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Reconstructing the House in Anthropology About the House: Lvi-Strauss and beyond by Janet Carsten; Stephen Hugh-Jones; African

Nomadic Architecture: Space, Place and Gender by Labelle Prussin; Amina Adan; Peter A. Andrews; Arlene Fullerton; Anders Grum; Uta Holter Review by: Roy Richard Grinker American Anthropologist, New Series, Vol. 98, No. 4 (Dec., 1996), pp. 856-858 Published by: Blackwell Publishing on behalf of the American Anthropological Association Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/681892 . Accessed: 29/03/2012 15:27
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their roles in both professional and local discourse. But much of this reference has been off-handed, a la mode, and untheorized. Gibbs's compendium and Limon's cultural poetics can together anchor this in-

creased interest at a more informed level. They are excellent antidotes to superficial attention to the figurative. They can be strongly recommended. u

Reconstructing Housein Anthropology the


ROY RICHARD GRINKER

George Washington University About the House: Levi-Strauss and Beyond. Janet Carsten and Stephen Hugh-Jones,eds. Cambridge:CambridgeUniversityPress, 1995.300 pp. AfricanNomadicArchitecture: Space,Place and Gender. Labelle Prussin, with Amina Adan, Peter A. Andrews, ArleneFullerton,AndersGrum, Uta Holter.Washingand ton, DC: SmithsonianInstitutionPress and the National Museumof AfricanArt, 1995.246 pp. Two related but distinct strands of anthropological research have proceeded side by side with little articulation of the relations between them: an ongoing critique of the concept of the lineage and a long-standing and ethnographically rich investigation of the meanings and structures of houses. The former traces its roots to the early 1960s, when structural-functional anthropology and related kinship studies gave way to other theoretical approaches to ethnography.The latter began as early as the late 19th century, with Lewis Henry Morgan'sstudies of the relation between house structure and social organizationin North and Central America. In Africanstudies, where some scholars have sought to explain the house without sufficient attention to descent models, one result has been that scholars have rushed to defend kinship as if ethnographic and theoretical elaboration of the house was a denial of kinship and descent as social-structural frameworks. However, if the two books on houses to be discussed here are an indication of the direction of current research on social organization, anthropologists are beginning to reconsider (or, one might say, reconstruct) houses as central features of systems of thought and social organizationand to draw our attention not only to the complex ways in which house models compete with lineage and other models of social practice but also to how they coexist in complementary relationships. Indeed, these books show us that the study of the house is very much a study of kinship, as well as a study of cosmology, economics, law, and politics, among many other subjects. The most influential theorists of the role of house in society and economy, Claude Levi-Strauss and Stephen Gudeman,have urged anthropologists to con-

sider the house not only as an actual entity that structures social interactions but also as a source of core symbols that constitute those interactions. Indeed, in attemptingto move beyond the extensive literatureon the house as a concrete object, Levi-Strausshas called some societies, especially those categorized as Indonesian and Indo-European,house societies" (societe a matsons). For Levi-Strauss, who drew largely on data from native North America and medieval Europe, the house mediates conflicting structural principles, such as matriliny and patriliny, hypogamy and hypergamy. For Gudeman,who has done extensive research in LatinAmerica, the house is a fundamentalmodel of the economy, predating market and corporate models, and continuing to exist in dialectical relation to the newer models. The house model, as it appears in the first volume reviewed here, has been most widely applied in the anthropologyof Southeast Asia, where it is defined not as household (an economic and decisionmaking unit with a specific membership and developmental cycle) but in the conceptual terms Levi-Strauss
. * .

envlslonea.

In the first volume discussed here, Carsten and Hugh-Jonestake Levi-Straussa step further,to demonstrate that the house not only complements contemporary kinship theories but also may help constitute an anthropology of the house, which they suggest is perhaps analogous to the promising new ethnographic and theoretical literature on the anthropology of the body. Yet, as the editors clearly warn, if the house" is to be a useful analytical model, it must always be contextualized so that it does not become a monolithic framework;instead, as Susan McKinnonwrites in her essay, the concept of the house, or house society, can reassemble athe complexity of societies that had been suppressed by the incompatibility of previous typological distinctions" (p. 172). Through a variety of ethnographicexamples, the authors illustrate the geographic breadth and ethnographic specificity of LeviStrauss's model and also elaborate upon the model. For these authors, the house becomes not only a conceptual space but a physical structure with architectural features; it stands for the mediation of oppositions, but it is also an organic whole defined in terms of physical bodies.

