Feminism and Anthropology: A Research Paper on Eleanor Leacock and Rosario De Santos

Feminism and Anthropology: A Research Paper on Eleanor Leacock and Rosario De Santos

VERONICA L. GREGORIO MA Women and Development Studies University of the Philippines

Titled, “Feminism and Anthropology: A Research Paper on Eleanor Leacock and Rosario de Santos,” the final paper on Anthropology 280 will discuss the life and works of two figures in Anthropology with feminism as one of their fields of specialization. The choice of the topic was in line with the field of study of the writer (MA Women and Development Studies) and also in time of the National Women’s Month celebration. The paper will present the two figures in Anthropology with background on their personal life, education, and selected publications. The paper is dedicated to all women students and researchers in different fields who devote their time and research for the empowerment and emancipation of marginalized women. May this paper serve as an inspiration to all of us.

Feminism and Feminist Anthropology In the Philippines, same with many parts of the world, the word “feminism” suggests negative ideas to the uninformed community. Feminists are often condemned, rejected, and misinterpreted because only few people really bothered to ask what feminism is about. To clear such misunderstandings about the said idea and to be able to contextualize our key figures (who are both feminist), let us first discuss what feminism is all about. According to Kamla Basin and Nighat Said Khan, feminists in South Asia, there is no specific abstract definition of feminism applicable to all women at all times. Nevertheless, we have the widely accepted definition of feminism and that is an awareness of women’s oppression and exploitation in the society, at work, and within the family, and conscious action by women and men to change the situation. According to this definition, it is clear that a mere recognition of sexism is not enough; it has to be accompanied by action to end male domination. The actions can be in many different forms and it can be done by both men and women. Hence, men can also be feminist. To provide a short 1herstory, the struggle of our earlier feminists includes 2democratic rights or legal reforms while present-day feminists now work towards emancipation of women 1 2

A term used to pertain to women’s stories in exchange of history Includes right to education, to work, to own a property, to vote, to participate in elections

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which includes: (1) struggle against subordination to the male within the home and in the society and (2) against double burden due to combined production and reproduction work. In essence, present-day feminism can be defined as a struggle to the achievement of women’s equality, dignity, and freedom of choice to control our lives and bodies within and outside the home. Now that we have a better understanding of feminism, the next discussion will be about the development of feminist anthropology as a field of study and its principal concepts. Under the direction of Dr. Michael D. Murphy, a professor from the Department of Anthropology in the University of Alabama, Johnna Dominguez, Marsha Franks, and James H. Boschma, III (graduate students by the time of publication), provided a study guide on how feminist anthropology developed as a field. Based on the study, the subfield of Feminist Anthropology emerged as a reaction to a perceived 3androcentric bias within the discipline. As a continuous reaction to the said androcentrism, feminist anthropology developed three waves. The first wave, from 1850 to 1920, sought primarily to include women‟s voices in ethnography. What little ethnographic data concerning women that existed was often, in reality, the reports of male informants transmitted through male ethnographers. The second wave, from 1920 to 1980, moved into academic spheres and separated the notion of sex from that of gender, both of which previously had been used interchangeably. Gender was used to refer to both the male and the female, the cultural construction of these categories, and the relationship between them. In addition, second wave feminist anthropologists rejected the idea of inherent dichotomies such as male/female and work/home. Contemporary feminist anthropologists constitute the theory‟s third wave, which began in the 1980s. Feminist anthropologists now acknowledge differences through categories such as class, race, ethnicity, and so forth. The studies include those that focus on production and work, reproduction and sexuality, and gender and the state. The same study determined some of the principal concepts being studied in Feminist Anthropology. It includes: (1) Subordination of women: Analysis and development of theory about the universal and cross-cultural explanation to the subordination of women, (2) Marxism: Explains that the subordination of women in capitalist societies, both in terms of their reproductive role, and value as unpaid or underpaid labor, arises from historical trends predating capitalism itself. According to Engels, men‟s acquisition of property (land or herds) resulted to the "world historical defeat of the female sex", (3) Universal binary opposition: Anthropologist Sherry Ortner used dichotomies such as public and domestic, production and reproduction, and nature and culture to explain universal female subordination, (4) Domestic power of women: Ernestine P. Friedl and Louise Lamphere believe that, although females are subjected to universal subordination, they are not without individual power. They emphasized the domestic power of women – where power is manifested in individually negotiated relations based in the 3

