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The Sexual Division of Foraging Labor: Biology, Taboo, and Gender Politics

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  03 June 2009

Robert Brightman
Robert Brightman
Affiliation:
Reed College
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Extract

If women's biology is their economic destiny, nowhere is this destiny more inexorable than in anthropological representations of the sexual division of foraging labor. Physically weak, immobilized by nursing children, engrossed in the provisioning of reliable plant foods, redolent with odors that drive away the game, and subject finally to the axiom that specialization everywhere increases productivity, the foraging woman who gathers but does not hunt seems multiply inevitable, the product at once of logistical necessity and evolutionary selection.

Type
Ideologies for Living Off the Land
Information
Comparative Studies in Society and History , Volume 38 , Issue 4 , October 1996 , pp. 687 - 729
Copyright
Copyright © Society for the Comparative Study of Society and History 1996

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