Ethnographies

Gender and Ethnography: A Brief History

Although ethnography was formally named a research method in the early 20th century as part of the development of the field of anthropology, the tenets central to ethnographies have been present in various historical writings. From travel writings to community-based oral histories, the practices of participating in community, observing and recording said observations, and interviewing community members have endured in a range of geographic areas and in many different populations, even though the products of such practices were not named “ethnographies.” The emergence of ethnography as a formalized research practice is tied to a number of colonial projects. For example, scholars now considered foundational to the field of anthropology were enlisted by colonial governments to get to know, study, and draw conclusions about so-called primitive populations and their day-to-day lives. These early anthropologists (primarily white men) took detailed notes about everything about a given population: where and how they lived, what they cooked and ate, and who did the cooking, hunting, gathering, and other essential tasks to keep their community running. These divisions of labor were, in many cases, gendered, that is, determined along the lines of perceived bodily capacity based on a binary model of biological sex (“male” or “female”). Given the coloniality of these early ethnographies, such sex-based assumptions of “gender”—along with gender roles and gendered divisions of labor—were based on a Western, white, Euro-American model of gender that relied on a binary between femininity and masculinity.

As early as the 1930s, feminist anthropologists, quickly followed by lesbian, gay, and queer anthropologists, challenged the gendered assumptions of these early ethnographies by drawing attention to gender roles culturally constructed in ways that differed from this binary model. One oft-used example of such gender difference is the population now known as two-spirit in Native American communities. Initially called berdaches by European colonial officials and anthropologists who studied Mojave populations, anthropologists and other social scientists have long drawn on this third-gender (i.e., neither “male” nor “female,” neither “man” nor “woman”) population to exemplify the social construction of gender, gender roles, and sexuality. For anthropologists, two-spirit populations demonstrated the ways that “gender” can be defined not by biological sex but rather by occupation, social roles, and individual preference. For trans studies, as well as other studies of LGBTQIA+ communities, the existence and study of two-spirit populations have exemplified the transhistorical persistence of gender diversity. Some scholars, however, have cautioned against romanticizing the presence of two-spirit populations, noting the very real forms of violence and discrimination that these populations can face. Ethnographic methods, by attending to the on-the-ground realities for trans and gender-diverse populations around the world, can address these forms of violence as well as resistance and community building.

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