Leela Dube was one of the first anthropologists who contributed to the link between gender and ethnography within the field of anthropology and simultaneously introduced women’s issues and concerns to the mainstream of the disciplines of sociology and anthropology. She simplified anthropology in a way that it could be efficiently utilised by other younger disciplines, such as women’s studies, to analyse gender relations. She utilized the “comparative approach’ of anthropology in particular to understand, evaluate, and differentiate the lives of women across various cultures. The book Anthropological Explorations in Gender: Intersecting Fields (Dube, 2001) contains the essence of more than fifty years of her work, weaving together a variety of her thought-provoking observations and conclusions based on the vast array of field-based research she has conducted throughout her academic career. The purpose of this article is to review the same book by Leela Dube. The book weaves together many pieces that investigate the dynamic and complicated relationship between gender and other types of stratification, such as caste, class, and religion. Dube’s collection of articles sheds light on how prevalent social mores can have a lasting effect on generating and sustaining female inferiority within the social system. Using ethnographies, biographies, autobiographies, texts, folklore, and so forth, Dube has meticulously gathered a wealth of material about women’s status, kinship, and gender relations from a broad variety of sources.
About the Author
Leela Dube was born on the 27th of March, 1923, to a Brahmin household in the state of Maharashtra. As a child born during the pre-independence period, her formative years were heavily influenced both by the home and the nationalist atmosphere that prevailed at that point in time. She has written pioneering works that exemplarily integrate the insights of anthropology with those of women’s studies. Within the discipline of anthropology, she is regarded as one of the first anthropologists who seriously studied and contributed towards the relationship between gender and ethnography (Bell et al. 1993). She particularly used the “comparative method” of anthropology to interpret, analyze, and differentiate between the lives of women across various cultures. Within the women’s movements of India, Dube’s works are hailed and considered to be seminal in providing a holistic understanding of women’s systemic deprivation and oppression in spaces including family, household, and community. Leela Dube was herself someone who cared deeply for the women’s movements and worked towards the complete emancipation of women.
In this article we aim to review the book “The Book Anthropological Explorations in Gender: Intersecting Fields”, one of the most exemplary works of Leela Dube, which contains the essence of more than 50 years of her work that weaves together a variety of her thought-provoking observations and inferences based on the wide range of field-based research she has undertaken during the course of her academic life.
Critical Review & Analysis
Women’s Worlds-Three Encounters
“Women’s Worlds—Three Encounters,” which was originally published in 1970, It is a narrative based on the ethnographic fieldwork undertaken within the ‘gendered field’ of anthropology. The essay contains her experiences of researching in three different sites; her doctoral fieldwork, which was conducted among the Gond women in the late 1940s; her fieldwork in a village in western UP in the 1950s to analyse the responses of women to government-initiated community development programmes; and her work focusing on matriliny and Islam in the Lakshadweep islands in the 1970s. Dube has expounded on each of these experiences from the perspective of a female anthropologist investigating the inner lives of women, which are frequently inaccessible and disregarded by male anthropologists.
She saw how others had characterised Gond women of Chhattisgarh as immodest and provocative due to their attire (as they did not wear a blouse and covered their breasts using one end of the sari itself). These women were also believed to be black magic practitioners. Within the community, however, they enjoyed greater freedom, particularly in terms of movement. Even elopement, remarriage, and intrusion were commonplace in the group. However, there were stringent commensal prohibitions that only applied to women. Dube also talked with the males in the village in order to have a comprehensive picture, as the women had little awareness of rituals, beliefs, economic activity, panchayath, etc.
During her tenure as a research assistant for her husband in Rankhandi, a huge multi-caste village in western UP, her responsibilities were limited in scope and her engagement in the project was limited as well. It differed from her fieldwork with Gond women. As a Brahman wife who was also expecting a child, she was required to adhere to the village’s stringent rules and limitations. As noted by Dube, the women of the community lived in a separate world and historically held a low social rank.
Next, she travelled to the Lakshadweep settlement of Kalpeni. Throughout her fieldwork, Dube had focused on analysing the duration of marriage among the islands, the interaction between matriliny and Islamic law of inheritance, and traditional political organization.Prior to entering the area, she supervised Abdul Rahman Kutty’s PhD dissertation on Klapeni. The work offered her such a concise and clear picture of the area that she felt as though she already knew the village before visiting. While doing fieldwork in the community, Dube took conscious measures to minimise religious divides. She did not engage in prayer, worship, or fasting. During her visit, she eliminated the kumkum ir sindoor (vermilion). She noted that the village’s Muslims put a high emphasis on the matrilineal structure and had no desire to alter sharia law. All matrilineal property transfers necessitated the women’s signatures. Compared to Gond and Rankhandi, Dube’s experience working on the island of Klapeni was far more gratifying and free of restrictions.
On the Construction of Gender: Hindu Girls in Patrilineal India
In “On the Construction of Gender: Hindu Girls in Patrilineal India,” Dube explores the mechanisms through which girls establish a sense of gendered identity by investigating the rituals, rites, languages, and family customs. She concentrated on women and girls from patrilineal Hindu homes and even analysed her own indoctrination for this aim. She begins by emphasising the culturally manufactured gender disparities that are usually understood as being biologically based. Dube utilises her famous “seed and earth” analogy to illustrate this. This concept has been frequently used in the field of women’s studies, where it possesses tremendous power. She emphasises further that our family structures and kinship organisations sustain and maintain the majority of gender norms, whether in terms of marital residency, recruitment, or family re-organisation. The system of caste therefore impacts and influences these as well. Dube also introduced the idea of using women as gatekeepers of caste, or as boundary markers, which she called “repositories of honour”. Furthermore, she also stimulated discussions on issues of sex-selective abortions, and female infanticides in different societies. Dube thus investigates ethno-theories of reproduction, employing an assortment of texts and anthropological resources to demonstrate the materiality of patrilineal kinship.