Placing male human beings or the masculine point of view at the center of one's view of the world

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domestic sphere but influencing and even determining male activity in the public sphere, (5) Sex/Gender system: Gender, as it came to replace the term woman in the anthropological discussions, helped to free the issue of inequality from biological connotations, (6) Identity: Having focus on social categories such as age, occupation, religion, status, and so on. Power is an important component of analysis in this concept since the construction and enactment of identity occurs through discourses and actions that are structured by contexts of power and (7) Queer Theory: Queer theory is the most recent post-structuralist reaction which challenges 4 heteronormativity. Feminist Anthropology puts the function, status, and contributions of women to the society at the center of anthropological research. To concretely see the products of this field, let us proceed with our two key figures, Eleanor Leacock and Rosario De Santos. Eleanor Burke Leacock (1922 - 1987) Eleanor Burke Leacock was born on July 2, 1922 in New York but raised by her family in New Jersey. Her mother, Lily Mary Batterham obtained a master‟s degree in mathematics and had taught secondary school. Her father, Kenneth Burke is literary critic, philosopher, and writer. She lived with her two sisters, Jeanne Elspeth Burke Hart and France Burke and two brothers: Michael Burke and Anthony Burke. Eleanor is called “Happy” by her family and friends. Although Leacock‟s parents offered no obvious criticism of sexism during her childhood, her father often worked at home and on the farm, and her parents shared outdoor chores. Because of this, their lifestyles did not fit the expected gender roles of that era. In the city, her parent‟s social set included artists, political radicals and writers who would discuss revolutionary thinkers, such as Marx, at social gatherings. The values she absorbed in her formative years mixed respect for manual labor that was characterized by the farming community and the intellectual integrity and independence that distinguished the writers and artists. These early experiences clearly influenced how she approached the field of anthropology and the Marxist and feminist tendencies that became the hallmark of her work (Alten, 1998). Leacock had always attended public schools growing up, but as a teenager she was given a scholarship to the Dalton School, a prestigious private high school, where she thrived on the intellectual stimulation and progressive teaching styles. She was acutely aware, however, of the differences between her family‟s standard of living and that of her more affluent peers. This experience made her more cognizant of class differences in society and influenced her thinking on "the culture of poverty" which became an area on which she focused. She also won a scholarship to Radcliffe in 1939. There, she became active in a circle of student radicals who

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Assumption that heterosexuality and the resulting social institutions are the normative structures in all societies

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excelled in studies but who were considered undesirable by more traditional students (Gacs, 1988). While at Radcliffe, she met Richard Leacock, a Harvard student interested in film making, whose family lived in New York. Eventually, the two got married in 1941. By 1942, Eleanor transferred to Barnard. While studying at Barnard, she experienced her first personal case of sex discrimination. Although she had received the highest grade in a drafting course given at Columbia‟s Engineering School, she was denied the drafting assistantship that she wanted, explicitly because she was female. The experience led her to confront the social injustice of sex discrimination more than before (Gacs, 1988). At the age of 22, she graduated from Barnard College and returned to New York to enrol in graduate school at Columbia University. By the end of World War II in 1947, her husband returned and she became pregnant with their first child and daughter, Elspeth. In 1951, Leacock developed a field technique called “Anthropology on the ground” which she applied in her study on the Indian people in Labrador, the Montagnais-Naskapi. She mapped local camp positions and hunting-trapping patterns at different times and she found out that subsistence resources were not privately owned even after centuries of commodity production; although the rights to trap in given places were privatized, the rights to gather, fish, hunt for food, and so on were still communal. She also looked into post-marital residence patterns and found that in the past, matrilocality had existed. This challenged the notion set forth by Julian Steward, one of the members of her dissertation committee, that hunter-gather societies were inclined to patrilocality because hunting and trapping were men‟s activities. With her first foray into fieldwork among the Innu of Labrador, Eleanor Burke Leacock began a forty year long relationship with the study of Native North American peoples. During this time, she pioneered the view that Native North American culture could only be conceived of by looking at the framework of the transformative and harmful forces of colonialism. She redirected the public‟s attention to the sources of native cultural resistance and autonomy. Before she completed her dissertation entitled: The Montagnais “Hunting Territory” and the Fur Trade, Eleanor and Richard‟s second child, David, was born (Alten, 1998). Eleanor‟s dissertation provided ethnographic material from the north shore of the St. Lawrence and argued that family hunting territories were not Aboriginal but a product of the European fur trade. Leacock contended that the economic system introduced by the European fur trade established a dependent relationship between Aboriginal peoples and the fur companies. This in turn contributed to the transformation of Aboriginal peoples' traditional communalistic modes of production into individualistic systems of land holdings to support increased pressures and competition for resources. Her representation of family hunting territories ultimately suggested that, as producers in the market-dominated fur trade, Aboriginal peoples had become assimilated to a specific European class system within a wider capitalistic mode of production. Page 4 of 11

