Education
London School of Economics.
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Edwin Ardener
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He was also noted for his contributions to the study of history. Within anthropology, some of his most important contributions were to the study of gender, as in his 1975 work in which he described women as "muted" in social discourse. A graduate of the London School of Economics, Ardener took up an Oxford lectureship in social anthropology at the invitation of East. East. Evans-Pritchard.
His ethnographic research concentrated on Africa, particularly on Cameroon.
His history of the Bakweri of Cameroon in the nineteenth century is regarded as definitive. In this essay he advanced the theory that women have been a muted group, comparatively unheard in social discourse, whose relative silence might also be seen as a function of the dominant group"s deafness to them.
He identified a problematic tendency in anthropological methodology to talk only to men and about women, thereby ignoring at least half the sample of people they were supposed to be observing. Ardener diagnosed the problem as a result of the fact that ethnographic methods were both devised and verified by male anthropologists, who did not realise what they were overlooking.
