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Article Excerpt
Introduction
March 30 2005--A group of scholars gathered at George Mason University for a colloquium exploring the topic, Muted Group Theory: Past, Present and Future, an event organized by Cynthia Lehman. Women and Language, as one of the event sponsors, is pleased to provide extended abstracts of the presentations and discussion.
Colloquium keynoter was Shirley Ardener of Oxford University, co-author with Edwin Ardener of writings in the 1970s that first explicated the muted group theory. Other presenters and discussants included Cheris Kramarae, whose Women and Men Speaking in 1981 was largely responsible for bringing muted group theory to the attention of communication scholars; Julia Wood, the scholar widely recognized as making the earliest applications of standpoint theory within communication; Jan Dates, whose work has examined mainstream media depictions of African Americans; Mark Orbe, who used both muted group and standpoint theories in developing a theory of co-cultural communication; and Thomas Nakayama, author of works exploring Asian American communication and the identity of whiteness.
The abstracts printed here were extracted from authors' presentations and the discussions that followed and the ideas presented are substantially less fully developed than in the presentations or papers. And while each author has had the opportunity to see the editing by W & L, we are responsible for any errors that remain. We urge interested readers to contact us and the presenters for permission to review the complete documents or colloquium transcripts. In addition, readers should know that some participants' papers are presented here in more detail than others. To preserve space, references for all presenters are collected together with the exception of listing much of the Ardeners' work following the abstract of the paper by Shirley Ardener.
Ardener's "Muted Groups": The genesis of an idea and its praxis
I have been asked by Cynthia Lehman and her colleagues to give a talk at George Mason University on the origins and early developments of Muted Group Theory. It is immensely encouraging to any academic to find early work still alive and provocative so many decades after its introduction. I was, of course, aware that the theory is frequently applied, in various ways to current work by many different scholars. But I was certainly astonished, when preparing to find so many hits on Google and AltaVista when, in preparation for my talk for this occasions, I tapped in "muted groups"! I have printed off a boxful of studies; it includes some good defenses and many applications. (1) Among them was one by Wall and Gannon-Leary, who, after having "revisited" the theory in 1999 found "it still has relevance and ... applicability beyond the gender based" and can still "aid understanding". It is a bit humbling.
Within my time limit today, and in response to prompts,
first I will briefly summarize the chronology of the early texts developed in Oxford in 1960s and '70s--at the Institute of Social Anthropology, and at the seminar on the social anthropology of women at Queen Elisabeth House. (2) This is for the record. Then I refer to the context in which Edwin's ideas fitted. Again I don't expect to be able to unpack them now, or you to remember them. But you will be able to locate them, now I have put them in the record. Finally I will describe briefly some examples of the muting of groups by academics.
Chronological background
In 1968 my late husband Edwin drew attention to the difficulties anthropologists, of either sex, faced in identifying and articulating models of the world which women might generate, if they did not synchronies well, or accord with, those generated by men. His ideas, which drew on our fieldwork in Cameroon, were written up for a festschrift honouring his teacher Audrey Richards, on her retirement. After presenting it in Oxford in 1968, he gave the paper at Phyllis Kaberry's seminar in London University in the same year.
In 1971, I presented my paper (3) "Sexual Insult and Female Militancy" which showed how muted women can use body symbolism to make their case. I gave examples from Cameroon ethnography, as well as from the feminist movements.
Edwin's paper for the festschrift for Audrey Richards was published the following year, in The Interpretation of Ritual, 1972, edited by Jean La Fontaine.
My sexual insult paper was first printed in 1973 (Man, vol. 8, No.3). I followed it with "Nudity Vulgarity and Protest" in New Society in 1974, thus continuing my focus on body symbolism.
