- Email: [email protected]
Prologue: Negotiating women's roles and power: The practice of world religions in contemporary Asia
Religion 37 (2007) 111e116 www.elsevier.com/locate/religion
Prologue: Negotiating women’s roles and power: The practice of world religions in contemporary Asia* Susan Sered Department of Sociology and Criminology, Suffolk University, 8 Ashburton Place, Beacon Hill, Boston, MA 02108, USA
Abstract The articles that comprise this special issue make a convincing case for the importance of anthropological research in the field of gender and religion. Based upon the work of a panel presented at the 2002 annual meeting of the American Anthropological Association, these articles demonstrate the anthropological facility for moving back and forth between ‘great traditions’ and local conditions. In different ways and in different contexts, these articles point to a variable pattern of ancient, local or indigenous cosmological equality and women’s ritual leadership that are effaced as a result of political or cultural conquest by a literate, centralised, male-dominated ‘great tradition’. Equally important, these articles demonstrate that this effacement is rarely complete. Rather, women’s power is fluid, dynamic, variable and negotiated at varying institutional and interpretive levels. These tensions illustrate how analyses of gender in religion work with different sets of issues. The first set of issues centres on women, that is, on actual persons who have varying degrees of agency within specific social situations. The second set of issues centres on what is often called ‘Woman’, a symbolic construct that conflates gender, sex and sexuality that is composed of allegory, ideology, metaphor, fantasy and projection. Published by Elsevier Ltd.
Within the field of religious studies gender is a well-established sub-discipline. Daly’s (1968) The Church and the Second Sex, Reuther’s (1974) Religion and Sexism: Images of Women in the Jewish and Christian Traditions, Stone’s (1978) When God Was a Woman, and Christ and Plaskow’s *
The articles were originally given as papers on a panel of the American Anthropological Association on ‘Negotiating Women’s Roles and Power in the Practice of World Religions’ held in New Orleans on 20 November 2002. E-mail address: [email protected]. 0048-721X/$ - see front matter Published by Elsevier Ltd. doi:10.1016/j.religion.2007.06.004
112
S. Sered / Religion 37 (2007) 111e116
(1979) Womenspirit Rising: A Feminist Reader in Religion preceded anthropological attention to gender and religion by several decades. The belated regard by anthropology for issues so central to cultural life no doubt reflects a number of factors, including the Marxist/materialist leanings of much of early feminist anthropology, a reluctance to engage wide theoretical questions of women’s ‘status’ in much of later feminist anthropology, and perhaps most important, a sense that what is encoded and sanctified in oral and written religious texts is ideal, mythological, pseudo-historical, esoteric and non-contextualised. The articles in this special issue of Religion argue for the importance of anthropological research in the field of gender and religion. Based on a panel presentation at the 2002 annual meeting of the American Anthropological Association, these articles demonstrate the anthropological facility for moving back and forth from ‘great traditions’ to local contexts. These articles point to a variable pattern of the effacement of ancient, local or indigenous cosmological equality and women’s ritual leadership by a male-dominated ‘great tradition’. But this effacement is rarely complete. Rather, as these articles show, women’s power and roles are fluid, dynamic, variable and negotiated. What we call ‘religion’ is a conglomerate of shifting symbols, only some of which are ritually enacted and thus imbued with cultural potency at any given time and by any given group. Others remain in a loose cultural reservoir, available as circumstances demand. This looseness makes possible the kinds of negotiations that the articles document. These articles further suggest that religions tend to be characterised by tensions over the status of women. In part, this is because characterisations of idealised women exist within cultural reservoirs of symbols upon which real women themselves draw. Moreover, as the articles here show, ambiguity surrounding women’s religious status is part of a set of negotiations between world religious and local traditions. In his study of women ritual specialists and Taoism among the Zhuang national minority in China, James Wilkerson explains that as Taoism spread into South China with the expansion of the empire, the accommodation of local practice often went hand in hand with the attempt to undermine the