Healers Also Gather Acorns: Examining the Division of Labor and Power Dynamics among California Hunter-Gatherers

Summary

Previous theories concerning women’s access to roles of power within Native American Hunter-Gatherer societies have focused on linking such access to socially proscribed gender identities, role flexibility, and/or kinship systems. My work seeks to validate such models within the context of women’s access to the role of healer among California Hunter-Gatherer groups by looking to written records from the 1800s and ethnographies from the early 1900s. Through quantitative and qualitative analysis, I examine if cultures with multiple gender-linked innate qualities restrict women’s access to the role of healer and/or if women having greater access to circumstantial labor roles equating to greater access to power.

My research tests notions about the strict binary division of labor via statistical reassessment of correlations between subsistence labor-roles and gender. By seeking to highlight how social roles were (or were not) seen as concordant with gender-identity, I posit that a more nuanced view of labor and gender is necessary. My research provides a better analytical framework from which archaeologists can interpret past distributions of power by showing the usefulness of ethnographic analogies that are more inclusive of engendered methodologies.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 81st Annual Meeting, Orlando, FL (2016)

Keywords

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