric gender realities. It only eases our naïve belief that 'things have always been the same' in gender constructions which are 'eternal and unchanging'. This masculist construction sees women existing primarily for sexual and reproductive purposes of men, reduces women to their bare 'essentials' of breasts, buttocks and vulvae, presumes their passivity and denies Paleolithic womanhood its own sentience as human beings. The unconscious acceptance of such a 'script' is a mystification of consciousness--'metaphors of sexual identity' recreate the past in the dominant idioms of the present-the text read into the voiceless figurines as representations of the past are our own preconceptions rooted in the present.

Feminist anthropologists center upon the problem of representation of gender identity--the female other had long been descriptively present, but in 'markedly' unremarkable ways. Dilemma of andocentric sexism could not be simply solved by 'ethnographic accretion' of just 'add women and stir' recipes which were early assumptions of 'female voice and point of view' by the Anthropology of Women--it merely brought women back into view. Muteness is not simply 'voicelessness' or absence or silence of the other in the text, but it is a function of the structure of dominant modes of representations within dominant idioms of discourse and ideologies which inhibit free expression and full realization of alternative models of reality by always structuring world view through the dominant model. The female perspective is blocked at the everyday level of discourse and women therefore cannot effectively account for their world from their own viewpoint--dominant models do not prevent hearing or looking at women, but the world of women cannot be listened to or seen effectively in its own terms.

Male bias occurs at three levels: 1) the bias of the researcher's own expectations and presumptions, 2) the bias based on general male dominance/female subordination in the world, 3) the bias of western culture in which comparative analogies of hierarchy are 'invented' when gender difference and asymmetry are interpreted as sexual inequality and dominance. Feminist deconstruction of this three tiered structure faces the problem of not just recording women but with reworking general anthropological theory and praxis.

The feminist agenda confronts not only the destruction of male bias, but the dilemma of 'female bias' based upon the presumed universal identity of women and their interests, the identity of Difference, which led to early dichotomizations of public/domestic, culture/nature, and dominance/subordination as symbolic and social universals of the male/female world. Furthermore, recognition of female bias back to the recognition of the 'Myth of Male Dominance'. "The recognition of shared oppression is the basis for 'sexual politics' premised on the notion that women as a social group are dominated by men as a social group." The identity of Difference becomes the basis for the elucidation of the differences of identity--it does not necessarily 'take one to know one' otherwise the whole anthropological enterprise is cast in doubt, biological male/female differences and the differences of gender are not necessarily cultural differences, racial differences, interpersonal differences or ethnic differences--the feminist world view of one woman is not necessarily 'isomorphic' with the realities of other women. Presumed universals of public/domestic, culture/nature and dominance/subordination are based on ethnocentric presuppositions of Woman the Nurturer, the 'devaluation' of women as natural, and that difference and asymmetry reflect dominance and inequality, ignoring possibilities of 'separate but equivalent', 'mutual complementarity' and that individuals may be simultaneously wives, sisters and mothers.

Emphasis upon the symbolic construction of female identity begets neglect of social relations of femaleness based on 'what women do' in the world--the sexual division of labor in the world. Women's status is not a function of 'motherhood' or 'nature' but is determined by their access to resources, conditions of their work, distribution of the products of their labor. Domestic spheres of production, kinship and marriage become powerful determinants in the construction of gender identity and the relative status of women--gender becomes negotiated as 'high ritualized' statements on what individual's perceive as particularly salient political-economic concerns. The 'problem of women' becomes part of the 'problem of people' and the western preconception of 'personal identity'--individual women in the world are not necessarily bound by the symbolization of womanhood.

An ethnographic example of the Political Economy of female subordination is the study of the penetration of capitalism relations of production into rural Tahiti. Traditionally, Tahitian women shared power and rank with males--ascriptive rank was more important as an organizing principle than gender in determining differential power and social prerogative. Household production and local economy was characterized by complementary 'mutuality' between men and women as independent producers and consumers. The sexual division of labor was neither rigid not exclusive. Missionaries promoted 'nuclearization' of extended households and discouraged spacing practices of abortion and infanticide. Colonial administrative posts were exclusively a male domain, leading to privileged access to western money, goods and prestige. 'Money gave Authority' in that male political-economic predominance in public spheres led to male dominance in the household. Women's earnings became devalued in relation to male earnings, male consumption priorities and interests took precedence over female priorities and interests. There was a transformation of the domestic production from a subsistence orientation to petty commodity production for regional markets--reflected in the changes of the sexual division of labor and resulting in differential male/female access and control over strategic resources, productive processes and wealth. Domestic economy is a potential arena for conflict and competition as the peasant household embodies an internal contradiction between production and ownership and internal status role identification. Differential power is linked to and derived from control over the means and rewards of production. In this regard men monopolized those areas of commodity production which were tied into wider spheres of exchange, especially copra and vanilla production resulting in the relegation of women's roles to devalued domestic spheres of 'reproduction and domestic maintenance' which did not produce prized 'surplus value'. Women became economically dependent upon men and their labor could therefore be profitably exploited.

