Man as Culture and Woman as Nature?

Why can men’s accounts represent a whole society while women are permitted to explain only women? Nicole-Claude Mathieu makes that asymmetry a problem of anthropological method in her 1973 L’Homme article, Homme-culture et femme-nature ?. Criticizing Edwin Ardener’s argument about women’s speech and worldview, she shows why acknowledging that women have not been heard does not yet establish them as subjects capable of interpreting society.

Mathieu does not deny scholarly neglect. She asks why an alleged difficulty in obtaining women’s social models is explained through characteristics of women, while men’s statements acquire an assumed universality. If the research frame already makes men speakers about society and women speakers about themselves, adding female informants can supply material for the old frame without changing what counts as knowledge.

Two explanatory standards within one relationship

The article identifies an important slippage. Men’s ability to furnish social explanations is attributed to their political position; women’s supposed closeness to nature is attributed to reproductive bodies. Two sides of a relationship consequently receive social and biological explanations respectively. The question is not whether reproductive differences exist. It is why they become sufficient causes of a symbolic order while male bodies escape equivalent scrutiny.

Bakweri women’s rituals make the criticism concrete. Rereading Ardener’s material, Mathieu argues that practices involving wilderness and water spirits can also be understood as bringing forces back into society, rather than women identifying themselves with nature. She then examines his diagrams: men have no clear place within the model called the female worldview. Women can apparently describe their own position but cannot offer an account encompassing both women and men.

This is a critical rereading of another anthropologist’s material and inferences, not Mathieu’s new Bakweri field study. It should not become a claim about the meaning shared by every woman in that community. Its value lies in separating observation, local interpretation and scholarly generalization, checking when the latter two are quietly treated as identical.

Later passages distinguish the speaker’s bodily sex from the social reference of discourse. Women can endorse explanations organized around a masculine position of power; men do not all possess equal authority to speak either. A female speaker therefore does not automatically establish an independent, unified female worldview. The objects of inquiry are concrete distributions of power, recognition as a qualified interpreter, and the transformation of dominant discourse into apparently unsexed common sense.

The critique also tests contemporary promises to give voice. If an institution determines the questions, selects speakers and confines their answers to a women’s-experience category, visibility may preserve the hierarchy of knowledge. A further question follows: can invited participants alter the research problem, interpret other groups and explain institutions as a whole? This does not make every position equally reliable; it demands explicit standards for assigning interpretive authority.

Scott’s article on gender as a category of historical analysis similarly makes gender a relationship to explain rather than a ready-made fact. Mohanty’s Under Western Eyes offers a comparison between knowledge institutions that prescribe intelligible positions for others. The objects differ, but all three make authority to explain part of the argument itself.

Mathieu’s later When Yielding Is Not Consenting investigates the conditions in which interpretive capacities develop. How do continuous work, care and restricted knowledge shape the space for understanding a relationship and refusing its demands? The 1973 paper exposes the exclusion of women from explanations of society; the 1985 essay challenges the inference of free consent from compliance. Both require that limits produced by power not be overlooked and then redescribed as women’s own attributes.