ANTH/WMNS 324 Anthropology of Gender17 March 2009 Gender, Ritual and Religion.

General questions: How are ritual and religion gendered? How do gendered ritual and religion relate to

society?

Group discussion

Sered quotes Geertz as saying that religion is “‘independent yet interdependent’ with social structure, rather than a mere reflection of it” (2009: 437). Based on your reading of these articles, do you see that gender roles in religion and ritual reflect those of the society or are somewhat independent of what they are in society?

Boddy: “Spirit possession and gender complementarity: Zâr in rural northern Sudan”

- against those who argue that women’s participation in zâr is the result of their marginalization from Islam, takes the position that the women of Hofriyat engage in zâr as complementary and relatively equal to men’s participation in Islam

- thus, emic cultural framework provides for different religious experience, and not, therefore a realm of intergender or intragender conflict (these she sees as an ethnocentric reading).

Kendall: “Shamans, bodies and sex: Misreading a Korean ritual”

- argues against those who she says reduce Korean shamanism into sexual expression

- that is an ethnocentric reading of women’s ritual bodily performance

- rather, says body sensuality not simply sexual, and that there are many elements in shamanic performance that are not even simply sensual

These two articles by Boddy and Kendall thus argue that women’s religious experience must be understood in emic, not ethnocentric terms.

McIntosh: “Tradition and threat: Women’s obscenity in Giriama funerary rituals”- riffs off of Gluckman’s functionalist interpretation of

rituals of reversal

- while his argument centrally pertained to the socially supportive role these rituals played in stable societies, she is dealing with a social framework under pressure

- what does women’s obscene performance at funerals mean in a context in which young Kenyan men and women are exposed to and engage in looser sexual mores deriving from Western tourism?

Sered: “Women, religion and modernization: Tradition and transformation among elderly Jews in Israel”- interested in whether women’s role in religion

suffers in context of modernization, as it has been argued to do in social prestige, economy and kinship

- gets to argument in conclusion: “in response to modernization women’s religion is vulnerable, tenacious and creative” (2009: 445).

These two articles by McIntosh and Sered concentrate on how women’s religious lives are affected by change imposed by “modernization.”

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