In 1975 I reprinted Edwin's paper, with my text on sexual insult, together with Edwin's new response "Belief and the Problem of Women, Revisited" (4), in Perceiving Women, for which I wrote an Introduction. (5)
In 1977 I gave a paper at the Wameford Hospital in Oxford, which was further elaborated in 19 at an anthropology conference in Cambridge, "The Iconography of Gender: the Vagina". I published "Arson, Nudity and Bombs among the Canadian Doukhobors: a question of [muted] identity" in G. Breakwell, ed., Threatened Identities, Wiley in 1983.
The paper on the iconography of the vagina was published in 1987 (in The Cultural Construction of Sexuality, ed. Pat Caplan).
The genesis of Muted Group Theory
Edwin always maintained that muted group theory was not only, or even primarily, about women--although women comprised a conspicuous case in point. In fact he also drew on his personal experience as a sensitive (intellectual) boy among hearty (sportive) boys in an all-boys London secondary school. As a result of his early encounters with boys, thereafter he identified with other groups in society for whom self-expression was constrained. (6) Edwin's Oxford doctoral students of the early '70s applied his ideas to, for example, petty criminals (Mike Maquire) and schoolchildren (Charlotte Hardman), and Celts (Chapman, et al). Hardman used the term muted on a postcard (7), and Edwin adopted it as he found it more 'convenient's than "inarticulate", because some feminists (wrongly) assumed that Edwin was referring to a biological condition. He was never a biological determinist; he saw biological difference as neutral, 'unmarked', until humanity otherwise determines. To quote Burton, his former student, referring to Edwin (1994:20): "'Dominance, he states, is a problem of humanity (1986:99), which can originate in a simple, unmarked difference (for example, left- and right-handedness, or biological differences between men and women). Such a difference leads to an imbalance, thence an imparity, and finally to an inequality (1986:100)'".
Edwin saw that muted group theory had pragmatic (technical) as well as analytical potentials (1975, p.1). Certainly it has been a useful awareness-raising tool for many fieldworkers--as hundreds of internet hits still prove, and as recent work at Cambridge affirms. (9) In particular, scholars interested in 'women's voices'--for example Dale Spender (1980) from Australia, Cheris Kramarae (1981) in the States and Deborah Cameron (1985) in the UK--were among the first of many to take up our discussion of muted groups. As Cheris and others are here to speak for themselves, I do not need to elaborate. It sparked off interest in many different disciplines, e.g. in Classical Studies (see J. Gould 1980). Development Studies have benefited a lot. I recently received a message from a young British colleague stating "FYI, I've been explaining about muted groups to the business studies students--it's hard going, but part of my general quest to get them to understand that reality is messy."
I think you are all familiar with the basic linguistic arguments. Muted Group Theory includes the question whether everyone in society has participated equally in the generation of ideas and their encoding into discourse. Have groups developed separate realities, or systems of values that do not get adequate recognition in the dominant representations of society? Are there mechanisms for devaluing their contributions, squeezing them out from the arenas in which rewards are distributed? Of course, as many of you know, while 'muting' may entail the suppression, or repression of speech, the theory, in its linguistic aspect, is concerned at least as much with what people say, and when they speak, and in what mode, as with how much.
Today I merely wish to emphasize that muting, by dominant groups through control of dominant discourse, is refracted through and embedded in many different social spaces: in seating arrangements (hence the book I edited Women and Space; Ground Rules and Social Maps, 1981), prestige and power (hence Persons and Powers of Women, 1985, and Edwin on "The Problem of Dominance", 1996) (10) religion (hence Women and Missions, 1993, co-edited with Bowie and Kirkwood), and, of course speech (hence Bilingual Women, 1994, which I co-edited with Burton and Dyson).