religious status of Zhuang women. To quote him, ‘representatives of the Taoist tradition and of the Chinese state both locate female ritual specialists at the bottom rung of the classification of ritual specialists, thereby attempting to impose a Chinese gender hierarchy upon Zhuang religious life’. Wilkerson observes a highly salient pattern, which several other note as well, that a division of labour is often visible where indigenous cultural concerns fall within a female sphere of activity, whereas Han cultural concerns are a male sphere of activity. In the face of the dominant Taoism, however, the ritual roles of the Zhuang women have persisted along with their local traditions, as dramatically manifested by the ways in which an effective Zhuang female ritual specialist can establish herself as a powerful figure in the community. A review of ethnographic studies of gender and religion suggests that this pattern may be widespread, especially in Asia where Buddhism and other religions often co-exist within the same communities (see Sered, 1994). Shanshan Du describes the egalitarian gender ideology of the indigenous religion of the De’ang, in contrast to the male-oriented and male-dominated Theravadan ‘great tradition’. On the one hand ‘In accordance with the marginalisation of women in the gender ideology of Theravada Buddhism, the inferiority and subordination of De’ang women is institutionalised in village sangha and highlighted in the restrictions on women in temple activities’. On the other hand and just as among some other ethnic minorities in Southwest China where Theravada Buddhism dominates, various De’ang myths grant the indigenous goddess of
S. Sered / Religion 37 (2007) 111e116
113
agriculture, the Mother of Grain, an indispensable position in the Buddhist cosmology. Beyond the mythological realm, the agricultural goddess is fully recognised in De’ang ritual practices, even in those involving monastic institutions. While village women represent their households to perform rituals for Mother of Grain, monks represent the village in performing fertility rituals in honour of this indigenous goddess. Similar shifts away from women’s ritual pre-eminence, or at least equality in the wake of conquest by a ‘great tradition’ religion have been documented by Bell (1983) for Australia, by Silverblatt (1980) for the Andes, by Forman (1984) for Oceania and by Davis (1984) for Thailand. Numerous other scholars have traced how Islam has enhanced the religious status and roles of men in Africa, with the traditional mainstream, spirit-oriented religions becoming increasingly associated with women, and increasingly marginalised or condemned (Masquelier, 2001). Okinawan history offers a particularly illuminating example. Since the end of the nineteenth century, women’s religious leadership an Okinawan has been eroded by the compulsory Japanese policy of land registration. In traditional Okinawan villages, high-ranked priestesses owned land that they passed on to their successors, usually their daughters. This land gave the priestess the economic autonomy necessary to remain unmarried. With Japanese annexation, land was required to be registered in the names of male ‘heads of household’. As a result, priestesses lost their land to male relatives (see Lebra, 1966). In Henza Village, where I carried out fieldwork during: 1994e95, the previous head priestess had lost her house to her brother, a situation which, according to the oldest living priestess in the village, has had deleterious effects on the spiritual potency and status of the current head priestess (see Sered, 1999). At the same time men have become far more absorbed than women into the political and economic structures of Japan. Traditional Okinawan men’s rituals, such as the annual haari boat race and the young men’s eisaa dancing, have taken on new visibility as they have become publicly supported exhibitions of Okinawan culture within the Japanese nation state. Hence men rather than women are the public face of municipal Japanese New Year celebrations and of annual family visits to Buddhist and Shinto temples to receive blessings for the New Year from the priests. The priestesses’ traditional rituals, many of which are performed in sacred groves deep inside the jungle, do not lend themselves to the kind of displays found at the newly expanded men’s rituals. Unlike the men’s rituals, the priestesses’ prayers are not a good fit for the Japanese category of culture (bunka). In fact, Lebra notes that in many villages, ‘the male political leaders are loathe to allot funds for [priestesses’] ritual purposes.. This changed attitude undoubtedly derives from the influence of Japanese culture, which accords the male a higher status in all spheres of action, religious as well as secular’ (Lebra, 1966, p. 78). Japanese scholars speculate that the ancient religion of Japan was dominated by women and that vestiges of that domination can still be found in modern Japan. According to Yoshida (1989), the continued religious domination of women in the Ryukyu Islands reflects the failure of Buddhism to make an impact. Whether or not Yoshida is correct, it is clear that in those East and Southeast Asian societies in which the indigenous religions are dominated by women, men tend to be involved in newer, state-sponsored, centralised, literate religions that preach doctrines of female pollution or subordination. Korean men, for instance, are responsible for Confucianist ancestor worship, whereas Korean women dominate as shamans (see Kendall, 1985). Thai and Burmese men are active Buddhists-many, if not, most young men enter Buddhist monasteries
114
S. Sered / Religion 37 (2007) 111e116
as novitiates for several years e whereas Thai and Burmese women are highly involved in local spirit-oriented religious practices (see Wijeyewardene, 1977). Buddhism has been the state religion of Burma for centuries. Alongside Buddhism, however, the indigenous religion, which centres on the appeasement of spirits known as nats, continues to be practiced, especially by women. Nats are propitiated at the time of illness; at key stages in the agricultural cycle; at births, deaths and marriages; and at Buddhist initiations. In fieldwork carried out in 1961e62 in a rural village in Upper Burma, approximately ten miles from the city of Mandalay, Spiro (1967) discovered that almost half of the men e but none of the women e claimed not to believe in nats. Men and women agreed that women are more involved in nat propitiation, that women fear the nats more, and that women perform more nat rituals. Village nat shrines are almost always tended by women, and village nat ceremonies are attended almost exclusively by women. Shamans, who become possessed by nats, are almost all women. Women also bow to nats, whereas men do not. Villagers explained this difference by the different status of men and women: within the [Buddhist] thirty-one abodes of existence men occupy a higher position than nats, where women occupy a lower position than nats. Specialists in Buddhism (monks) are exclusively male, and nat shamans are overwhelmingly, though not exclusively, female. In Burma almost all male children enter Buddhist monasteries as novitiates for a number of years (usually during adolescence). The time spent in the monastery strengthens men’s ties to Buddhism and reinforces women’s perception of Buddhism as belonging more to men than to women. The Buddhist leaders with whom Burmese are acquainted e the monks and teachers e are men. Yet as the articles in this issue maintain, political conquest by a patriarchal, centralised state or by a male-dominated religion does not eliminate the opportunities for women to exercise ritual agency or strands of gender-equal cosmologies. Rather than telling simple stories of the elimination of women’s ritual expertise, these articles emphasise ambiguity and ambivalence. They describe the religious sphere as a prime cultural arena in which the very meaning of gender can be negotiated. Audrey Mouser, looking at Malay gender constructions and performances, notes that women have turned imposed conservative Islamic constructs to their advantage by presenting a public image of ‘womanhood’ that earns them social capital as ‘good Malay women’, while recasting notions of ‘traditional’ versus ‘modern’ in ways that both value and realise personal goals. Without having to challenge gender norms overtly, these women have used a government policy that conjoins re-traditionalisation with Islamisation to gain educational and occupational opportunities. Wearing the veil, while an outward symbol of women’s subordinate status and lack of personal freedom, becomes a ‘free pass’ that allows women to move unhindered in the public sphere. As Malay women become less powerful in the legal realm, they become more active in the economic sector. As women become increasingly distanced from formal public Islamic rituals, they will become more able financially to fund their own practices. Underscoring the kinds of ambiguity that characterise all of the religious contexts described in this special issue, Du notes the ideological and institutional subordination of women, as well as their informal power, in the religion of the Theravadan societies in Southeast Asia and Southwest China. The cosmological position of Mother of Grain is defined through her challenge to Buddha in that she epitomises the negotiations between indigenous De’ang gender ideology and that of orthodox Theravada Buddhism. Wilkerson notes a similar ambivalence facing Zhuang female ritual specialists.
