Background
Peggy Sanday was born on July 9, 1937 in Long Island City, New York, United States.
(In this book, Professor Peggy Sanday provides a ground-br...)
In this book, Professor Peggy Sanday provides a ground-breaking examination of power and dominance in male-female relationships. How does the culturally approved interaction between the sexes originate? Why are women viewed as a necessary part of political, economic, and religious affairs in some societies but not in others? Why do some societies clothe sacred symbols of creative power in the guise of one sex and not of the other? Professor Sanday offers solutions to these cultural puzzles by using cross-cultural research on over 150 tribal societies. She systematically establishes the full range of variation in male and female power roles and then suggests a theoretical framework for explaining this variation. Rejecting the argument of universal female subordination, Professor Sanday argues that male dominance is not inherent in human relations but is a solution to various kinds of cultural strain. Those who are thought to embody, be in touch with, or control the creative forces of nature are perceived as powerful. In isolating the behavioural and symbolic mechanisms which institute male dominance, professor Sanday shows that a people's secular power roles are partly derived from ancient concepts of power, as exemplified by their origin myths. Power and dominance are further determined by a people's adaptation to their environment, social conflict, and emotional stress. This is illustrated through case studies of the effects of European colonialism, migration, and food stress, and supported by numerous statistical associations between sexual inequity and various cultural stresses.
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1981
(The practice of cannibalism is in certain cultures reject...)
The practice of cannibalism is in certain cultures rejected as evil, while in others it plays a central part in the ritual order. Anthropologists have offered various explanations for the existence of cannibalism, none of which, Peggy Sanday claims, is adequate. In this book she presents a new approach to understanding the phenomenon. Through a detailed examination of ritual cannibalism in selected tribal societies, and a comparison of those cases with others in which the practice is absent, she shows that cannibalism is closely linked to people's orientation to the world, and that it serves as a concrete device for distinguishing the 'cultural self' from the 'natural other'. Combining perspectives drawn from the work of Ricoeur, Freud, Hegel, and Jung and from symbolic anthropology, Sanday argues that ritual cannibalism is intimately connected both with the constructs by which the origin and continuity of life are understood and assured from one generation to the next and with the way in which that understanding is used to control the vital forces considered necessary for the cannibalism in a culture derives from basic human attitudes toward life and death, combined with the realities of the material world. As well as making an original contribution to the understanding of the significant human practice, Sanday also develops a theoretical argument of wider relevance to anthropologists, sociologists, and other readers interested in the function and meaning of cannibalism.
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1986
(This widely acclaimed and meticulously documented volume ...)
This widely acclaimed and meticulously documented volume illustrates, in painstaking and disturbing detail, the nature of fraternity gang rape. Drawing on interviews with both victims and fraternity members, Peggy Reeves Sanday reconstructs daily life in the fraternity, highlighting the role played by pornography, male bonding, and degrading, often grotesque, initiation and hazing rituals. In a substantial new introduction and afterword, Sanday updates the incidences of fraternity gang rape on college campuses today, highlighting such recent cases as that of Duke University and others in the headlines. Sanday also explores the nature of hazing at sororities on campus and how Greek life in general contributes to a culture which promotes the exploitation and sexual degradation of women on campus. More broadly, Sanday examines the nature of campus life today and the possibility of creating a rape-free campus culture.
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1990
(In this bracing study of American sexual culture and the ...)
In this bracing study of American sexual culture and the politics of acquaintance rape, esteemed anthropologist Peggy Reeves Sanday identifies the sexual stereotypes that continue to obstruct justice and diminish women. Beginning with a harrowing account of the St. John's rape case, Sanday reaches back through British and American landmark rape cases to explain how, with the exception of earliest Colonial times, rape has been a crime notable for placing the woman on trial. A ground-breaking work of scholarship, A Woman Scorned brings a broader perspective to our understanding of acquaintance rape and envisions, finally, a new paradigm for female sexual equality. In this bracing study of American sexual culture and the politics of acquaintance rape, esteemed anthropologist Peggy Reeves Sanday identifies the sexual stereotypes that continue to obstruct justice and diminish women. Beginning with a harrowing account of the St. John's rape case, Sanday reaches back through British and American landmark rape cases to explain how, with the exception of earliest Colonial times, rape has been a crime notable for placing the woman on trial. A ground-breaking work of scholarship, A Woman Scorned brings a broader perspective to our understanding of acquaintance rape and envisions, finally, a new paradigm for female sexual equality.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0520210921/?tag=2022091-20
1996
(Contrary to the declarations of some anthropologists, mat...)
Contrary to the declarations of some anthropologists, matriarchies do exist. Peggy Reeves Sanday first went to West Sumatra in 1981, intrigued by reports that the matrilineal Minangkabau―one of the largest ethnic groups in Indonesia―label their society a matriarchy. Numbering some four million in West Sumatra, the Minangkabau are known in Indonesia for their literary flair, business acumen, and egalitarian, democratic relationships between men and women. Sanday uses her repeated visits to West Sumatra in the closing decades of the twentieth century as the basis for a new definition of matriarchy. From the vantage point of daily life in villages, especially one where she developed close personal ties, Sanday's narrative is centered on how the Minangkabau conceive of their world and think humans should behave, along with the practices and rituals they claim uphold their matriarchate. Women at the Center leaves the reader with a solid sense of the respect for women that permeates Minangkabau culture, and gives new life to the concept of matriarchy.
