International Encyclopedia of Men and Masculinities
Anthropology has always involved men talking to men about men. Until recently, however, very few within the discipline of the ‘study of man’ had truly examined men as men. Although in the past three decades the study of gender and sexuality comprises one of the most important new bodies of theoretical and empirical work in the discipline of anthropology overall, gender/sexuality studies are still often equated with women’s studies.
It is the new examinations of men as engendered and engendering subjects that encompass the anthropology of men and masculinities today. There are at least four distinct ways that anthropologists define and use the concept of masculinity and the related notions of male identity, manhood, manliness and men’s roles. Marking the fluidity of these concepts, and frequently the regrettable lack of theoretical rigour in approaching this issue, most anthropologists writing on this subject employ more than one of these concepts.
The first concept of masculinity holds that it is, by definition, anything that men think and do. The second is that masculinity is anything men think and do to be men. The third is that some men are inherently or by ascription considered more manly than other men. The final manner of approaching masculinities emphasises the general and central importance of male—female relations, so that masculinity is considered anything that women are not.
In the anthropological literature on masculinity to date much attention has been paid to how men in different cultural contexts perform their own and others’ manhood. Thus Herzfeld (1985) writes of the importance to men in a village on Crete of distinguishing between being a good man and being good at being a man, because here it is the performative excellence of manliness that counts for far more than merely being born male.
In his ethnographic study of ‘a masculine subculture’ among the Sambia in New Guinea, Herdt (1994) seeks to present how men view themselves as male persons, their ritual traditions, their females and the cosmos. The path to understanding Sambia masculinity, Herdt argues, therefore lies in paying close attention to Sambia male idioms: that is, what these men say about themselves as men. Further, in exploring male initiations among the Sambia, Herdt accentuates what he calls ‘an intense, phallic masculinity’ such that the issue is not one of males striving for masculinity versus femininity but rather for a particular kind of masculinity that is, by its nature, only available to men to achieve. Nonetheless, Herdt writes that ‘the public dogma’ of men among the Sambia is that maleness itself emerges from femaleness.
In the first major study of manhood in anthropology Brandes (1980) describes how male identities develop in relation to women. In this examination of folklore and men in rural Andalusia, Brandes argues that even if women are not physically present with men while working or drinking, and even if not reflected in men’s conscious thoughts, women’s ‘presence’ is a significant factor in men’s own subjective understanding of what it means to be men. Discussing changing gender identities in working-class Mexico City, Gutmann (1996) also argues that most men during most of their lives view male identities in comparison to female identities.
Insufficient attention has actually been paid to men-as-men in anthropology, and much of what anthropologists have written about masculinity must be inferred from research on women and by a process of extrapolation from studies on other topics.
In addition to utilising different conceptual frameworks, two distinct topical approaches are evident in the anthropological study of masculinity: some studies mainly treat ‘men only’ issues, events and locations like male initiation, men’s cults, men’s houses, bars and sex between men. Other studies include descriptions and analysis of women as integral to the broader study of manhood and masculinity. Exemplary of the first type is the widely read survey by Gilmore (1990). This study, functionalist in orientation, insists on widespread if not necessarily universal male imagery in the world and on an underlying archetypal and ‘deep structure’ of masculinity cross-culturally and transhistorically. The other approach has been to document the ambiguous and fluid nature of masculinity within particular spatial and temporal contexts and document that there exists no unitary man’s point of view.
Among the topics anthropologists have recently studied in relation to men and manhood are same-sex sex; divisions of household labour; family, kinship and friendship ties; the body; and contests over power. In the absence of systematic theorisation of masculinity, most studies of men-as-men in anthropology focus on only one or two of these topics, while by default they have created myriad and contradictory categories and definition s of m
From early interest in sexual drives (those of natives and anthropologist alike), male authority (and how it may reside in men other than the father) and the Oedipal complex, anthropologists have played a not insignificant role in the development and popularisation of ‘native’ definition s a nd distincti ons regar masculinity, femininity, homosexuality, and more. To what extent the views expressed have represented those of men, women or anthropologist—or a combination of all these—is in retrospect far from clear. Early feminist anthropological studies in the 1970s, the earliest approaches to studying masculinity, tended to depict an overly dichotomised world in which men were men and women were women, and women contributed as little to ‘making’ men as men did to ‘making’ women. Unlike these initial feminist studies of women in anthropology, however, which sought to address in part women’s previous ‘invisibility’ in the canon, men have never been invisible in ethnography or anthropological theories of ‘mankind’
Two of the most important areas of theoretical work on men and masculinities in anthropology concern same-sex sex, or sex between men (MSM), and the relation of women to men and masculinities.
