Cave Paintings and Feminist Anthropology

Cave Paintings and Feminist Anthropology

Feminist anthropology started to become popular in the 1960s and 1970s and is often attributed to the advent of new, progressive, or “radicalized” political and social agendas of that time both inside and outside of academia (HAT 128).  The goal of feminist anthropology was to strive toward a more powerful and inclusive understanding of society and culture through the study of the cultural representations and experiences of, and practices within, women (HAT 128).  A classic example of feminist anthropology can be found in the work of Sally Slocum.

Sally Slocum’s “Woman the Gatherer: Male Bias in Anthropology” (1975) identifies redress perceived male bias in anthropology and anthropological research.  She focuses in particular on the thesis of “Man the Hunter” which attributes many inherited behaviors seen within the human species as a result of male cooperation while hunting and killing animals. After deconstructing this notion, she reconstructs the idea of “Woman the Gatherer.”  In doing so she points out obvious male bias in the study of the evolution of humans which always focused on the male role of the hunter while completely ignoring what women were doing in the meantime.  She argues how this bias has indeed hindered the full development of the discipline of anthropology and the study of humans as a whole, for a theory that leaves out half the human species is unbalanced.

After reading Sally Slocum’s publication, I was immediately reminded of an article I had just recently read about the work archaeologist Dean Snow:

http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2013/10/131008-women-handprints-oldest-neolithic-cave-art/

Snow’s research featured in this article suggests that some of the oldest known cave art paintings and iconic handprints were actually the work of female artists.   After an analysis of hand stencils found in eight cave sites across France and Spain, he determined that three quarters of the hand prints were female.  The fact that this news came as a surprise to people immediately supports the notion of male bias addressed in Slocum’s article.  In this article about Snow’s work, he even comments, “There has been a male bias in the literature for a long time,” and goes on to remark, “People have made a lot of unwarranted assumptions about who made these things, and why.”  The use of “unwarranted” here hits the nail on the head in relation to feminist anthropology.  There has been a male bias really for no good reason and it is incredible that even 40 years after publications like Slocum’s, researchers such have Snow have to acknowledge that these biases are still unwarranted.  Yes, some of this bias is sure to have arisen due to the fact that most early anthropologists and ethnographers were themselves male and therefore tended to focus more on male roles and male informants.  However, this does not excuse the lack of consideration of female roles and life when investigating culture.

In the past, as this article explains, researchers have proposed that the paintings and hand stencils had been the work of men because the images typically were associated with game animals and hunting scenarios.  Therefore men would have been creating them as some sort of “hunting magic” or ritual in the hopes of increasing hunting success.  Even here, yet again, researchers are overlooking the fact that women also processed meat, were involved in hunting procedures, and were directly benefited if hunts were successful.  So this belief again focuses on “Man the Hunter” without much consideration for the role of women.  Snow’s negation of the role of men in the creation of these cave paintings brings women center stage.  Snow also remarks, when discussing the role women had in the processing of meat as well as other important tasks in hunter-gatherer societies, “It wasn’t just a bunch of guys out there chasing bison around.”  This is exactly the acknowledgement Slocum had been striving for in “Woman the Gatherer.”  While disappointing that it still has to come to a surprise to people, the fact that researchers are now acknowledging the equally important, if not more important, role of women in ancient societies represents steps made in the right direction in the field of anthropology and away from male bias that has been ever present in its history.  If one of the goals of anthropological research is to understand human cultures and behavior to the fullest extent, then the inclusion of the female perspective and role of women in such societies is necessary.