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(Beyond the Second Sex is an innovative work that challeng...)
Beyond the Second Sex is an innovative work that challenges Simone de Beauvoir's notion that women are "the second" in every society. Anthropological inquiry into male-female relations has evolved around debates concerning sexual inequality. Based on original field research, the essays presented in this volume are not concerned with inequality per se. Rather, the authors pose ethnographic and analytical challenges in the assumptions and definitions that, in the past, have supported judgments about sexual equality and inequality. They move away from broad labels and blanket judgments in favor of addressing the conflict, contradictions, and ambiguities that are so often encountered in field research. These essays maintain that, in discussing the cultural construction and representation of gender, the "culture" that is abstracted from field data cannot be separated from a complex, ongoing, and everchanging local process. From this point of view, the editors conclude, the relationship of the sexes to each other is best discussed in terms of the conflicts, tensions, and paradoxes that are at the heart of daily life in many societies. Beyond the Second Sex will be of interest to students and scholars of anthropology and women's studies.
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(Told in Aboriginal art and narrative, the Dreamtime story...)
Told in Aboriginal art and narrative, the Dreamtime story of the creation and meaning of the Wolfe Creek Meteorite Crater in Australia's Western Desert appears here for the first time. Deftly and sensitively Sanday introduces the meaning of the cosmology of the homeland of the Walmajarri and Djaru Aboriginal people. She provides a compelling story of discovery, both that of her geologist father in 1947 and her own decades later. In a vibrant example of public-interest anthropology, an ethnography that evolves from dialogue and collaboration and honors the Aboriginal artists with whom she worked, Sanday enlightens, elucidates, and communicates the aesthetic sensibility of a people on their own terms. Through powerful Aboriginal art, readers become part of an unforgettable cultural experience.
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anthropologist educator writer
Peggy Sanday was born on July 9, 1937 in Long Island City, New York, United States.
Sanday attended Columbia University, obtaining Bachelor of Arts degree in 1960. Six years later she received Doctor of Philosophy degree in anthropology from the University of Pittsburgh.
Sanday served at the position of assistant professor at Carnegie-Mellon University in Pittsburgh for three years from 1969. In 1972 she became an associate professor of anthropology at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, she left it in 1985. That same year she began to work at the Department of Anthropology of the University of Pennsylvania as a professor of Anthropology, she remained there until 2001. After that she changed her working position and became R. Jean Brownlee Endowed Term Chair at the School of Arts and Sciences at the University of Pennsylvania. She retired in 2006.
Anthropologist Peggy Reeves Sanday has issued several books, among them Anthropology and the Public Interest: Fieldwork and Theory, which she edited. This book is a study of the vast influence of anthropology on society, and it contains chapters dealing with the role of the anthropologist in various aspects of American culture, including language planning and public policy.
For her second book, Female Power and Male Dominance: On the Origins of Sexual Inequality, Sanday culled anthropological data from some one hundred and fifty societies, studying the history of men’s and women’s roles in various cultures. In this book, the author analyzes male and female roles in two types of societies: those with inner orientation and those with outer orientation. Inner-oriented societies, Sanday sets forth, are those in which inhabitants live in harmony with nature and with one another. A society that has inner orientation has an abundant food supply, with little need for hunting, and there is no threat of attack or oppression from neighboring societies. The creation story of a society with inner orientation most often finds its god in nature and portrays god as either a woman or a couple.
On the other hand, Sanday demonstrates, societies that have outer orientation offer a more difficult way of life. The scarcity of food forces the men to become hunters and, as food suppliers, men are considered to be more valuable than women. Women in outer-oriented cultures are more apt to be beaten and dominated by their men, and often treated as slaves. The deity of a society that has outer orientation is generally portrayed as a male, supernatural god, who competes with nature.
Sanday’s study reports an increase in the number of outer-orientation societies with the advent of western colonization.
Sanday issued her next book, Divine Hunger: Cannibalism as a Cultural System, in 1986. In this volume the author looks at fifteen societies that practice, or have previously practiced, cannibalism. Contrary to widespread belief that cannibalism results from food shortages, Sanday’s findings indicate that there are spiritual and practical aspects of cannibalism. Kinsmen, for example, often eat the body of a dead loved one in order to bond with the deceased, while others maintain internal order by consuming invasive outsiders.
Two of Sanday’s later books examine another form of human injustice. Fraternity Gang Rape: Sex, Brotherhood, and Privilege on Campus and A Woman Scorned: Acquaintance Rape on Trial are the anthropologist’s studies of rape and its effect on society. The first oi these looks specifically at a gang rape that occurred in a fraternity house on a college campus in 1983.
Sanday further explores society’s reaction to rape in A Woman Scorned, which traces the history of beliefs about the sexual domination of women, while indicating how those beliefs influence cases of acquaintance rape.
(In this bracing study of American sexual culture and the ...)
1996(Told in Aboriginal art and narrative, the Dreamtime story...)
(This widely acclaimed and meticulously documented volume ...)
1990(Beyond the Second Sex is an innovative work that challeng...)
(The practice of cannibalism is in certain cultures reject...)
1986(In this book, Professor Peggy Sanday provides a ground-br...)
1981(Contrary to the declarations of some anthropologists, mat...)
Sanday has two children.
