The Problem of Sex Discrimination in Indigenous ArchaeologyBy Elizabeth Weiss
February 16, 2022
In January, as reporters were celebrating the first woman—and also the first transgender person—to win more than a million dollars on Jeopardy!, I was reading up on the discrimination still faced by biological women who toil away in my own fields of endeavor: anthropology and archaeology. This discrimination is not an artifact of male over-representation (this being the usual subject of feminist complaint in academia). Nor is it centered around the actual science of anthropology or archaeology: No one is publishing papers whose actual content strikes me as offensively sexist. Rather, the working conditions and resource-access protocols in field schools, excavation sites, museums, and even virtual databases are now increasingly informed by “traditional” Indigenous practices that are, in some cases, explicitly sexist.
The sub-field known as Indigenous archaeology is based on the demand that archaeology must be informed by Indigenous values—this being an outgrowth of the broader postmodern idea that the identity of the person providing information is often more important than the accuracy of the information itself. Objectivity is an illusion, the theory goes, so the primary mission is to heed the morally authentic demands of this or that group.
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The most obvious problem is that some Indigenous groups enforce taboos on female participation in rituals and ceremonies. This was acknowledged by New York Times writer Edward Rothstein in 2006, when he noted that “some Australian curators have accommodated Aboriginal demands that female curators can’t handle their objects.” More recently, Jesmael Mataga, a professor at Sol Plaatje University in South Africa, wrote about a Mukwati walking stick from Zimbabwe that had been repatriated from a private collection in London, and is now curated at the Zimbabwe Museum of Human Sciences. Descendants of the stick’s original owner requested that it be curated through “culturally informed practices,” which meant, among other things, preventing female curators from touching it.
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Ancient taboos against menstruating women are part of traditional cultural and religious practices in many parts of the world. Thankfully, they are a thing of the past in western societies. Yet some Indigenous tribal elders have singled out menstruating archeologists as being subject to special rules. In a 2018 article explaining why relatively few Native Americans choose STEM careers, in fact, authors Deborah Williams and Gerhard Shipely noted that “many Native American tribes have taboos regarding menstruating women, including separating them from the community, particularly men,” notwithstanding the obvious conflict with privacy and anti-discrimination laws.
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One irony here is that Indigenous archaeology is in some ways an outgrowth of feminist archaeology. Feminist archaeologists have specifically embraced the repatriation of artifacts, and the turning over of skeletal remains to culturally-affiliated Indigenous tribes. Feminist archaeologists have also tried to paint the pre-colonial past as something of a matriarchal paradise (sometimes using the term “rematriation” as part of their ambitious conceptual reworking of the field). And so the fairly obvious conflict between the two sub-fields isn’t just worrying to the extent that it disadvantages female scholars in a real and practical sense; it also betrays the false conceit by which these two progressive movements were presented as conjoined.
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Source:
https://quillette.com/2022/02/16/the-problem-of-sex-discrimination-in-indigenous-archaeology/