The debate, then, has always concerned itself with other than only utterances; rather it focuses on the more fundamental question of the generation of categories of thought, of conceptualization, and of ideas concerning social structures, and how these are expressed 'on the ground'. Edwin's work on different levels modeling reality, and his notion of the "template" was introduced as early as 1968 (in his "Witchcraft, Economics and the Continuity of Belief' paper, published in 1970, in Witchcraft Confessions and Accusations, ed. Mary Douglas). He expanded this work later in his discussions of "p" (paradigmatic) and "s" (syntagrnatic) structures, which are linked by modes of transformation (see a brief reference in footnote 4 p.26, in Perceiving Women, 1975), and his other work on "the analysis of events" (for a full bibliography and a selection of papers see Edwin's "The Voice of Prophesy '" and other essays, 1989). (11)
As noted, I could not possibly recount such work here, although it is relevant; I can only point the way to it. Chapman (p. xiv) noted of Edwin that "his apparently relaxed style conceals a tense economy of expression ... he could make a terse argument do where others might produce a book.... one phrase served where others might require laboured paragraphs." McDonald wrote of the "density of economy of his prose" (p.229). Certainly his work on muted groups is compact. Indeed it has appeared to me at times that others have unpacked at length, and sometimes presented as new, what has been implicit in Edwin's argument, as if he were unaware of it. This was possibly a useful task, however, if others needed it. I think I too should be counted as one who has done this.
In the 'sixties and 'seventies, for me muted group theory offered a way to avoid the simple stance then advocated by some that we only needed to give or add "the woman's perspective"--as if there was something substantive "out there" which could be fully described if viewed from different positions. Nor did I see that the answer was to identify a lot of sub-groups, which could be added together, or placed in a hierarchy, in some way, to get a whole vision of a society. Now I realize that in recent years you have developed "Standpoint Theory" and "Co-Cultural Theory" here in the States, and it is largely for enlightenment on this theory that I have made this trip, to be with you and to learn where this has taken us.
I felt then that there were numerous realities that did not necessarily fit together in, nor add up to, a harmonious whole. Muted groups and dominant groups are not independent realities. To use Hastrup's phrase: they are "mutually affecting spheres of reality." (12) Muted groups and dominant groups operate as "simultaneities" (a word popular with Edwin). For more on this topic see his 1989 collection, including Chapman's excellent exegesis.
Like Chapman, Hastrup has noted that for Edwin "the meeting of empirical and definitional problems" was always prime (p.226). As he (Chapman again) "was particularly desirous to stress the material features of the reality demonstrated ..." (p. xxii). (13)
Anthropological (and other) models
I soon decided that, while looking at others, we must look at our own biases or pervasive tendencies that could influence our interpretations; in particular, at the ways women are represented in anthropological literature, and in dominant modes of discourse among social anthropologists. These representations may seem to resemble ['folk.sup.models' (14)] more than is sometimes assumed.
In the '80s, I maintained that an examination of the very presentation of so-called 'scientific' diagrams, tables, and texts which set out to show differences between the sexes could tell us as much about the unconscious cultural or 'folk' models of the analysts who drew them up, as the actual details in the diagrams do about the sexes. The most important message, in fact, may indeed be in the mode rather than in the purported statement and, critically, the message may not be random. The paper, originally presented before a small informal interdisciplinary group of colleagues teaching the Human Science degree, was eventually published in 1986 ("Representations").
I argued that a kind of unconscious deafness or myopia occurs in dominant circles, which can even affect anthropologists! For example, Evans-Pritchard, our clever and charming professor at Oxford, published Male and Female Among the Azande. This all-embracing title relied on texts gathered from a handful of male informants; he only acknowledged the absence of texts from women in a mere half-sentence, tucked into his Introduction. (15) This phenomenon of men speaking for or representing menplus-women, without comment, is discussed in a paper by Kirsten Hastrup (in Defining Females 1978) entitled "The Semantics of Biology', virginity being her special illustrative topic. For her, 'male is generalized, while female is specified'.
When drawing attention to this I recalled that, when our Queen was attending a race meeting in Australia, a television commentator said that this would particularly please Australians because they have only three things on their minds: drink, horses, and women. We see in this trivial joke a common kind of assumption: 'Australians' unqualified are male--the male is the representative or essential Australian.