But male control in the world is rarely absolute and independent female income may challenge male authority and lead women to press for their own social interests. It is from this Political Economic perspective that some of the historical realities underlying the rise of a feminist reconstruction of the world can be configured. It is not the a feminist world view is unnecessary or less interesting or unimportant or incorrect, but the dilemma of its difference and identity and the reasons for its being in the world may have other purposes than those promoted by 'an insider's frame of reference'--it may be a political revolution of equality based upon an economic revolution of rising expectations.

******

If the reintroduction of Marxist thinking constituted for anthropology a 'return of the repressed' then the inception of the radical importance of gender can be construed as the 'sexual desublimation of displaced libido'. A reflection of male bias of anthropology was a set of preconceptions about women--though some men were weak and many women were strong, maleness is associated with strength and femaleness associated with weakness, that though some women were smarter than many men, males in general were more serious and rational thinkers, while some women have held positions of authority, males in general were more responsible while women were less decisive. Implicit in these preconceptions is the bias that men are inherently more capable, women less talented. Furthermore, for anthropologists, men were 'objective' while women were seen as been more susceptible to emotion, intuitions, 'feelings' and were therefore inherently more subjective. It is not surprising that there prejudices reflect certain basic facets of status class consciousness and basic valuations of literacy versus orality, nor is it surprising that from a biological standpoint, differences of gender are similar to differences of race. It is fitting that these kinds of differences and the status quo their belief perpetuates, should find evolutionary validation in such myths as 'Man the Hunter'. In short, because women were biologically inferior to men, they were inherently less valuable and less interesting 'objects of study' in the anthropological imagination. Women who became anthropologists had to do a man's job of it, and often in the process, had to become 'honorary males'.

The question remains as to what difference does the Difference really make, and how does the difference make a difference. Before the advent of gender into anthropology, it made no difference, as Difference was buried in the collective unconscious of anthropological thought, covered over by the conscious preoccupation with other kinds of difference. From the standpoint of anthropology as a pure and objective science, women did not make as good natural scientists because they were unless they could master in a masculine manner the subjectivity they were inherently prone to. This is a critical difference in a field which values objectivity and strongly devalues subjectivity as scientifically impure and 'polluting'. The professionalization of the anthropological ego strongly emphasized the compartmentalization between objective and subjective involvements. Furthermore, men could be entrusted to venture off into the 'field' without the same risks women were heir to. The consequences of a women 'messing up' would be much more difficult to conceal. Male ego, from boyhood, tends to be validated by exploratory activities and daring exploits--a women's domestic character could only be compromised. Symbolically, this dichotomy is expressed in male symbols which are associated with political, boundary maintenance, external identity functions, while female symbols are associated with sacredness of the internal culture order--the reproductive aspects of culture. The dialectic of the male and female principle has been widely associated with external political and internal religious order of culture, and is a recurrent theme of mythology.

Symbolically, women are the bearers of culture. Man the Hunter provisions Woman the Mother. It is in this sense that the anthropological position of women should be construed as relegated to the relative silence of the background, as normally and acceptably 'hidden from view'. Male anthropologists, as political representatives and emissaries of culture in cross cultural contacts, police the boundaries of cultural identity and probe the boundary identities of other cultures. Furthermore, it was the male role to 'penetrate' into the eternal female 'nature' of another culture, to come to 'know' that culture as an objective insider. This was part of a symbolic tradition of intellectual imperialism and cultural hegemonization, of the exportation of western cultural values abroad as predominant, which makes the historical reality and sexuality of gender difference 'politically impregnated'.

It is in this sense that the issue of gender difference should now make a difference after all the years of obvious difference. Sexual repression was a fundamental part of Christian ideology (sex as pornography but graphic violence as mass expression) and had as its consequence the sublimation of sexuality as 'subjective weakness' and the internalization of mechanisms of control. A set of double standards applied to both male and female identity--male as cad or dad and female as either prostitute or virgin--except that the male prerogative was allowed more public license and sexual solicitude than the female. Men were prone to mess around, but women were either on a pedestal or fallen into disgrace. Status role identity and expectations for males and females were therefore quite different with different social consequences as were the range of behavioral repertories available to both. Human sexuality, as it came to be embodied by femaleness as the love-object/possession of the male, came to have illicit connotations that made discussion of gender relations in the world a normally marked and avoided topic--a subject of nature markedly uninteresting to objective science. Gender relations as a dimension of the expression of human sexuality became 'loaded' with metaphorical salience.