In 1952, she received her doctorate, but was given little support by the department at Columbia in finding a job. Being married, female, the mother of two small children, and a political radical, left Leacock isolated from many of the academic opportunities offered to her peers. Her dissertation on family hunting territories among the Innu was widely cited in the literature about Native American culture change. With this work, she also made clear the effects that colonialism and capitalism had on Native North America during a time when this was either ignored by most anthropologists or explained away by acculturation theory (Sutton, 1993). In 1955, when their second daughter, Claudia, was still a baby, Leacock went to Queens College to teach part-time for a year. This was followed by a temporary, part-time position at City College. She joined the Bank Street College of Education Schools and Mental Health project, aimed at improving teaching practice during 1958 to 1965 (Gacs, 1988). Eleanor and Richard‟s marriage broke up in 1962. They have four children, Elspeth, David, Claudia, and 5Robert. After being a semi-employed evening classes professor at Queens College, City College and New York University, Eleanor got her first full time job teaching anthropology at Brooklyn Polytechnic Institute in 1963, 11 years after completing her Ph.D. in Columbia. Upon being fully employed, Leacock focused her writing and research on the work of 6 Lewis Henry Morgan concerning egalitarian societies and cultural evolution, the critique of the culture of poverty as class-based and racially biased anthropology. She credits her concentration on interdisciplinary studies on the fact that she did not have an academic position early on in her career. With such broad interests, Leacock established herself as a scholar and critic and audiences both inside and outside anthropology (Alten, 1998). Eleanor Leacock‟s second husband since 1966 was Civil Rights and Union activist James Haughton. It was during 1960s that Leacock sharpened her concentration as a Marxist feminist, focusing on the relationship of class and gender. She took up Morgan‟s hypothesis that an association existed between the development of 7patriarchy and the processes of class and state configuration. In so doing, Leacock became one of the first modern feminist anthropologists to reevaluate the connection between the development of the state and women‟s loss of authority and sovereignty and provided inspiration for other feminist scholars. She argued that egalitarian societies do exist where men and women can do different jobs and remain separate but equal. It was not until the advent of capitalism, according to Leacock, that the family was privatized and separated from the public world of work and the state. When this happened what had once been mere differences in gender, class and race were metamorphosed into inequalities between the colonized and colonizer as women‟s work at home became marginalized and depreciated. 5

Date of birth is unknown (November 21, 1818 – December 17, 1881) He was a pioneering American anthropologist and social theorist 7 System in which the role of the male as the primary authority figure is central to social organization 6