Corinne Hutt's once well-known book (1972) on sexual differentiation was entitled Male and Female, a familiar linguistic usage which presages the bias common in her diagrams (see below). It seems a natural English usage, for if we were to say, instead, 'women and men', we would 'mark' the phrase; we would turn it from a generality into something specific. Socio-linguists like Dale Spender (1980), and Cheris have identified many such examples of muting. (16)
To move the analysis on: I noted that Jack Goody, in discussing the effects of lineality on presentation, asserted that
One of the features of the graphic mode is the tendency to arrange terms in (linear) rows and (hierarchical) columns in such a way that each item is allocated a single position, where it stands in a definite, permanent and unambiguous relationship to others. Assign a position, for example, to 'black' and it then acquires a specific relationship to all other elements in the 'scheme of symbolic classification' (Goody 1977:218).
I went on to ask: in lists or tables, where would you expect figures for males to be? Well, first of course. Thus the male image is implanted, establishing a prior standard against which subsequent information about women can be mapped (17).
In reading these data we will, no doubt, follow procedures advocated by Peter Ramus in the sixteenth century when he tried to introduce a new 'dialectical order', 'method' or 'logic' resting on the analytical study of texts. 'This order was set out in schematic form in which the "general" or inclusive aspects of the subject came first, descending thence through a series of dichotomized classifications to the "specials" or individual aspects' (Yates 1965, quoted in Goody 1977:219).
Simple linguistic gaffs like this are not the sort of a trap which we would expect social anthropologists to fall into today. But there are other pitfalls which we have not always escaped and still require us to be wary. Some time ago I began to look at graphs giving information broken down by sex. Figure 1 (simplifying a diagram in Reynolds (1976:117) is an example; many others can be found, for instance in Hutt (1972). In this case the black line represents data which rises higher in the scale for boys than for girls. There are examples (see, e.g. Hutt 1972: 36, 89, 121) where quantities for girls rise higher, but still a broken line is used to express them. 18
[FIGURE 1 OMITTED]
Does it make any difference?
If, in the preponderance of cases, the dotted or broken line expresses the female data, does this matter? I tried out some experiments, using spurious information not connected with gender. Each test had two textual variations and two different graphs, to counter such effects as precedence. Respondents were given one or other of each, for each test. Example: "The borrowing patterns from two public libraries were compared. They turned out to be different. One of them was the same as normal for public libraries and one was deviant (or: one was the deviant and one was normal). Here is a graph. Which of the lines refer to which library?" Several other nonsense graphs were also used in the exercise.
These tests were suggestive, though they were not done on a large enough scale to be authoritative; they suggested to me that, to most readers, the solid line appears as the base, or norm, or where appropriate, the ideal, while the broken line represents a deviation from it. So it seems likely that, in graphs where figures for males are indicated by a hard line, these are taken to be the norm, the measure against which the female deviation is compared. The male is generalized, while the female is specified, to use Hastrup's phrase. [More examples in the original]
For another example of uneven handedness, involving kingship, we may turn to John Barnes (1967). His first sentence in a paper on genealogies reads, "In many senses the most distinctive and fundamental human institution is the nuclear family, founded on the two concepts of marriage and parentage and consisting of man, wife, and children."
Innocuous? No linguistic bias? Well, why did he not say 'Man, woman and children' or 'husband, wife and children'? His remark, "In kinship there are, as it were, always two parties to be considered," looks a little more hopeful, but he goes on: "for a man is never a son or an uncle merely on his own; he is always some specific person's son and some other person's uncle."
Reflect now on what I termed 'the parenthetical woman', also found in the same pupblication by Barnes, who writes (p. 102) of 'any individual and his (or her) mother, father, brother, sister, husband (or wife)'. Ego seems to have suffered a sex-change at the end of this sentence, which permits 'or wife' to be parenthesized! On his genealogy (on his page 110) we...
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