S. Sered / Religion 37 (2007) 111e116
115
The ambivalence is even more poignant when the context is one in which women carve out for themselves substantial and meaningful roles within a firmly male-dominated tradition. Hillary Crane dramatically brings home the theme of ambiguity, quoting a nun with whom she worked in a Taiwanese Buddhist monastery: ‘Although I am a man, it’s important for me to remember that I am a woman’. As Crane explains, ‘These apparent contradictions are part of a strategy undertaken by the nuns to resolve contradictions found within the Buddhist texts studied at the temple’. Crane further notes that the ‘Texts that factor in the nuns’ construction of a negative image of women mostly discuss women as sources of distraction or attachment for men, and therefore, as dangerous’. When female nuns read these texts, they switch back and forth between seeing themselves as gendered symbols and seeing themselves as gendered agents. Taken together, the articles in this issue show that the analysis of gender in religions works with two sets of issues. The first set centres on actual women, who posses varying degrees of agency. Women as agents can demand rights, can enter into negotiations and protest unfair treatment. In religion, agency is expressed in stating one’s religious needs freely, in imaging and addressing the divine as one sees fit, in gathering openly with others of like mind to carry out rituals, and in freely choosing which rituals to join or eschew. The second set of issues centres on what is often called ‘Woman’ e a symbolic construct that is composed of allegory, ideology, metaphor, fantasy and, at least in male-dominated religions, male projections. Although Woman may barely reflect the real experiences of women, in religious interactions these two categories tend to get confused. Woman as a symbol is often associated with some of the deepest, most compelling and most tenacious theological and mythological structures in a religion, and these structures imprint the lives of women in that religion. Over the past decades scholars in religious studies have given most of their attention to ‘Woman’ whether in the form of goddesses, demonesses, virtuous virgins and mythological seductresses, or in the form of jural objects insofar as they are treated in texts written by and for men. During the same period anthropologists and sociologists have focused on ‘women’, looking at, for example, contemporary possession cults or patterns of church attendance. This divide has hindered the study of gender and religion. Real women manoeuvre and negotiate in cultural worlds in which ‘Woman’ is part of the currency and part of the grammar. Crane so eloquently shows, ‘Woman’ is read not only through the eyes of the male elite but also through the eyes of real women as well. The articles in this issue should help rectify an unfortunate conceptual bifurcation. References Bell, D., 1983. Daughters of the Dreaming. McPhee Gribble/Allen and Unwin, Melbourne. Christ, C., Plaskow, J. (Eds.), 1979. Womenspirit Rising: A Feminist Reader in Religion. Harper and Row, San Francisco. Daly, M., 1968. The Church and the Second Sex. Beacon Press, Boston. Davis, R., 1984. Muang matrifocality. Mankind 14, 263e271. Forman, C., 1984. ‘Sing to the Lord a new song’: women in the churches of Oceania. In: O’Brien, D., Tiffany, S. (Eds.), Rethinking Women’s Roles: Perspectives from the Pacific. University of California Press, Berkeley, pp. 153e172. Kendall, L., 1985. Shamans, Housewives, and Other Restless Spirits: Women in Korean Ritual Life. University of Hawaii Press, Honolulu. Lebra, W., 1966. Okinawan Religion. University of Hawaii Press, Honolulu. Masquelier, A., 2001. Prayer Has Spoiled Everything: Possession, Power, and Identity in an Islamic Town of Niger. Duke University Press, Durham, NC.
116
S. Sered / Religion 37 (2007) 111e116
Reuther, R., 1974. Religion and Sexism: Images of Women in the Jewish and Christian Traditions. Simon and Schuster, New York. Silverblatt, I., 1980. Andean women under Spanish rule. In: Etienne, E., Leacock, E. (Eds.), Women and Colonisation: Anthropological Perspectives. Bergin, New York, pp. 149e185. Sered, S., 1994. Priestess, Mother, Sacred Sister: Religions Dominated by Women. Oxford University Press, New York. Sered, S., 1999. Women of the Sacred Groves: Divine Priestesses of Okinawa. Oxford University Press, New York. Spiro, M., 1967. Burmese Supernaturalism. Prentice-Hall, Englewood Cliffs, NJ. Stone, M., 1978. When God Was a Woman. Harcourt Brace, San Francisco. Wijeyewardene, G., 1977. Matriclans or female cults: a problem in Northern Thai ethnography. Mankind 11, 19e25. Yoshida, T., 1989. Lecture. International Culture Center for Youth. Jerusalem, 23 March. Susan Sered, Ph.D., Senior Research Associate at Suffolk University’s Center for Women’s Health and Human Rights, is the author of six books and dozens of articles in the fields of medical anthropology, religious studies and gender studies. Before coming to Suffolk, She directed the ‘Religion, Health and Healing Initiative’ at Harvard University’s Center for the Study of World Religions, and served as Associate Professor of Anthropology at Bar Ilan University in Israel. Among her books are Uninsured in America: Life and Death in the Land of Opportunity (University of California Press), Religion and Healing in America (Oxford University Press) and Priestess, Mother, Sacred Sister: Religions Dominated by Women (Oxford University Press).
