Sherry Ortner

Sherry Beth Ortner ( born September 19, 1941 in New Jersey) is a feminist anthropologist and professor of U.S. origin.

Life

Ortner grew up in a Jewish middle -class family and studied at the University of Colorado anthropology. 1966-68, she finished her first fieldwork in Nepal. Ortner had participated in the social protests of the 60s and was active in the anti -war and civil rights movement. Then she made acquaintance with the then- burgeoning women's movement. In the 1970s, women's issues were still very marginalized within anthropology. Today Sherry Ortner is one of the leaders of the feminist anthropology, she works and teaches at the University of California, Los Angeles.

Works

Sherpas Through Their Rituals (1978 )

Sherpas Through Their Rituals is Ortners published form of their thesis work in Nepal. It is concerned with rituals and shows how individual symbols are arrested in the social structure. It describes the life of the Sherpas, their relationships and life paths through analysis of their religious rites. Ortner's early work was influenced by Clifford Geertz ideas. The work is very densely filled with ethnographic descriptions, but also contains quite a few references to Ortner's later theories.

Is Female to Male as Nature is to Culture (1974 )

Is Female to Male as Nature is to Culture was the work with which it expressly addressed himself of feminist research. Here she made the statement that has now become famous, that the woman is always associated with nature, the man of culture, and in this they saw the reason for the universal oppression of women by men, just as the culture tames nature. As an empirical example Ortner gave the Crow Indians, who have a very matrilineal organized at first sight and in which the women appear to be at the center. But Ortner points out that even in this group the woman is suppressed and devalued, namely when she has her menstruation. Then she is excluded from important ceremonies and must not touch important ritual objects.

Sherry B. Ortner's conclusions

Ortner questioned why women are equated with nature and locates three aspects that build on each other:

Classification of author

The beginnings of feminist theory lie in the confrontation with the structuralism by Claude Lévi- Strauss, who built on the assumption of a nature-culture opposition as a universally applicable social constant. Sherry Ortner was heavily influenced by structuralism, because she put a for all companies equally, so universally valid symbolic dichotomy of nature and culture determine which corresponded with the notions of "femininity " and " masculinity ".

Some authors have criticized this Dichotomiedenken of structuralism and also this claim to universality in Ortner. Are women really oppressed universal all over the world? This review suggested that women's studies to further discussion and the opposition pairs assumed to be universally proved in the 80s as a specific, historically developed western setting.

Selected Bibliography

See also: field research, ethnology, cultural anthropology, social anthropology