The erotic component to male bonding and rivalry is clearly demonstrated in many new studies on same-sex sex. Many studies in the anthropology of masculinity have as a central component the reporting and analysis of some kind of sexual relations, attractions and fantasies between males. Of great importance theoretically is the fact that the term ‘homosexuality’ is increasingly out of favour, seen as too culturally narrow in meaning and implication.
Try as we might to describe and champion a vast diversity of masculinities and femininities in Latin America, there is no mistaking the fact that dichotomous dualities, for instance those positing active and passive men who have sex with other men, recur with what may be for some a frustrating regularity. Nor is the blessed distinction between sex and gender—that is, between bodies and culture—still found to be nearly as useful as many scholars in gender studies once presumed and hoped. As Parker shows (1999), while retaining useful elements, the active/ passive taxonomy can miss as much as it captures with respect to changing norms and actual sexual practices. With both so-called political passivity and sexual passivity there is evidently more at play than is perhaps immediately apparent; both forms of assumed passivity represent territories that remain to be more fully charted. Clearly one obstacle that must be overcome in studying sexual passivity in Latin America is the notion that passivity is the mirror opposite of activity.
To reverse decades of male anthropologists rather exclusively interviewing and describing male informants, feminist anthropologists placed greater emphasis beginning in the 1970s on women and so-called ‘women’s worlds’. In good measure this was a question of ‘discovering’ the women so notoriously absent (or ‘disappeared’) in earlier ethnographies. Only in the 1980s did men systematically begin exploring men as engendered and engendering persons. Yet ironically most ethnographic studies of manhood have made insufficient use of feminist contributions to our knowledge of gender and sexuality and have failed to engage sufficiently in the important debates within this discourse. In part this illustrates what Lutz (1995) calls the ‘masculinisation of theory’, here through the evasion of what is considered theoretically unworthy.
How to incorporate the opinions and experiences of women with respect to men and masculinity is an important concern. Some anthropologists have argued that, as men, they are severely limited in their ability to work with women. Gutmann (1997) argues that ethnographic investigations of men and masculinity must include research on women’s ideas about and experiences with men. More than a simple statistical assertion that increasing one’s sample size will sometimes increase one’s understanding of a subject, and more than providing a supplement to ethnographic work with men on masculinity through adding women’s voices and distinct experiences to those of men, the issue is even more that masculinities develop and transform and have little meaning except in relation to women and female identities and practices in all their similar diversity and complexity.
The recurrent theme in much anthropological writing on masculinity is that, ‘according to the natives’, men are made and women are born: the thorough critique of this view has been very influential in feminist anthropology, but unfortunately too little considered by anthropologists for whom women are largely irrelevant to constructions of masculinity. It seems worth asking, however, if bias might not enter into some ethnographers’ accounts. This is a methodological issue, and even more a conceptual one, because although it is a mistake to assume too much similarity from one cultural context to another, conclusions regarding the impossibility of a male ethnographer compiling any useful information about women, much less from women about men, seem to merit further attention. Whether or not women and men absent themselves from the other’s presence during rituals, for example, women and men do regularly interact at other times, and they profoundly affect each other’s lives and identities. We must not confuse formal roles and definitions with daily life.
Important strides have been made in studying women in a variety of cultural contexts. Corresponding studies of masculinities still lag far behind. This does not mean that ethnographies of men should be viewed, understood or utilised primarily as a complement to women’s studies. Rather, they must be developed and nurtured as integral to understanding the ambiguous relationship between multigendered differences and similarities, equalities and inequalities. As with the study of ethnicity, one can never study one gender without studying others.
In any discussion of masculinity there are potential problems involved, especially if the topic is reduced to possession of male genitalia, or still worse if it is regarded as ‘for men only’. The present review is intended to counter such typologising, which is in many ways arbitrary and artificial. This essay has not, I trust, been read in any sense as representing ‘men’s turn’ at the scholarly tables of gender inquiry. Rather, my purpose has been to describe studies of men-as-men in the field within the context of a multigendered puzzle.
Anthropologists of various subjects will recognise the taken-for-granted nature of men and manhood in much work to date. A quick perusal of the indexes to most ethnographies shows that ‘women’ exist as a category while ‘men’ are far more rarely listed. Masculinity is either ignored or it is considered so much the norm that a separate inventory is unnecessary. Then, too, ‘gender’ often means women and not men.
Between the performative modes in which manhood is emphasised and the attempt to invent modern hurdles for achieving manhood status lie a variety of qualities and characterisations that anthropologists have labelled masculine and manly. Contrary to the assertion that men are made while women are born (albeit ‘in the natives’ point of view’) is the understanding that men are often the defenders of ‘nature’ and ‘the natural order of things’, while women are the ones instigating change in gender relations and much else. This is part and parcel of the contradictions, inequalities and ambiguities of gender relations, ideologies and practices in all their myriad facets and manifestations that themselves prove central to the process of engendered social transformations.
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