Prologue: Negotiating women’s roles and power: The practice of world religions in contemporary Asia* Susan Sered Department of Sociology and Criminology, Suffolk University, 8 Ashburton Place, Beacon Hill, Boston, MA 02108, USA
Abstract The articles that comprise this special issue make a convincing case for the importance of anthropological research in the field of gender and religion. Based upon the work of a panel presented at the 2002 annual meeting of the American Anthropological Association, these articles demonstrate the anthropological facility for moving back and forth between ‘great traditions’ and local conditions. In different ways and in different contexts, these articles point to a variable pattern of ancient, local or indigenous cosmological equality and women’s ritual leadership that are effaced as a result of political or cultural conquest by a literate, centralised, male-dominated ‘great tradition’. Equally important, these articles demonstrate that this effacement is rarely complete. Rather, women’s power is fluid, dynamic, variable and negotiated at varying institutional and interpretive levels. These tensions illustrate how analyses of gender in religion work with different sets of issues. The first set of issues centres on women, that is, on actual persons who have varying degrees of agency within specific social situations. The second set of issues centres on what is often called ‘Woman’, a symbolic construct that conflates gender, sex and sexuality that is composed of allegory, ideology, metaphor, fantasy and projection. Published by Elsevier Ltd.
Within the field of religious studies gender is a well-established sub-discipline. Daly’s (1968) The Church and the Second Sex, Reuther’s (1974) Religion and Sexism: Images of Women in the Jewish and Christian Traditions, Stone’s (1978) When God Was a Woman, and Christ and Plaskow’s *
The articles were originally given as papers on a panel of the American Anthropological Association on ‘Negotiating Women’s Roles and Power in the Practice of World Religions’ held in New Orleans on 20 November 2002. E-mail address: [email protected]. 0048-721X/$ - see front matter Published by Elsevier Ltd. doi:10.1016/j.religion.2007.06.004
112
S. Sered / Religion 37 (2007) 111e116
(1979) Womenspirit Rising: A Feminist Reader in Religion preceded anthropological attention to gender and religion by several decades. The belated regard by anthropology for issues so central to cultural life no doubt reflects a number of factors, including the Marxist/materialist leanings of much of early feminist anthropology, a reluctance to engage wide theoretical questions of women’s ‘status’ in much of later feminist anthropology, and perhaps most important, a sense that what is encoded and sanctified in oral and written religious texts is ideal, mythological, pseudo-historical, esoteric and non-contextualised. The articles in this special issue of Religion argue for the importance of anthropological research in the field of gender and religion. Based on a panel presentation at the 2002 annual meeting of the American Anthropological Association, these articles demonstrate the anthropological facility for moving back and forth from ‘great traditions’ to local contexts. These articles point to a variable pattern of the effacement of ancient, local or indigenous cosmological equality and women’s ritual leadership by a male-dominated ‘great tradition’. But this effacement is rarely complete. Rather, as these articles show, women’s power and roles are fluid, dynamic, variable and negotiated. What we call ‘religion’ is a conglomerate of shifting symbols, only some of which are ritually enacted and thus imbued with cultural potency at any given time and by any given group. Others remain in a loose cultural reservoir, available as circumstances demand. This looseness makes possible the kinds of negotiations that the articles document. These articles further suggest that religions tend to be characterised by tensions over the status of women. In part, this is because characterisations of idealised women exist within cultural reservoirs of symbols upon which real women themselves draw. Moreover, as the articles here show, ambiguity surrounding women’s religious status is part of a set of negotiations between world religious and local traditions. In his study of women ritual specialists and Taoism among the Zhuang national minority in China, James Wilkerson explains that as Taoism spread into South China with the expansion of the empire, the accommodation of local practice often went hand in hand with the attempt to undermine the religious status of Zhuang women. To quote him, ‘representatives of the Taoist tradition and of the Chinese state both locate