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The only tension within these articles and it is a useful one is precisely the problem raised by the editors at the outset of the volume: how to restrict the use of such an abstract and general term as house and at the same time illustrate its wide applicability. Waterson, for example, explores the concept of the house throughout Southeast Asia and then compares the forms of Southeast Asian house societies to feudal Japan. She highlights a remarkable number of applications of the house to very different ethnographic and historical cases, from egalitarianto hierarchicalsocieties, and yet each application brings out ethnographic particulars that would remain masked without some concept of the house-whether the house is conceived as ideology, cosmology, architecture, a site of exchange, descent, or alliance, or all of these. The essays by Bloch (on the Zafimaniryof Madagascar),Riviere (on Guiana), Lea (on a group of Kayapofrom Brazil), and Hugh-Jones (on Tukanoans in northwest Amazonia) are particularlyuseful because they analyze the house in communities outside Southeast Asia. Other articles, by Janowski, Waterson, Carsten, Gibson, Howell, and McKinnon are replete with fascinating data that fulfill a central promise of contemporaryanthropology-the dialectic between theory and data, one continually influencing the other at a time when fewer and fewer detailed ethnographies seem to be published. Labelle Prussin's beautifully illustrated volume deals more specifically with architecture, house furnishings, and technology among nomadic" societies throughout the Sahara: namely, the Tekna, Trarza, Kunta, Brakna, Tuareg, Tubu, Beja, Mahria, Somali, Rendille, and Gabra.The authors focus on physicality, no doubt because this book emerged out of a proposed exhibit on Africannomadic arts and architecture.(It is for this reason, too, that, while Prussin authored the majorityof the essays, there are other contributionsby Amina Adan, Peter A. Andrews, Arlene Fullerton, Anders Grum,and Uta Holter.) But the central feature of these essays is more accurately described as creativity. Prussin argues that creativity in general, and women's creativity in particular, has been masked by the local (and therefore also anthropological) devaluation of artifacts in nomadic societies. Temporary house structures-tents, tepees, and huts are constructed primarilyby women throughout sub-Saharan Africa, and because these structures are temporary, noninheritable,and usually defined in anthropological analysis as domestic (i.e., female"), anthropologists have conventionally placed them at a level of relative social insignificance in comparison to cattle, camels, and other inheritable, amale"wealth. This volume will stand as a corrective to that convention, in part because the authors present very rich and detailed infor-

mation on houses and other shelters and in part because they show that these structures are the meeting places of some of the most vital threads of social life: life, death, sex, politics, and economics. Precisely because the shelters are temporary, transformable,and open to creative response, they come to symbolize the fluidity and creativity of culture. If there is a point at which these two volumes meet, it is in the analysis of polarities: the inside and outside, the infinite and the contained, the male and the female. Space and gender intersect in tangible, physical forms that enact social relations right before our eyes. In a Gabra newlywed couple's house, for instance, ritual containers symbolizing marriagehang from the interior walls, while on the exterior wall, rope made by women, but used exclusively by men, hangs over the multicolored cloth wainscoting, thus expressing gender polarities in architecturalterms. At the heart of Prussin's work there is a harmonyof gender polarity and of aesthetics, which, one senses, stands opposed to the architecture of an ever present, but unspecified, aWest" what Robert Farris Thompson, in the foreword to the book, calls athe Westernemerald cities of Oz." Prussin's subtext is a critique of architecture and especially a critique of the denial and devaluation of women's contribution to architecture. Prussin tells us clearly that studies of nomadic dwellings may widen our perspectives not only on what it means when we categorize something as architecture but also on what it means when we exclude something from that category. There is, in other words, a romanticism to Prussin's work absent from that of Carsten and HughJones, which therefore gives the appearance of two different kinds of texts. While the latter is more typically anthropological in the sense that it seems unbiased and without political tendency, the former emerges as an exhibition with an explicit agenda to document women's creative contributions to societies in which women's contributions usually go unnoticed an agenda that in no way detracts from this book's importance, scholarship, and coherence. Both of these contributions may deeply influence the kinds of data ethnographerscollect in the future. In light of these and other works that focus on the house, the field of social organization is taking on an appearance and direction that departs from the past and yet remains in a dialogue with it. The assault on the lineage is part of a larger critical literature that reevaluated tribeX as an anachronistic and procrustean model of social solidarity, a model that had long been based on ambiguous and shifting criteria sometimes tribes were defined by language or custom, at other times by territory, and at still other times on administrative (colonial) requirements for censuses