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Leacock‟s view that gender subordination was linked to the hierarchical nature of society, differentiated her from radical feminists who believed that patriarchy and reproductive relations rooted in the family were the main source of woman‟s subjugation (Sutton, 1993). In 1972, she was brought in as chair by the City College of New York to rebuild the Department of Anthropology, which had recently split from sociology. On that same year, she published a book section in the Introduction to Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State, by Frederick Engels. She made several contributions to further Engels' work; in part to combat a prevalent idea in her time that men "naturally" dominated over women. The introduction has detailed anthropological findings to show that human social developments, though many and varied, are based on the methods of economic production in force during that stage of development. A great deal of the evidence examined has to do with the roles of women, which has made this line of investigation even more interesting during these decades of female emancipation. The section emphasized that in the first known societies, women were at least the equal of men in all decisions. She emphasized that all concepts of family were based on matriarchal lineage, because that was the only lineage that could be determined. She also published the Myths of Male Dominance: Collected Articles on Women Cross-Culturally in 1981. The book debunks the many myths behind the idea of “natural” male superiority. Drawing on extensive ethnographic research across cultures, Leacock demonstrates that claims of inherent male dominance and female subordination are based on carefully constructed falsehoods with no historical, factual basis. Instead, Leacock argues for the material roots of women‟s oppression as part of a historic process within the development of human societies. She documents numerous historical examples of egalitarian gender relations, and shows that, far from simply accepting their lot, women across cultures challenged attempts to denigrate and isolate their labor and roles in society. Finally, Leacock‟s analysis proves that just as women‟s subjugation has not always existed as a facet of human relations, it can also be overcome. According to the New York Times, Eleanor Leacock remained at the City College of New York until she died of stroke in 1987 at the age of 64. One of the awards given to her was the New York Academy Sciences Award for the Behavioral Sciences in 1983, making her the first woman to receive such distinction. Rosario De Santos Rosario De Santos was born on October 3, 1942 in Manila, Philippines. She was six years old when her parents separated and she was raised by her mother since then. Her mother Sofia Bona De Santos is a writer, medical practitioner, and feminist. As a child, Sario‟s aunties are the ones who look after her when her mother is busy at work. Rosario is called “Sario” by her family and friends.

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Sario spent her kindergarten and elementary years in Holy Ghost School in the Philippines until the time that her mother was granted a Graduate Degree Scholarship in Harvard University. It was during Sario‟s last year in elementary school that they went to Boston where she continued her studies. According to Sario, it was the beginning of her years of independence; this is because her mother is busy in studying and writing thesis. Part of the independence is studying on her own, reading different books in various fields, meeting new friends, taking care of herself and doing household chores on her own. After one year, they went back to the Philippines and Sario continued her high school years still in the Holy Ghost School. During her last year in high school, her mother, who was already working in the World Health Organization, was assigned to be a Regional Adviser on Tuberculosis in Europe and Egypt. They both went to Egypt where she continued and finished her studies in a British school for girls while her mother is working in Alexandria. After graduating from high school, Sario was not yet sure of what course she is going to take but she was sure that she is into Social Sciences. Upon enrolment in the American University of Beirut in Lebanon, Sario studied psychology but after three years, her mother was once again assigned in another country, this time, in Mexico. It was 1964 when Sario enrolled in a university in Mexico but she was unsatisfied of the quality of education. After one semester, she decided to enrol in the University of the Americas and take Anthropology instead. Sario‟s mother is very fond of history and this is one of the reasons why she decided to study Anthropology. Right after graduating college, Sario decided to take a graduate course in New York. She studied MA in Sociology and Anthropology in Fordham University in 1966. This is the same year that her mother was transferred in Guatemala for another post. In December 1966, Sario and her French boyfriend whom she met in New York, went to Guatemala to spend Christmas with her mother. While in New York, Sario and her boyfriend eventually married but after one month, the biggest tragedy in Sario‟s life happened: her mother died in Guatemala. With this event, Sario came back to the Philippines with her husband to arrange the burial. Upon arrival in the Philippines, a friend of her mother, the father of Mahar Mangahas, introduced Sario to the Chair of the Department of Anthropology. After meeting Sario, and knowing that she‟s already taking up MA in Sociology and Anthropology, the chair offered her to teach Anthropology in University of the Philippines Baguio. Sario accepted the teaching post and went to Baguio with her husband who took courses in Philippine Culture. It is during her stay in Baguio that Sario became interested in studying the Ifugaos. She started exploring and gathering data about the Alim during her second semester in teaching. In 1968, after one year of teaching in UP Baguio, the department chair offered her to be a full-time Instructor in the Department of Anthropology in the University of the Philippines Diliman. Some of her students in UP Diliman are: (1) Lorena Barros – founder of the Malayang Page 7 of 11