Seed and Earth: The Symbolism of Biological Reproduction and the Sexual Relations of Production
‘Seed and Earth: The Symbolism of Biological Reproduction and Sexual Relations of Production,’ provides the groundwork for contemplating the intricate link between the structural and the cultural-ideological. The metaphor illustrates the roles that father and mother play in reproduction. The type and characteristics of a crop are decided by the seed, while the field only nurtures it. Therefore, the child belongs to the owner of the seed, i.e., the father, while the child’s mother has only moral rights over the child and no material rights.
Caste and Women
“Caste and Women,” addresses the confluence of caste and gender, as well as the ways in which caste, via hierarchy and exclusion, systematically deprives women and places them on the receiving end of uneven resource allocation and exploitative production relations. She emphasises the need for a closer examination of the workings of kinship and how it influences the distribution of resources, property rights, etc. within the context of family organizations. Women are subject to purity-pollution taboos governing food, which Dube considers to be a significant factor in preserving caste divisions and hierarchy. Dube then examines the link between caste, marriage, and sexuality. She argues that caste as a system flourishes via the dominance and control of female sexuality. Using the available data, she has constructed a framework with sexuality at its centre, while also tackling caste and gender. In addition to primary and secondary marriages, dowry, caste endogamy, and intercaste partnerships, she examined a variety of problems as part of her investigation.
Who Gains From Matriliny?
“Who Gains from Matriliny?” by Dube, is essentially an anthropological account of women’s life on a matrilineal island in Lakshadweep. It provides a completely novel viewpoint on gender interactions. In her article, she rejects the notion of matriliny as merely the mirror opposite of patriliny and investigates it in terms of what it gives women. In the village of Kalpeni, she demonstrates how the interaction between matriliny and Islamic beliefs has lent a degree of flexibility to the unilineal descent system. Her work in Kalpeni demonstrates how matrelineality can be adapted to a religion (here, Islam) governed by patrilineal principles. It gives the insight that the flexibility of Islam depends on the way it is practiced. In the village, she discovered that despite the fact that women wield authority as lineage founders, matrilineally-related males are the ones who make choices about property and the public domain. Even though there is a strong gender-based division of labour and limits on women’s mobility beyond the village, the village affords women far more autonomy and security than any other patrilineal system in South Asia.
Kinship and Gender in South and South-east Asia
“Kinship and Gender in South and Southeast Asia” gives a comparative examination of the kinship structures of these two areas. She investigates the disparities in family systems that may explain how gender functions in various regions. This study bolstered her opinion that kinship organisations are not only symbolic esoterica but also have enduring and tangible effects on the material well-being of its members. She investigates further the interrelationships between kinship, the economy, religion, and politics in several countries with patrilineal, matrilineal, and bilateral kinships, such as India, Bangladesh, Nepal, Pakistan, Indonesia, etc. Her observations and deductions included the substantial differences in social identity, descent, marital connections, habitation, property rights, attitude toward female sexuality, and economic roles between the two geographical regions. Dube demonstrated that in South Asia, sexuality is a lot more strict and stereotypically understood, and violence against women is justified in the name of family honour and pride. In South-East Asia, on the other hand, because of the strong presence of the concept of bilaterality, women have a far greater degree of freedom of action, in areas such as mobility and are encouraged to assume positions of power practically on par with males.
Reflections, and Relevance of the Book
The book is a thread that connects together different essays, which discuss in-depth the complex and dynamic relationship between gender and other forms of stratification such as caste, class, and religion. It provides an interface between gender and kinship. The book also talks about the importance of kinship organisation in terms of determining and enduring conventional structures of power that are designed to oppress and subordinate women in social settings. This work of hers had an enduring impact in sensitising women’s studies scholarship to the theoretical and methodical insights of anthropology, and visa versa. Dube, through her collection of essays, also sheds light on how the prevailing social mores can have a lasting impact on creating and promoting female inferiority in the social system. The book was revolutionary in the sense that it ensured the “feminization of anthropology” by structurally representing the subject of gender as it appears across various national and international regions. Lastly, Dube’s work is methodologically rich and contains a plethora of information on women’s status, kinship, and gender relations, systematically collected from a wide array of sources using ethnographies, biographies, autobiographies, texts, folklore, so on and so forth.
Conclusion
The book Anthropological Explorations in Gender is hence a commendable effort to analyse and comprehend family, patterns of succession of property, and the allocation of household resources, as well as how these elements are inextricably intertwined with women’s social position and identity, as well as their access to education, work, and other rights. This collection of well-researched articles based on the rigorous fieldwork undertaken in several parts of the country and abroad offers many significant concerns for future debate by feminist scholars in the field of women’s studies. Each article emphasises the significance of the “intersecting areas” of family and gender, anthropology and gender, and feminism and women’s movements, inviting readers with varied academic interests to learn more about these topics and concerns.
Reference
Dube, Leela. (2001). Anthropological Explorations in Gender: Intersecting Fields. New Delhi: Sage Publications.