Gender Thinking in the Making: Feminist Epistemology and Gender Archaeology

Abstract

In this paper I suggest that gender archaeology has followed the three main feminist epistemologies as described by Sandra Harding (1986): feminist empiricism, standpoint theory, and feminist postmodernism. I explore the main principles of these orientations and discuss their use in gender archaeology, offering examples from Norwegian, Spanish and North American contexts. My purpose is to trace a genealogy of gender archaeology from the point of view of epistemology that will reveal its feminist character. Even though it has been developed within the processual and post-processual contexts of archaeology, a review of its epistemological principles will show that gender archaeology must be situated within a wider feminist framework.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

This article has been written during my research stay at UC Berkeley under the stimulating and thoughtful supervision of Margaret Conkey. I am especially grateful for her support and encouragement. My particular thanks to Kim Christensen, who kindly revised my written English. I wish to thank as well Liv Helga Dommasnes, Sandra Montón-Subias, Marisa Ruiz-Gálvez Priego, Víctor Fernández Martínez, Almudena Hernando and Ruth Tringham who read the first draft of my paper and contributed to its improvement. Finally, I am grateful to Rosemary Joyce and Jerry Howards for the time they dedicated to engaging with me in theoretical discussions about epistemology. This paper has been partly financed by MICINN (Ref. HAR2009-08666). Responsibility for the final result and conclusion lies with myself.

Notes

1 This paper deals with the theory of knowledge that lies behind feminist archaeology. I do not discuss the different theoretical models that gender archaeologists have developed to address the study of past societies.

2 Feminist epistemologists and archaeologists not only have discussed about the presence of non-epistemic values in science but also they have reconsidered the traditional cognitive values such as ‘simplicity’ and ‘homogeneity’, arguing the lack of neutrality of those and suggesting new alternatives (see Longino 1994).

3 However, see Flannery and Winter (1976) for a non-gender theorized discussion of male and female activities in a Mesoamerican village.

4 I do not want to convey the idea that the three feminist epistemologies that I describe follow an evolutionary pattern. They certainly appeared successively but nowadays they overlap.

5 An antecedent of the maintenance activities programme was the task differentiation approach developed by Janet Spector (1983, 1991).

6 Sister Stories is accessible online at: http://www.nyupress.org/sisterstories/index.html