Sherry B. Ortner

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

Life

Ortner grew up in a middle-class Jewish family and studied anthropology at the University of Colorado. 1966–68 she finished her first field research in Nepal . Ortner had participated in the social protests of the 1960s 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.

In 1992 Ortner was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences . Today she is one of the leading figures in feminist anthropology, she works and teaches at the University of California, Los Angeles .

Works

Sherpas Through Their Rituals (1978)

Sherpas Through Their Rituals is Ortner's published form of her dissertation in Nepal. She deals with rituals and shows how individual symbols are stuck 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's ideas. The work is very densely filled with ethnographic descriptions, but also contains some 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 she explicitly turned to feminist research. Here she made the now famous statement that women are always associated with nature, men with culture, and in this she saw the reason for the universal oppression of women by men, just as culture tames nature. As an empirical example, Ortner gave the Crow Indians, who at first glance seem very matrilineally organized and where women seem to be the focus. But Ortner shows that women in this group are also suppressed and devalued, namely when they are menstruating. Then she is excluded from important ceremonies and is not allowed to touch important cult objects.

Sherry B. Ortner's conclusions

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

1. The physiology of women: women are considered closer to nature because their body and its functions are more geared towards the reproduction of humanity than those of men. While the woman is enabled / condemned to give birth by her body, the man can or must express his creativity externally in artificial symbols - he creates culture (Ortner refers to Simone de Beauvoir here). According to de Beauvoir / Ortner, the man creates infinitely existing objects, while the woman only produces finite objects, namely people.
2. The social roles : Due to the functions of her body, the choice of roles for women is severely restricted by culture. The mother-child relationship is associated with the domestic, the male with the public. This dichotomy is constructed through social roles.
3. The female psyche: Ortner thinks women think concretely and subjectively, while men are more objective. She explains that with socialization. Ortner describes how girls experience continuity, because the mother is initially the point of reference for both girls and boys. It remains that for girls. But boys experience a break, because from a certain age the father takes over the upbringing and the boy has to learn to distance himself consciously from the female. He must learn to be a man by establishing an abstract relationship with the little-present father.

Classification of the author

The beginnings of feminist theorizing lie in dealing with structuralism according to Claude Lévi-Strauss , which was based on the assumption of a nature-culture contrast as a universally valid social constant. Sherry Ortner was strongly influenced by structuralism , because she established a symbolic dichotomy of nature and culture that was equally valid for all societies, that is, universally valid, which corresponded to the terms "femininity" and "masculinity".

Some authors criticized this dichotomy of structuralism and also Ortner's claim to universality. Are women really universally oppressed everywhere in the world? This criticism stimulated further discussions in women's studies, and the opposition couples, which were accepted as universally, turned out to be a specific, historically developed Western attitude in the 1980s.

Selected bibliography

• 1974: Is Female to Male as Nature Is to Culture? In: Michelle Zimbalist Rosaldo, Louise Lamphere u. a. (Ed.): Woman, Culture and Society. Stanford University Press, Stanford 1974, pp. 67-87.
• 1978: Sherpas Through Their Rituals. Cambridge Press.
• 1981: as edited with Harriet Whitehead: Sexual Meanings. Cambridge 1981.
• 1981: with Harriet Whitehead: Gender and Sexuality In Hierarchical Societies. Cambridge Press, New York.
• 1984: Theory of Anthropology Since the Sixties.
• 1999: Life and Death on Mt. Everest. Sherpas and Himalayan Mountaineering. Princeton University Press.

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

Web links

• Literature by and about Sherry B. Ortner in the catalog of the German National Library
• Information on Sherry Ortner