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and labor mobilization rather than on an understanding of the complexities and varieties of social organization. Africanists, for example, often held to Elrmly the view that Africans lived in distinct tribes, each composed of descent groups that were in turn composed of lineages, yet a number of prominent anthropologists and historians have shown that descent groups seldom organize some of the most significant political and economic activities of everyday life. Even Evans-Pritchard,a founder of lineage theory and one of the few early anthropologists to argue that descent groups were conceptual models rather than principles and determinantsof behavior, could Emdno Nuer concept for lineage or clan, the closest word being thok mac (the hearth) or thok dwtel (the entrance to the hut), neither of which have much to do with lineages or corporate groups. Yet the house did not emerge as a central component of anthropologicaltheorizing until recently. Southeast Asianists have been at the forefront of this development, and Curtis Keim, Enid Schildkrout,Jan Vansina, and I have all written about so-called house societies in central Africa. The house in Southeast Asian ethnographyhelps show us the relation between the concepts we use and the conclusions we reach. In many parts of Indonesia,

for example, a comparative study of descent rules might highlightthe differences between societies with distinct kinship patterns, but a focus on the house brings out important continuities between unilineal and nonunilineal societies, exogamous and endogamous societies. Indeed, it is often the case that these oppositions are transformations and, therefore, to some extent, reflections of one another. For the Lese farmers and Efe (Pygmy) hunter-gatherers of northeastern Zaire, with whom I worked, clans and lineages are vital to collective actions such as feuds and warfare, but descent groups are simply one level, one location, at which to analyze social organization. In this region, descent, as an ideology of likeness, certainly helps us understand egalitarianism, male solidarity, and segmentary lineage organization, but houses, as institutions defined by difference (parentchild, husband-wife, and forager-farmer relations), help us to understandethnicity, gender, and hierarchy. This is a lesson conveyed in both of these volumes. Descent and the house compete and coexist in particular cultural contexts and realms of life, and social organizations are simply too complex to be captured by any single model. -

Sex andViolence
LUTTRELL WENDY

Duke University ConceivingSexuality: ApproacEs to Sex Researchin a Postmodon World.RichardG. Parkerand John H. Gagnon, eds. New York:Routledge.1995.307 pp. Issues in Representationand ExperiSex and Violence: ence. Penelope Harvey and Peter Gow, eds. New York: Routledge.1994.197pp.
The difficult thing to explain is not why gender relations are so violent, but why violence is so gendered, so sexualized. [HenriettaMoore in Harveyand Gow, p. 154]

Having taught courses on gender, sexuality, and society for ten years, I agree with what Henrietta Moore says, but for different reasons than those she gives. Mypoint in reviewing these two edited volumes is to ask in what ways each book helps us to better understand the twisted relations of gender, sexuality, and violence so that we mightbe more effective agents of personal and social change. The students I teach are keen observers of the cultural rules, images, and ideals that organize or shape gendered constructions of male sexuality as aac-

tive, aggressive, thrusting and powerful" and female sexuality as apassive, powerless, submissive and receptive" (Moore, p. 138). Indeed, some students express their deep resentment, if not sorrow, about having to negotiate daily these limiting constructions; they say they are taking the course either because their personal self-images, behaviors, or desires simply don't match up with what they think the culture is expecting of them or because, even more to their dismay, these gendered constructions have a more tenacious hold on them than they would like. This latter issue about the tenacity of gendered constructions whether related to sexuality, violence, or personhood- is, in my experience, the most difficult thing to explain, yet it is the question for which so many of us seek clarification. So how does each book fare toward this end? The Gagnonand Parkercollection is impressive in terms of accessibility and scope. Composed of 15 articles by authors from different countries and disciplines, the book features speciElclocal processes and understandingsabout sexuality. As the title highlights, it is a postmodern" collection, which perhaps explains why the editors piece certain articles together

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