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The most corrosive injustice encountered, up close, in every single human culture I've walked through? That's easy: the shackles that men lock, cruelly, arbitrarily, on the potential of women. (Who's always underpaid? Who's typically undereducated? Who wakes up first to a morning of toil? Who's the last to rest?)-Paul Salopek, National Geographic Explorer who walked across the earth for 10 years. June 13, 2023. Salopek, P. 2023. nationalgeographic.com.
Anthropology is the holistic study of the human species: humankind's past and present biological, linguistic, social, and cultural variations. Archeology, biological anthropology, cultural anthropology, and linguistics make up the major “four fields” of the discipline. There is a mosaic of scholarship within anthropology about misogyny and related concepts such as sexism and patriarchy. They include the following:
Psychological anthropology-belief systems around sex roles; notions of purity and danger related to bodily functions of men and women that engender emotions and necessitate separate spheres for the genders (Douglas, 2002).
Biological anthropology-biological differences in evolution in relation to behaviors; evolution and diversity in sexual dimorphism; dominance through reproductive success (e.g., polygyny, elder control of females) (Gibson & Mace, 2007; Hrdy, 1999; Larsen, 2003).
Historical/archeology-describing men's and women's spaces and occupations linked to political systems; addressing the question of the universality of patriarchy and misogyny; describing some more egalitarian societies such as ancient Crete, some hunter-gatherer groups, the Nayar of Kerala, India (Saini, 2023).
Kinship studies-the vast array of forms of marriage and family structure and how these are linked to control over land, inheritance, leadership. Why matrilineal descent-inheritance through the female line-does not