Kilusan ng Bagong Kababaihan (Free Movement of New Women) or MAKIBAKA who became a guerrilla fighter, (2) Raquel Edralin-Tiglao - student activist in the 1970s against Marcos and founder of Coalition against Trafficking in Women, (3) Rigoberto Tiglao - current Ambassador of the Philippines to Athens, Greece, (4) Carolyn Sobritchea – former dean and current professor of Philippine Studies at the Asian Center in UP Diliman, and (5) June Prill-Brett – internationally-known Anthropologist and Researcher and a Professor Emeritus at UP Baguio. In 1972, Sario received a scholarship from the French Embassy and on the same year, Sario and her husband went to France to pursue their own line of studies – her husband on Vietnamese Studies and Sario on the 8Un Ifugao Face a‟ la Guerre (Ifugao Facing a War). After a year, Sario came back to the Philippines to gather data for her dissertation. It took several years before Sario was able to finish her post-graduate degree because of the different academic standards in France and in Philippines. Sario became much busy in studying and doing various researches in the Philippines while her husband loved travelling in different places in pursue of his studies. Having such situation, Sario and her husband talked about having a divorce in 1979. They both decided to go separate ways they eventually remarried. Sario met Rody Del Rosario, a labor leader and activist. Rody already have five children when he married Sario. They had their first child, Jamill, in 1980 and their second child, Malaya, in 1982, just 15 minutes before Sario‟s 40th birthday. Sario became a professor in the College of Social Work and Community Development (CSWCD) in UP Diliman in 1976 and became the Chairperson of the Department of Community Development in 1986. Sario wrote the “Life on the Assembly Line: An alternative Philippine report on women industrial workers” in 1985. The book summarizes the women workers situation in the Philippines. As the decade for women comes to an end, the problems of the Filipino women industrial workers become more and more apparent; unemployment, underemployment, lower wages due to inflation and acute competition over low-skilled, exportoriented jobs, more exploitation in the work place, no alleviation from childcare and housework, and an overall decrease in the standard of living. The problems of the Filipino industrial workers cannot be isolated from the society and the world as a whole. The book ended with the conclusion that the workers demands for equality, full employment, right to organize and join unions have to do with discriminatory laws and unfavorable government socio-economic policies, above all, an economy which allows exploitation and foreign domination. In 1988, Sario and her colleagues decided to put up the 9Women and Development Program in CSWCD where she became the first coordinator and at the same time, Sario with her colleagues and with the UP workers, put up the first union for all workers where she became the first woman President for all UP Campuses. One of the main issues that Sario faced is the 8 9

Published in a French Scientific Journal, Etudes Interdisciplinaires sur le monde insulindien, Volume 3, Issue 1 Now called Department of Women and Development Studies (DWDS)

