Diferenciación Social En Culturas Canela Y Sambia (inglés)

Canela & Sambia

Alexandra Casuso

Gender and Culture

Assignment #2

Spring, 2011

Sambia

The Sambia are a male dominated society in which there is a considerable male bias in every domain of culture life. Women play some important roles, especially in the spiritual domain, but they aren’t awarded any power for fulfilling these roles.

Social Domain

According to Sanday, in order for a society to be considered male dominant, it has to have the following traits: “Expectations that males should be tough, brave and aggressive; the presence of men houses (…); frequent quarreling, fighting, or wife beating; the institutionalization of regular occurrence of rape; and raiding other groups for wives.” The Sambia present all of these traits in their society. The first and second traits, male toughness and men houses, are portrayed in the rites of initiation young boys are subjected to at a very young age, these boys are taken from their mothers to go live in the male houses and learn how to be tough, among other things. The third trait, women beating, is exemplified by this quote “The sound of a women’s body actually being repeatedly struck with a wood plank in he village was not rare and was dreadful to hear amid the moans and pleads for help.” The fourth trait, rape, was not very common, but when it happened, “women were blamed for sexual innuendos that lead to compromising situations.” Finally, raiding other groups for wives was common among the Sambia because women were in short supply due to polygamy and female infanticide.

In addition, women’s menstrual blood is considered to be a pollutant; for this reason, a married couple occupies different sides of the house, and women were sent to special menstrual huts when they were menstruating. A society in which menstrual blood is seen as a pollutant, according to Sanday, “separates men from women and, as such, may be understood a an assertion of separate male and female social spheres.”

Spiritual Domain

The Sambia myth of parthenogenesis, according to Herdt, states that “male and female were created out of an amorphous male being, womanhood was established, and homoerotic fellatio became institutionalized in society.” This creation story shows how men take the inherent procreative power of women and make it theirs by mythicizing a false sense of reproductive control. “Men attempt to neutralize the power they think is inherent in women by stealing it, nullifying it, or banishing it to invisibility, ” says Sanday.

Spiritual power in the Sambia society is represented through Shamans; they have great power and provide heroic hope to the village. Women oftentimes assume the position of shamans. “(It is) very curious that a male-dominated society with a phallic cult should have in the midst women shamans.” The explanation is quite simple, males originally dominated the shaman role, but the harsh environment they live in and the wars of the past left the villages without any shamans to perform healing rituals. Since the role of the shaman was inherited, the female descents of the Shamans started to perform some rituals.

Economic Domain

Men, as hunters, are the providers of meat for the tribe; women gather and cultivate plant foods. Men consider food cultivated and gathered by women as trash food. On the other hand, women consider that men are lazy because women do all the physical work (milk animals, agriculture, etc), while men are sitting in the council houses arranging marriages and such. Sanday explains that in animal oriented societies “although men labor less, the centrality of masculine or animal symbolism in cosmology suggests that men are considered the generators of power.”

Political Domain

War is a matter of much concern among the Sambia. Because of their rugged environment, their relative lack of resources, and the shortage of women, the Sambia must always be prepared to attack of be attacked. Women do not participate in war because “Sambia made being a warrior and war leader, and being aggressive and ‘top dog’ in battle, the supreme measure of man’s place in the world and the status and prestige of his social relationships in it.” Sanday suggests in her book that females have an inherent ‘womanhood’ that is represented by their ability to give life, and that males don’t have anything inherent to attribute to their ‘manhood’, so they create a concept of manhood, which is the opposite of womanhood. In this case, men make being a warrior, which represents blood and killing, ‘the supreme measure of man’s place in the world’ to contrast with the female ability to produce life.

Conclusion

The Sambia are a male dominated society, and they show it in every aspect of their daily lives. In the social domain, male dominance prevails. Proof of that are male aggression against women, and perceiving menstrual blood as a pollutant. Both of these are portrayed by Sanday as strong evidence for a male dominated society. In the economic domain, male dominance is suggested because they have an animal oriented society in which food provided by women is considered of less importance that the food provided by men. In the spiritual domain, male dominance can be ascribed to their male dominant creation myth, and to the fact that women began performing as shamans because of the need of healing rituals in times of male absence. The political domain is dominated by males as they’ve awarded themselves specific roles as heads of the group since they are the main providers of protein and security to the villages, by doing this they reaffirm their manhood.

Canela

The Canela are a female and plant oriented society in which women rule every aspect of life; even if males perform important tasks in the political domain, they’re always subjugated by the women

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