female ritual specialists at the bottom rung of the classification of ritual specialists, thereby attempting to impose a Chinese gender hierarchy upon Zhuang religious life’. Wilkerson observes a highly salient pattern, which several other note as well, that a division of labour is often visible where indigenous cultural concerns fall within a female sphere of activity, whereas Han cultural concerns are a male sphere of activity. In the face of the dominant Taoism, however, the ritual roles of the Zhuang women have persisted along with their local traditions, as dramatically manifested by the ways in which an effective Zhuang female ritual specialist can establish herself as a powerful figure in the community. A review of ethnographic studies of gender and religion suggests that this pattern may be widespread, especially in Asia where Buddhism and other religions often co-exist within the same communities (see Sered, 1994). Shanshan Du describes the egalitarian gender ideology of the indigenous religion of the De’ang, in contrast to the male-oriented and male-dominated Theravadan ‘great tradition’. On the one hand ‘In accordance with the marginalisation of women in the gender ideology of Theravada Buddhism, the inferiority and subordination of De’ang women is institutionalised in village sangha and highlighted in the restrictions on women in temple activities’. On the other hand and just as among some other ethnic minorities in Southwest China where Theravada Buddhism dominates, various De’ang myths grant the indigenous goddess of
S. Sered / Religion 37 (2007) 111e116
113
agriculture, the Mother of Grain, an indispensable position in the Buddhist cosmology. Beyond the mythological realm, the agricultural goddess is fully recognised in De’ang ritual practices, even in those involving monastic institutions. While village women represent their households to perform rituals for Mother of Grain, monks represent the village in performing fertility rituals in honour of this indigenous goddess. Similar shifts away from women’s ritual pre-eminence, or at least equality in the wake of conquest by a ‘great tradition’ religion have been documented by Bell (1983) for Australia, by Silverblatt (1980) for the Andes, by Forman (1984) for Oceania and by Davis (1984) for Thailand. Numerous other scholars have traced how Islam has enhanced the religious status and roles of men in Africa, with the traditional mainstream, spirit-oriented religions becoming increasingly associated with women, and increasingly marginalised or condemned (Masquelier, 2001). Okinawan history offers a particularly illuminating example. Since the end of the nineteenth century, women’s religious leadership an Okinawan has been eroded by the compulsory Japanese policy of land registration. In traditional Okinawan villages, high-ranked priestesses owned land that they passed on to their successors, usually their daughters. This land gave the priestess the economic autonomy necessary to remain unmarried. With Japanese annexation, land was required to be registered in the names of male ‘heads of household’. As a result, priestesses lost their land to male relatives (see Lebra, 1966). In Henza Village, where I carried out fieldwork during: 1994e95, the previous head priestess had lost her house to her brother, a situation which, according to the oldest living priestess in the village, has had deleterious effects on the spiritual potency and status of the current head priestess (see Sered, 1999). At the same time men have become far more absorbed than women into the political and economic structures of Japan. Traditional Okinawan men’s rituals, such as the annual haari boat race and the young men’s eisaa dancing, have taken on new visibility as they have become publicly supported exhibitions of Okinawan culture within the Japanese nation state. Hence men rather than women are the public face of municipal Japanese New Year celebrations and of annual family visits to Buddhist and Shinto temples to receive blessings for the New Year from the priests. The priestesses’ traditional rituals, many of which are performed in sacred groves deep inside the jungle, do not lend themselves to the kind of displays found at the newly expanded men’s rituals. Unlike the men’s rituals, the priestesses’ prayers are not a good fit for the Japanese category of culture (bunka). In fact, Lebra notes that in many villages, ‘the male political leaders are loathe to allot funds for [priestesses’] ritual purposes.. This changed attitude undoubtedly derives from the influence of Japanese culture, which accords the male a higher status in all spheres of action, religious as well as secular’ (Lebra, 1966, p. 78). Japanese scholars speculate that the