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Sexual Division (sexual + division)

Distribution by Scientific Domains

Humanities and Social Sciences	55%
Life Sciences	33%

Selected Abstracts

Fishing and the Sexual Division of Labor among the Meriam

AMERICAN ANTHROPOLOGIST, Issue 3 2007
REBECCA BLIEGE BIRD
Do men and women forage differently because they are cooperatively responding to children's requirements for care or because they are differentially sensitive to variance? In this article, I examine how care trade-offs and variance contribute to gender differences in fishing strategies among Torres Strait Islanders (Meriam). Women's fishing had lower failure rates, coefficients of variation, and frequencies of sharing than men's fishing. Men and women responded to trade-offs between mean and variance differently: Women spent less time on high mean,high variance activities, men less time on high mean,low variance activities. Although child-care trade-offs affected time allocation to different fishing activities among women, they did not affect differences in time allocation between the sexes. These results support previous work implicating variance and sharing frequency as important resource currencies shaping gender differences in subsistence decisions, and they offer challenges to a general model of the division of labor predicated on economic notions of specialization as increasing production efficiency. [source]

Revisiting the Sexual Division of Labor: Thoughts on Ethnoarchaeology and Gender

ARCHEOLOGICAL PAPERS OF THE AMERICAN ANTHROPOLOGICAL ASSOCIATION, Issue 1 2006
Robert Jarvenpa
In gauging the impact of Susan Kent's scholarship, we examine how a controlled ethnoarchaeological comparison of gender and subsistence in circumpolar societies may be used to reassess a bedrock concept of anthropology: the sexual division of labor. Much discourse on this topic is marred by an exclusionary tone. That is, the sexual division of labor is presented as a list of things women cannot do, should not do, or are prohibited from doing by men. Rather than accentuating the negative and proscriptive, comparative ethnoarchaeology suggests that positive contributions of labor specialization by both women and men merit reexamination. [source]

Early hominid hunting and scavenging: A zooarcheological review

EVOLUTIONARY ANTHROPOLOGY, Issue 6 2003
Manuel Domínguez-Rodrigo
Abstract Before the early 1980s, the prevailing orthodoxy in paleoanthropology considered Early Stone Age archeological sites in East Africa to represent a primitive form of hominid campsites. The faunal evidence preserved in these sites was viewed as the refuse of carcass meals provided by hominid males in a social system presumptively characterized by sexual division of labor. This interpretation of early hominid life ways, commonly known as the "Home Base" or "Food Sharing" model, was developed most fully by Glynn Isaac.1,4 As Bunn and Stanford5 emphasized, this model was greatly influenced by a paradigm that coalesced between 1966 and 1968, referred to as "Man the Hunter."6 [source]

The Gender of Europe's Commercial Economy, 1200,1700

GENDER & HISTORY, Issue 3 2008
Martha Howell
This essay proposes that between about 1200 and 1700, commerce was rescued from the margins of the European moral economy with the help of a gender binary that took shape among a rising class of European merchant and artisan families. Among this class, a more rigid sexual division of labour was accompanied by a cultural narrative that credited tradesmen with the ability to serve the social whole and charged their wives and daughters with the task of ridding consumption of the taint of sin. The story of the commercial revolution in Europe was, thus, in part a social, legal and cultural history that redefined male and female for a rising class of people and, in fact, helped define the class itself. [source]

Gendering the Black Death: Women in Later Medieval England

GENDER & HISTORY, Issue 3 2000
S. H. Rigby
This review article of Mavis Mate's Daughters, Wives and Widows after the Black Death: Women in Sussex, 1350,1535 (1998) locates Mate's work within the broader context of the debate about changes in women's social position caused by the collapse in population following the Black Death. Was demographic decline accompanied by growing social and economic opportunities for women or should historians emphasise the continuity of female work as low-skilled, low-status and low-paid throughout the late medieval and early modern periods? How did women's role in the labour market affect the age of marriage, fertility rates and long-term population change? In general, Mate's conclusions offer support to the ,pessimists': women's work was vital to the household but economic centrality did not bring a commensurate social power or legal rights and the ideology of female subordination remained firmly in place. The main problem with Mate's case is, inevitably, a lack of evidence, for family structure, for the sexual division of labour and, above all, for affective relations. Nevertheless, this detailed, empirically based local study shows how successfully women's history has moved into the historical mainstream. [source]

Lifestyle, occupation, and whole bone morphology of the pre-Hispanic Maya coastal population from Xcambó, Yucatan, Mexico

INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF OSTEOARCHAEOLOGY, Issue 3 2007
Isabel S. Wanner
Abstract The present bioarchaeological study examines the external diaphyseal geometric properties of humeri, radii, femora and tibiae of the Classic period skeletal population of Xcambó, Yucatan, Mexico. The diaphysial proportions are evaluated using a biomechanical approach together with data from the material context and other osteological information. Our intent is to provide new answers to questions concerning lifestyle, domestic labour division and subsistence strategies of this coastal Maya settlement that was inhabited from the Late and Terminal Preclassic (300 BC,350 AD) to the Postclassic Period (900,1500 AD). Our results provide evidence for a marked sexual division of labour when compared with values from contemporaneous inland populations. The overall male and female loading patterns differ remarkably in terms of form and in bilateral comparison. A high directional asymmetry in the upper limbs is evident among males, a condition related to maritime transportation and trading activities. On the other hand, female upper limbs are characterized by very low side differences. Forces on the arms of women were probably dominated by food processing, in particular the grinding of grains or seeds. In the lower limbs, males show significantly higher anteroposterior bending strengths, which can be explained by greater engagement in transportation tasks and carrying heavy loads. In the course of the Classic period (350,900 AD), diachronic changes affect the male sample only, which suggests a shift of occupational pattern and physical demands. This shift, in turn, reflects Xcambó's changing role as the centre of a densifying settlement area and its place in the trading activities of northern Yucatan. Other topics of discussion relate to general regional trends and local prehispanic subsistence strategies. Our conclusions emphasize the value of geometric long bone analysis in the reconstruction of activity patterns and lifestyles in ancient coastal settlements. Copyright © 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. [source]

Variation in maternal strategies during lactation: The role of the biosocial context

AMERICAN JOURNAL OF HUMAN BIOLOGY, Issue 6 2009
Barbara A. Piperata
Compared to other mammals, human milk is dilute which lowers the relative daily cost of lactation allowing women greater flexibility in the strategies they use to meet the energy demands of lactation. These strategies include increasing dietary intake, reducing energy expenditure, and drawing on energy stores. Women are affected by the biosocial context in which they live, including norms regarding the sexual division of labor and diet and activity patterns during lactation, as well as household-level factors such as economic strategy and the availability of social support. This paper combines longitudinal data on dietary intake, energy expenditure, and body weight of 23 lactating Amazonian women living in a subsistence-based economy with detailed ethnographic data and considers how adherence to the cultural norms and the availability of social support contributed to intra-population variation in maternal energetic strategies. Dietary intake was found to vary more than energy expenditure. Adherence to dietary restrictions during the postpartum period of resguardo significantly reduced intra-population variation in energy intake. Women with social support came closer to achieving energy balance during resguardo (t = 2.8; P = 0.01) and peak lactation (t = 2.7; P = 0.02) and lost less weight (t = 3.6; P = 0.002) than those without such support. Those with social support had higher energy (t = 2.1; P = 0.05) and carbohydrate (t = 2.1, P = 0.05) intakes during resguardo and spent significantly less time in subsistence work during peak (t = 2.6, P = 0.03) and late lactation(t = 2.4, P = 0.03). Case studies are used to place these finding in context. Am. J. Hum. Biol. 2009. © 2009 Wiley-Liss, Inc. [source]

Possible relationship of cranial traumatic injuries with violence in the south-east Iberian Peninsula from the Neolithic to the Bronze Age

AMERICAN JOURNAL OF PHYSICAL ANTHROPOLOGY, Issue 3 2009
S.A. Jiménez-Brobeil
Abstract The main aim of this study was to analyze the presence and distribution of cranial trauma, as possible evidence of violence, in remains from the Neolithic to Bronze Age from the SE Iberian Peninsula. The sample contains skulls, crania, and cranial vaults belonging to 410 prehistoric individuals. We also studied 267 crania from medieval and modern times for comparative purposes. All lesions in the prehistoric crania are healed and none of them can be attributed to a specific weapon. In all studied populations, injuries were more frequent in adults than in subadults and also in males than in females, denoting a sexual division in the risk of suffering accidents or intentional violence. According to the archeological record, the development of societies in the SE Iberian Peninsula during these periods must have entailed an increase in conflict. However, a high frequency of cranial traumatic injuries was observed in the Neolithic series, theoretically a less conflictive time, and the lowest frequency was in crania from the 3rd millennium B.C. (Copper Age), which is characterized by the archeologists as a period of increasing violence. The relatively large size and the high rate of injuries in Neolithic crania and the practice of cannibalism are strongly suggestive of episodes of interpersonal or intergroup conflict. The number and distribution of injuries in Bronze Age is consistent with the increase in violence at that time described by most archeologists. Am J Phys Anthropol, 2009. © 2009 Wiley-Liss, Inc. [source]