Anthropology as an andocentric male dominated discipline follows from this sublimation of sexuality. Displaced libido is the result of the internalization of this repression, through symbolic identification--its desublimation in the interest of fender is a deliberate effort to recover a lost sense of our identity as 'natural', to restore a balance upset by our own rational self alienation. Part of this desublimation is the intellectualization of sexuality--a reaction formation to the very fact and act of sexual obsessiveness and alienation. Gender becomes not only an acceptable but an obsessively reiterated theme precisely because the repressive mechanisms of our society have been successfully 'internalized' into our collective psyche through the process of status role identification. Desublimation is a symptom of the alienation of our being from our own natural selves--it is important because the controls which have been internalized effectively prevent us from fully realizing our own naturalness. In such a world, we have to plan to be spontaneous, intend to be expressive and to learn how to behave 'naturally'.

Sublimation of displaced libido leads to a denial of sexuality as a need and an investment and symbolic attachment of libidinal energy in non-threatening, neutral objects. Anthropology as a collective representation symbolically attaches itself to the 'Law of the Father' and entails a denial of the 'Body of the Mother' as part of the process of status role identification involving libidinal displacement. It is not difficult to see how embedded our modern world is in the 'Law of the Father' in both symbolic and social ways, nor is it too difficult to see the many ways in which the Law of the Father stand above and comes before the 'Body of the Mother'.

This interpretation is based upon several premises: 1) Anthropology constitutes a social phenomena with its own organizational ethos and nomos. 2) Anthropology like any social phenomena, invests itself with symbol systems of collective representation embodying what it means to be a member of anthropology. 3) To become and remain members of anthropology, people who call themselves or are called anthropologists undergo a process of professionalization and internalization of the systems of collective representation in the psycho social process of status role identification. 4) This process of status role identification involves compartmentalization and the professionalization of Anthropological Ego comes to define itself symbolically in social relations and collective representations between 'self' and reference/counter reference 'other' in terms of in group/out group repression and projection of the repressed. 6) A certain amount of what is intellectualized as important in Anthropological Thought is the symbolic expression of the displaced libido in the identification of the Anthropological Ego. 7) Anthropology is especially susceptible to this problem because it deals focally with cross cultural contact. 8) This informs the basic dialectic of Anthropological Thought as being one of collectivizing/relativizing in its representations of the world and of anthropology within it.

The feminist reaction to the displaced female libido is precisely in terms of the preoccupation and elaboration of gender difference. For women anthropologists, the dialectic of gender has become part and parcel of their own Ego identification as anthropologists. For male anthropologists it has become a stern reminder that they are no longer alone as privileged carriers of anthropological authority in the world, but now much share some of their authority with women. We can see in this a symbolic and social revolution of equality as an expression of a political-economic revolution of rising expectations for women of the first world who are competing with men on a more equal footing in the global market.

Gender, with its own 'classes' or as its own 'ethno-nations' constitute an organizing principle of 'difference' about which exclusive solidarity can be promoted and political economic interests promoted. It is a part of a process of 'global stratification' of competing interest groups in the quest for power and wealth, groups whose loyalties tend to crosscut the traditional boundaries of nation-states. Feminism remains a class tied social phenomena of the first world.

In this sense Feminist Anthropology becomes, from the Political Economic perspective, yet another, somewhat marginalized 'mode of representation' which ideologically reinforces the status quo of class inequality.

The 'Third World' with its mosaic primate cities of slums, high rise flats and luxury hotels, its 'dual economies' and 'plural, poly-ethnic' societies, its heavy handed, nepotistic, under employed and strangling bureaucracies, its imbalanced and underdeveloped economies, its enduring diseases of malnutrition, illness, uneducation and its time bomb of overpopulation, congestion and pollution and resource depletion, has become the stomping ground of the contemporary young idealist/realist neo-Marxist anthropologist as it has come to embody all the evils and corruptions and inequities of the Capitalist World System and the associated problems of development/modernization. From sex tours and airport art, to capitalist factory discipline and third world mother and daughter working in the global factory for the Yankee dollar, to petty, labor intensive 'fringe' economies to illicit underground exploitation of women's nimble fingers, to domestic male domination and female abuse, to one day in the life of Juan Garcia the coffee bean picker to bottle babies, white bread, sugar and canned meat, from Nancita's new clothes to T.I.N.A.'s ironclad 'Thatcher Line', from C.A.R.E. packages to desertification to Cambodian refugees, from A.I.D.'s Solution to Ecocide in Indochina and 'Environmental Terrorism' in the Gulf to Media Imperialism and Amway International to Reader's Digest Sweepstakes and National Geographic and Playboy to Mary Kay and Evelyn Reed, Political Economy provides a handle on the global relevance of Difference and Identity.