ancient religion of Japan was dominated by women and that vestiges of that domination can still be found in modern Japan. According to Yoshida (1989), the continued religious domination of women in the Ryukyu Islands reflects the failure of Buddhism to make an impact. Whether or not Yoshida is correct, it is clear that in those East and Southeast Asian societies in which the indigenous religions are dominated by women, men tend to be involved in newer, state-sponsored, centralised, literate religions that preach doctrines of female pollution or subordination. Korean men, for instance, are responsible for Confucianist ancestor worship, whereas Korean women dominate as shamans (see Kendall, 1985). Thai and Burmese men are active Buddhists-many, if not, most young men enter Buddhist monasteries
114
S. Sered / Religion 37 (2007) 111e116
as novitiates for several years e whereas Thai and Burmese women are highly involved in local spirit-oriented religious practices (see Wijeyewardene, 1977). Buddhism has been the state religion of Burma for centuries. Alongside Buddhism, however, the indigenous religion, which centres on the appeasement of spirits known as nats, continues to be practiced, especially by women. Nats are propitiated at the time of illness; at key stages in the agricultural cycle; at births, deaths and marriages; and at Buddhist initiations. In fieldwork carried out in 1961e62 in a rural village in Upper Burma, approximately ten miles from the city of Mandalay, Spiro (1967) discovered that almost half of the men e but none of the women e claimed not to believe in nats. Men and women agreed that women are more involved in nat propitiation, that women fear the nats more, and that women perform more nat rituals. Village nat shrines are almost always tended by women, and village nat ceremonies are attended almost exclusively by women. Shamans, who become possessed by nats, are almost all women. Women also bow to nats, whereas men do not. Villagers explained this difference by the different status of men and women: within the [Buddhist] thirty-one abodes of existence men occupy a higher position than nats, where women occupy a lower position than nats. Specialists in Buddhism (monks) are exclusively male, and nat shamans are overwhelmingly, though not exclusively, female. In Burma almost all male children enter Buddhist monasteries as novitiates for a number of years (usually during adolescence). The time spent in the monastery strengthens men’s ties to Buddhism and reinforces women’s perception of Buddhism as belonging more to men than to women. The Buddhist leaders with whom Burmese are acquainted e the monks and teachers e are men. Yet as the articles in this issue maintain, political conquest by a patriarchal, centralised state or by a male-dominated religion does not eliminate the opportunities for women to exercise ritual agency or strands of gender-equal cosmologies. Rather than telling simple stories of the elimination of women’s ritual expertise, these articles emphasise ambiguity and ambivalence. They describe the religious sphere as a prime cultural arena in which the very meaning of gender can be negotiated. Audrey Mouser, looking at Malay gender constructions and performances, notes that women have turned imposed conservative Islamic constructs to their advantage by presenting a public image of ‘womanhood’ that earns them social capital as ‘good Malay women’, while recasting notions of ‘traditional’ versus ‘modern’ in ways that both value and realise personal goals. Without having to challenge gender norms overtly, these women have used a government policy that conjoins re-traditionalisation with Islamisation to gain educational and occupational opportunities. Wearing the veil, while an outward symbol of women’s subordinate status and lack of personal freedom, becomes a ‘free pass’ that allows women to move unhindered in the public sphere. As Malay women become less powerful in the legal realm, they become more active in the economic sector. As women become increasingly distanced from formal public Islamic rituals, they will become more able financially to fund their own practices. Underscoring the kinds of ambiguity that characterise all of the religious contexts described in this special issue, Du notes the ideological and institutional subordination of women, as well as their informal power, in the religion of the Theravadan societies in Southeast Asia and Southwest China. The cosmological position of Mother of Grain is defined through her challenge to Buddha in that she epitomises the negotiations between indigenous De’ang gender ideology and that of orthodox Theravada Buddhism. Wilkerson notes a similar ambivalence facing Zhuang female ritual specialists.
