This is a guest post by Marjorie Mandelstam Balzer, Professor at Georgetown University. It is part of the Faith, Gender, and Development research of the Religion and Global Development Program at the Berkley Center.
Women are at the crux of changing values concerning
religion and gender, reform and social change, including
religious and secular fundamentalism. As social
changes transform communities in widely differing
societies, women are redefining practical and intellectual
categories and issues. Religion is a central part
of the change process, as women engage in a selective
blending of local and world religions in ways that
transcend conventional descriptions.
Women resist, conform, and negotiate their way
through values that have alternately placed them
on pedestals and brought them down to earth. They
are crucial cultural mediators: they can be (literally)
spirit mediums but far more often they are practical
translators of beliefs into practice. Thus, they stand
metaphorically at the juncture of religion and gender.
Relevant issues include local definitions of “purity
and pollution,” women’s leadership, and sexism. New
approaches emerge as women have integrated daily
religious practice, ancient folk wisdom, and increasing
awareness of international norms.
A significant question that is rarely asked is whether
tensions about appropriate gender roles are central or
peripheral to the formation of religious canon. When
is gender salient? How can analysts navigate and
understand the multiple ways that women, as religious
actors and potential sacred power holders, are
portrayed and portray themselves? We need a commitment
to subtlety and an open mind. Gender roles,
including within each religious tradition, are changing.
Power issues are linked to socially embedded perceptions
of gender. We increasingly see a selective blending
of local world religions in ways that transcend
conventional descriptions.
Early anthropological studies of the juncture of religion
and gender looked for roots of religion in ancient matriarchies
and fertility rituals. Today such deterministic
assumptions are outmoded. But insights and lessons
can be drawn from the “roots” of cultural practice. The
complex cultural logics that underlie restrictions on
women’s behavior, often based on perceived danger-laced concepts of ‘female impurity,’ are an example.
My fieldwork in Western Siberia, with Ob-Ugrian
Khanty (Ostiak), illustrates social tensions expressed in
elaborate attention to ‘female impurity.’ Pre-Christian
beliefs and behaviors survived yet transformed during
Russian Orthodox proselytizing and Soviet secularization.
Indigenous women negotiated their way into
greater power and authority as they grew older, past
the age of fertility and menstruation, and into a life
cycle stage where they could become ‘old and sacred.’
In a separate instance, a ‘teach-in’ on Islam at
Georgetown University after 9/11 included a gender-
segregated group prayer. Some were upset that
women had been forced to pray behind the men.
‘No,’ explained the female president of Georgetown’s
Muslim Student Association, ‘we want it that way, just
as we wish to wear head scarves: to show our modesty,
and through this, our purity of purpose.’ While
the sincerity of these perspectives shines through,
potential for abuse exists. Focus on female purity
encourages strict rules in the name of ‘custom’; uneven
enforcement of deviance can lead to its social mitigator,
hypocrisy.
In many European cultures the strongest assumptions
of religious conservatives concerning appropriate
female roles lie in the significance of women as sacred
mothers producing children for a homeland quite literally
defined as a Motherland. The Eastern Orthodox
Church canon emphasizes Mary as the Mother of
God over images, icons and ideals of the Virgin Mary.
In India, women’s fertility is a core value of Hindutva,
Hindu nationalism, and an important symbol of Mother
India’s purity and prestige.
Anthropology provides insights into ways that
streams of folk religion mingle into mainstream
religions, especially into Islam, Buddhism, and
Taoism. Tensions between the old and the new seem
to ebb and flow. The river metaphor, however, has limits
since continuities of traditions, against many odds,
are also found. Focus on specific power relations enables the concepts of ‘tradition’ and ‘great tradition’
to become matters for query and specificity.
Precisely by using the lens of gender relationships,
core values are revealed within changing religious
ideologies. The sometimes chafing ways these
ideologies play out in actual human lives are illustrated,
as women ‘negotiate’ change and also live
with constraints. We learn not only what is negotiable
or re-formable, but also where and how conservatives,
including female conservatives, prevail.
Old debates that helped jump-start gender studies,
concerning mythic matriarchies, mother goddesses,
‘third sex’ phenomena, or domestic/public gender
divisions have been superseded in favor of cultural
complexity. We can no longer generalize about
women as relatively more ‘natural’ (read emotional)
and men more ‘cultural’ (read logical) when we see
diverse streams of customary and religious law that
emerge from specific relationships between men
and women. Comparing ‘traditions’ helps us realize
that gender distinctions derive more from the
political hegemonies of particular groups than from
the purity of particular sacred texts.
Winners (often men) write history, sometimes in
stone, but anthropologists search in the cacophony
of diverse, especially less privileged voices
(often women).
