Hands, Tools and Weapons

A division of labor can be described as complementary while giving its participants very unequal means of working. Paola Tabet’s 1979 “Les Mains, les outils, les armes” brings those means into view. Rather than deriving different tasks directly from bodily differences, her comparative reading of ethnographic accounts asks who can manufacture, use and control particular tools. Technology becomes a condition of dependency as well as an instrument of production.

Participation is not control

Collective hunting offers an especially revealing problem of classification. Tabet discusses accounts in which women drive or surround animals while men wield the weapons used to kill them. Calling hunting men’s work erases women’s contribution. Describing the activity simply as cooperation can conceal the unequal distribution of equipment and decisive operations. An activity label tells us less than an account of how tasks, instruments and authority are arranged within it.

Agriculture and craft production extend the argument. Women can contribute substantial labor without gaining access to the principal instruments or recognition as skilled producers. On page 45, Tabet discusses arrangements such as a blacksmith’s wife working the bellows or a potter’s wife preparing clay. Supplying energy and preparing materials does not necessarily create a route to becoming an independent craftsperson. The distinction between assistance and expertise is therefore something to investigate, rather than accept as an objective reflection of contribution.

Whose time makes efficiency possible?

Technical development does not automatically distribute its benefits equally. More complex equipment can raise productivity while leaving people excluded from it with tasks that consume time and patience. Their prolonged work may reflect unequal access to labor-saving conditions, rather than a natural preference for repetitive activity. This is why the ownership and authorized use of an instrument matter alongside the question of whether an instrument exists.

Applied to a contemporary workplace, that approach suggests examining training, software permissions, equipment budgets and promotion credentials together. This is an extension of the question, not a claim that Tabet studied present-day firms. The useful comparison concerns the mechanism: a contribution can remain indispensable while the means of controlling production and claiming expert status remain elsewhere.

The ethnographic evidence also requires historical care. Accounts made in different periods and societies cannot simply be assembled into a picture of an unchanging universal order. Who recorded the work, whose knowledge escaped the record, and how colonial relations transformed tools and authority remain necessary questions. Challenging biological inevitability does not require treating Indigenous societies as interchangeable.

Guillaumin’s account of the appropriation of women connects control of instruments to the availability of bodies and labor time. Acker’s theory of gendered organizations moves toward jobs and evaluation standards. Together they suggest asking who controls the means and rewards of effort before treating unequal outcomes as a shortage of women’s ambition.