Loose and vulgar according to Marx has itself had great metaphorical value in combining with other theoretical orientations (structuralism, feminism, ethnicity, critical theory) and its post Vietnam Age reintroduction coincided with several concurrent transformations of thinking in anthropology. This confluence in the post Vietnam Age stood witness to the Heart of Darkness Horror of the socio-political trauma and moral defeat of Vietnam--it was a period of post traumatic shock in which the doors of perception opened to ideas and realities previously left unspoken as 'taboo' in a pre-Vietnam Butch and Betty Crocker Amerika Cold War Mentality in which the Dream lived on the boob-tube representations of the Duke, Elvis and Trick Dicky. But Marx's inception of into American Academic Anthropology had precursors in the work of Eric Wolf, Sidney Mintz, Gunnar Myrdal, Andre Gundar-Frank and Mark Seldon. Indeed, the anti-colonial history of the Rest perspective was around and available for western intellectual modes of consumption/representation much longer than contemporary theorists may want to acknowledge--we did not invent these histories, we re-appropriated them during a time when our rude reawakening to the cruel realities of Vietnam brought home on TV and Life Magazine did not allow us to sleep on, Dream on and Forget. The 'others' voicelessness was our lack of vision, their mutedness was our Rule of Silence, their Difference was our indifference. Now, in reinventing and re-appropriating Marx in the name of intellectual interest and in the name of USAID and AID, we are left to ask whether Marx remains the master or is merely a marionette of the World System, and whether we have not unwittingly cast the proverbial baby from paradise for the sake of capitalizing on the name of Marxist Theory.

Another dialectical tension has arisen in critical theory itself, between Marxist materialisms and 'late stage capitalist' 'post modern' theory which has had its own intellectual history of 'anti-development' as a problem of constructive 'mentalism'. Modernized Wo-Man has lost her/his 'freedom of mind' usurped within a 'uni-dimensional' Buschian Brave New World Order. In compliance, we have forsaken our moral innocence and human dignity and forfeited our social freedom and human rights. We no longer learn how to be free, but are programmed by 'unfreedom'--freedom is an irrelevant 'unproblem' to people who are 'a-free' in a perfect world of Skinnerian Behaviorism.

The collectivizing/relativizing dialectic can be represented thematically in cross cultural research/historical particularism, in the 'orthodox individualism/methodological collectivism' of Political Economies, and in the dilemma of Difference and Identity in Anthropologies of Gender. It is part of a dialectic which has always informed the paradigmatic development of Anthropological Thought, and is a representation and reflection of changing social realities in the world. The future of this dialectic will prove a matter of which end of Humpty-Dumpty to break first--it will be a Lilliputian war between Big-enders and Small-enders and Gulliver will be the gullible young anthropologist caught between worlds of Difference and Identity.

The dilemma of Identity and Difference which is at the heart of the Anthropology of Gender brings Anthropological Thought reflexively back upon its own historically thematic 'collectivizing/relativizing' dialectic as of central importance in understanding the collective representations of anthropology in relation to the world.

Burton, M. & D. White 1987 'Cross Cultural Surveys Today' in Ann. Review of Anth. 16: 143-165

Frank, Andre Gunder 1969 'The Development of Underdevelopment' in Latin America: Underdevelopment or Revolution: 3-17 New York: Monthly Review Press

Lockwood, Victoria 1988 'Capitalist Development and the Socio-economic Position of Tahitian Peasant Women' in Journal of Anth. Research 44(3): 263-285

McNett, C. 1979 'The Cross Cultural Method in Archaeology' in Advances in Archaeological Method and Theory 2

Moore, H. 1988 Feminism and Anthropology Minneapolis: Univ. of Minneapolis Press

Nelson, S.M. 1990 'Diversity of the Upper Paleolithic 'Venus' Figurines and Archaeological Mythology' in Archaeological Papers of the American Anth. Assc. 2: 11-22

Staniland, M. 1985 'Fad, Theory or Problem?' in What is Political Economy; 1-9 New Haven: Yale Univ.

Swift, Jonathan 1970 Gulliver's Travels W.W. Norton & Co. Inc. New York