S. Sered / Religion 37 (2007) 111e116
115
The ambivalence is even more poignant when the context is one in which women carve out for themselves substantial and meaningful roles within a firmly male-dominated tradition. Hillary Crane dramatically brings home the theme of ambiguity, quoting a nun with whom she worked in a Taiwanese Buddhist monastery: ‘Although I am a man, it’s important for me to remember that I am a woman’. As Crane explains, ‘These apparent contradictions are part of a strategy undertaken by the nuns to resolve contradictions found within the Buddhist texts studied at the temple’. Crane further notes that the ‘Texts that factor in the nuns’ construction of a negative image of women mostly discuss women as sources of distraction or attachment for men, and therefore, as dangerous’. When female nuns read these texts, they switch back and forth between seeing themselves as gendered symbols and seeing themselves as gendered agents. Taken together, the articles in this issue show that the analysis of gender in religions works with two sets of issues. The first set centres on actual women, who posses varying degrees of agency. Women as agents can demand rights, can enter into negotiations and protest unfair treatment. In religion, agency is expressed in stating one’s religious needs freely, in imaging and addressing the divine as one sees fit, in gathering openly with others of like mind to carry out rituals, and in freely choosing which rituals to join or eschew. The second set of issues centres on what is often called ‘Woman’ e a symbolic construct that is composed of allegory, ideology, metaphor, fantasy and, at least in male-dominated religions, male projections. Although Woman may barely reflect the real experiences of women, in religious interactions these two categories tend to get confused. Woman as a symbol is often associated with some of the deepest, most compelling and most tenacious theological and mythological structures in a religion, and these structures imprint the lives of women in that religion. Over the past decades scholars in religious studies have given most of their attention to ‘Woman’ whether in the form of goddesses, demonesses, virtuous virgins and mythological seductresses, or in the form of jural objects insofar as they are treated in texts written by and for men. During the same period anthropologists and sociologists have focused on ‘women’, looking at, for example, contemporary possession cults or patterns of church attendance. This divide has hindered the study of gender and religion. Real women manoeuvre and negotiate in cultural worlds in which ‘Woman’ is part of the currency and part of the grammar. Crane so eloquently shows, ‘Woman’ is read not only through the eyes of the male elite but also through the eyes of real women as well. The articles in this issue should help rectify an unfortunate conceptual bifurcation. References Bell, D., 1983. Daughters of the Dreaming. McPhee Gribble/Allen and Unwin, Melbourne. Christ, C., Plaskow, J. (Eds.), 1979. Womenspirit Rising: A Feminist Reader in Religion. Harper and Row, San Francisco. Daly, M., 1968. The Church and the Second Sex. Beacon Press, Boston. Davis, R., 1984. Muang matrifocality. Mankind 14, 263e271. Forman, C., 1984. ‘Sing to the Lord a new song’: women in the churches of Oceania. In: O’Brien, D., Tiffany, S. (Eds.), Rethinking Women’s Roles: Perspectives from the Pacific. University of California Press, Berkeley, pp. 153e172. Kendall, L., 1985. Shamans, Housewives, and Other Restless Spirits: Women in Korean Ritual Life. University of Hawaii Press, Honolulu. Lebra, W., 1966. Okinawan Religion. University of Hawaii Press, Honolulu. Masquelier, A., 2001. Prayer Has Spoiled Everything: Possession, Power, and Identity in an Islamic Town of Niger. Duke University Press, Durham, NC.
116
S. Sered / Religion 37 (2007) 111e116
Reuther, R., 1974. Religion and Sexism: Images of Women in the Jewish and Christian Traditions. Simon and Schuster, New York. Silverblatt, I., 1980. Andean women under Spanish rule. In: Etienne, E., Leacock, E. (Eds.), Women and Colonisation: Anthropological Perspectives. Bergin, New York, pp. 149e185. Sered, S., 1994. Priestess, Mother, Sacred Sister: Religions Dominated by Women. Oxford University Press, New York. Sered, S., 1999. Women of the Sacred Groves: Divine Priestesses of Okinawa. Oxford University Press, New York. Spiro, M., 1967. Burmese Supernaturalism. Prentice-Hall, Englewood Cliffs, NJ. Stone, M., 1978. When God Was a Woman. Harcourt Brace, San Francisco. Wijeyewardene, G., 1977. Matriclans or female cults: a problem in Northern Thai ethnography. Mankind 11, 19e25. Yoshida, T., 1989. Lecture. International Culture Center for Youth. Jerusalem, 23 March. Susan Sered, Ph.D., Senior Research Associate at Suffolk University’s Center for Women’s Health and Human Rights, is the author of six books and dozens of articles in the fields of medical anthropology, religious studies and gender studies. Before coming to Suffolk, She directed the ‘Religion, Health and Healing Initiative’ at Harvard University’s Center for the Study of World Religions, and served as Associate Professor of Anthropology at Bar Ilan University in Israel. Among her books are Uninsured in America: Life and Death in the Land of Opportunity (University of California Press), Religion and Healing in America (Oxford University Press) and Priestess, Mother, Sacred Sister: Religions Dominated by Women (Oxford University Press).