Introduction: Genderising Anthropology in Southeast Asia

Abstract

Reviewing some of the earlier perspectives on gender in history, social scientists usually begin by making some objective observation on the position of women in the past. The Morgan view that societies originally maintained structures that were matriarchally defined was rejected by social and cultural anthropologists mainly because empirical evidence did not support his notion of matriarchies as preceding other kinds of social systems. The perspective that macro developments from outside produce effective change in relationships between men and women has contributed to much binary thinking in the social sciences, where so-called 'egalitarian societies', said to contain gender relationships of symmetry, have been compared and contrasted to 'class-structured societies' containing relationships of gender asymmetry or inequality. Influence on gender analysis produced a period of disenchantment with cultural relativity and an attempt to renew universalistic notions of women's subordination in Western theory.

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