Sherry Ortner “So Is Female to Male as Nature is to Culture”

This article serves as a method of re-examination for Sherry Ortner, who earlier on in her career wrote another highly controversial piece connecting females as closer to nature (through childbirth) and males as closer to culture (through production of objects). This analogous relationship received pushback from the academic community, and in this piece Ortner revisits her initial claims. The main method for determining answers to the initial questions posed involved case studies of different communities, yet all three case studies concluded relative gender egalitarianism. Ortner acknowledges that despite this conclusion, egalitarianism itself needed to be re-examined because it was “complex, inconsistent, and -to some extent- fragile”. To me, the conclusions of these case studies is flawed for several reasons; most importantly, egalitarianism seems like a conclusion derived based off of a lack of evidence to the contrary, even though all three communities consistently saw anecdotal evidence of predominantly men coming into positions of power. Ortner speaks to the concept of “structures” and how a lack of defining categories doesn’t necessarily mean that a specific structure is absent. I think this is a valuable takeaway because Ortner encourages the reader to stray away from the binary thinking associated with her initial claim, and instead think of “structures” as “existential questions”. The issue of gender within the culture/nature question forces both concepts to be redefined since current definitions place one in a position of power over the other, when in fact the relationship is much more complicated.