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struggle for worker‟s right and unequal treatment against the ranking file employees of the university. The UP President by that time wanted to have a separate union by the ranking file employees and the faculty members. To quote Sario: “We went through hell trying to certify our union. We organized and we even filed a case in the Supreme Court.” But because of the vague decision of the Supreme Court, Sario and her colleagues were not able establish one union for all faculty and ranking file employees. At present, UP Diliman has two different unions, the All UP Worker‟s Union and the UP Academic Union. It was in the late 1990s when Sario decided to finish her post-graduate degree in Philippine Studies while teaching in CSWCD. Due to Sario‟s outstanding performance as a faculty, she received the Gawad Chancellor Award for being the Best Faculty in Extension in 1999. Sario also became the coordinator of UP Diliman Gender Office (UPDGO) from 1999 to 2008 and became the UPDGO Representative to the Committee of the Office of Anti-Sexual Harrassment (OASH) from 2002 to 2008. Sario was invited to be a Visiting Professor for three month (March-June 2005) in the Universite de Paris under the Institut des Etudes Europeenes (IEE) in France. Sario was invited to be a Visiting Professor for three month (March-June 2005) in the Universite de Paris under the Institut des Etudes Europeenes (IEE) in France. Sario finished her Ph. D. in 2003 and her dissertation, The Ifugao „Alim as Gendered Discourse, won as the Best Dissertation in the College of Arts and Letters, University of the Philippines Diliman. The dissertation straddles in three disciplines of study: Anthropology, Comparative Literature, and Feminist Gender Studies. It focuses on an indigenous oral discourse of the Ifugaos of Piwong, called “alim” recorded in 1975, and makes an ethnographic, gendersensitive discourse analysis of the language, structure, and content of its text including its historical, socio-economic, and cultural context. As an analysis of Ifugao social life, this study shows the interconnections between macro, micro, and local dimensions of Ifugao life, including gender. The study of alim discourse shows that it is both the result and the instrument of a certain mode of production which the study discusses in detail, and as such, reflects the ideology of that mode, which is itself a struggle of modes of production – the production of rice as the basis of wealth and the production of chickens and pigs through trade, as the celebrations and rituals. At present, Sario is separated from Rody while their children are both studying in Europe. Jamill, 32, is a graduate of BA Broadcast Communication while Malaya, 31, is a graduate of BA Film, both from the College of Mass Communication in UP Diliman. She is a Professor Emeritus in UP Diliman since 2010 and a Senior Professorial Lecturer in the Center for International Studies (CIS) also since 2010. She published under the following names: Rosario Bona De Santos Lorrin, Rosario Lorrin, Rosario Del Rosario, Rosario De Santos Del Rosario, Rosario de Santos Bona Del Rosario, and Rosario Bona De Santos – At present, she use Rosario De Santos in her works. Page 9 of 11

Sario‟s specialization includes: Ifugao Ethnography, Philippine Folklore, Women and Gender Studies, Filipino Workers and Child Labor Studies, and Community Development. When asked what tips she can give to the new generation of Anthropologist, she answered: “First, you really have to go to the field, you cannot do anthropology without going to the field. Second, always remember that the personal is political. Third, look at gender all the time, in every step of data gathering, look for it. Fourth is always use participatory action research, let the people give their opinions. They also have to be the writer of the research. Last is, always do anthropology – do it in your family, in your school, everywhere, study humans around you and their culture.”

(Photo with Dr. Rosario De Santos at the CSWCD Library, March 24, 2014)

Conclusion The paper presented is not just about the contributions of Eleanor Leacock and Rosario De Santos in the academe but also in the society and especially in the women‟s movement. There is no barrier between their personal lives, education, and career paths – all are interconnected with their feminist principles. They recognize the existence of women‟s oppression and exploitation in the society, at work, and within the family, and they act to change such situation. Their stories are very inspiring to all young scholars who also wish to contribute to the field of Anthropology and also at the same time, to use their research to stand by the side of the marginalized sectors. Women has always been at the margin but because of the stories of women like Eleanor Leacock and Rosario De Santos, other women are motivated and empowered to participate in the struggle for women‟s equality, dignity, and freedom within and outside the home. Page 10 of 11

“To be a woman is a never-ceasing battle to live and be free.” - Joi Barrios, Filipino writer and Feminist Sources:       

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Alten, Kristin (1998). Bibliographies: Eleanor Burke Leacock. Bloomington: Indiana University. Basin, Kamla and Khan, Nighat Said (1986). Some Questions on Feminism and Its relevance in South Asia. New Delhi: Kali for Women. De Santos, Rosario. Personal Interview. 13 February and 24 March 2014. Gacs, Ute., ed (1988). Women Anthropologists: A Biographical Dictionary. The University of Michigan: Greenwood Press. Gellner, Pamela and Miranda Stockett (2006). Feminist Anthropology: Past Present and Future. University of Pennsylvania Press. Johnna Dominguez, Marsha Franks, and James H. Boschma, III (2009). Feminist Anthropology. Tuscaloosa, Alabama: The University of Alabama. Leibowitz L. (1975). Perspectives on the Evolution of Sex Differences. In Toward an Anthropology of Women, Rayna R. Reiter, ed., pp. 21-35. New York: Monthly Review Press. Sutton, Constance R., ed. (1993). Lewis Henry Morgan, Ancient Society. New York: Meridian Books.

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