Review
...this is an important, indeed a path-breaking, volume. It raises many compelling anthropological issues that rightly complicate our understanding of gender and power in the past and the near-present. The volume's affordable price and presentation of contrasting ideas recommend it for use in graduate courses. It will also be instructive to sociocultural anthropologists wishing to learn about power-gender dynamics that operate in ways not practiced in the modern world. But this volume should certainly be read by all archaeologists interested in the traditionally separate questions of power and gender..
–Transforming Anthropology, Vol. 10, No. 1, 2001, Marcia-Anne Dobres
...this is an important, indeed a path-breaking, volume. It raises many compelling anthropological issues that rightly complicate our understanding of gender and power in the past and the near-present. The volumes affordable price and presentation of contrasting ideas recommend it for use in graduate courses. It will also be instructive to sociocultural anthropologists wishing to learn about power-gender dynamics that operate in ways not practiced in the modern world. But this volume should certainly be read by all archaeologists interested in the traditionally separate questions of power and gender..
–Transforming Anthropology, Vol. 10, No. 1, 2001, Marcia-Anne Dobres
–Transforming Anthropology, Vol. 10, No. 1, 2001, Marcia-Anne Dobres
...this is an important, indeed a path-breaking, volume. It raises many compelling anthropological issues that rightly complicate our understanding of gender and power in the past and the near-present. The volumes affordable price and presentation of contrasting ideas recommend it for use in graduate courses. It will also be instructive to sociocultural anthropologists wishing to learn about power-gender dynamics that operate in ways not practiced in the modern world. But this volume should certainly be read by all archaeologists interested in the traditionally separate questions of power and gender..
–Transforming Anthropology, Vol. 10, No. 1, 2001, Marcia-Anne Dobres
Product Description
Manifesting Power confronts the relationship between gender and power within prehistoric and historic societies. It addresses the extent to which our preconceptions of the nature of power, and of relations between the sexes, are rooted in our own experience of western society, and argues that both conditions and perceptions may have been quite different among peoples of the past.
This collection includes nine innovative chapters which draw on data from a range of periods and areas. By looking at the evidence for gender distinctions both from archaeological sites and from ethnographic observation, the contributors explore what these distinctions can reveal about power relationships in general. They argue that the evidence often does not point to the existence of hierarchical gender relationships, and explore the forms of power available to women among the Maya and Aztec, and in prehistoric Denmark, Alaska, and the southeastern United States.
This collection includes nine innovative chapters which draw on data from a range of periods and areas. By looking at the evidence for gender distinctions both from archaeological sites and from ethnographic observation, the contributors explore what these distinctions can reveal about power relationships in general. They argue that the evidence often does not point to the existence of hierarchical gender relationships, and explore the forms of power available to women among the Maya and Aztec, and in prehistoric Denmark, Alaska, and the southeastern United States.
