Abstract
Leela Dube (1923-2012) was an Indian social anthropologist / sociologist whose primary interest was in the field of family and kinship studies. This essay traces the zig-zag process of her intellectual evolution over five decades into one of the leading feminist anthropologists of her day – in India, in the Asian region, and indeed globally. Crucial turning points in this evolution were: (i) her self-initiated field study of the accommodation of the matrilineal kinship system of the Lakshadweep islanders with the androcentric legal apparatus of Islam; (ii) her role as the ‘sociologist’ member of the famous Committee on the Status of Women in India, an experience that convinced her that the best contribution she could make to the emerging women’s studies discourse was through the conceptual and methodological resources of her own discipline, anthropology; and (iii) her self-conscious deployment of the so-called ‘comparative method’ of anthropology to explore the contrasting patterns of gender relations in strongly ‘patrilineal’ South Asia versus ‘bilateral’ Southeast Asia. She saw this ambitious comparative exercise, largely ignored by both her admirers and her critics, as enabling an emancipatory rethinking of some of the dominant paradigms of Western feminism. It was also, incidentally, a bold step in the disciplinary evolution of Indian social anthropology.
On a Personal Note
It would probably be true to say that many of those who had gathered for the ‘In Memoriam’ workshop organised by the Centre for Women’s Development Studies (CWDS) in August 2014 to commemorate four iconic founding figures of women’s studies in India had shared close personal relations with their subjects, or been the privileged beneficiaries of their professional tutorship. This was not true in my case.
I had first come into contact with Leela Dube in the late 1960s, obliquely as it were, when she had sought out my husband, J.P.S. Uberoi, to discuss with him her recently published monograph on matriliny and Islam (Dube, 1969). Whether he actually said so or not, he certainly conveyed to me the impression that he saw her project as belonging to the category that he was wont to dismiss as a ‘gilded lily’, meaning, a typical anthropological fetish for the exotic and unusual, in preference to the regular hard stuff of social structure analysis. Nothing could be further from the truth, as Janaki Abraham’s paper in this issue of the IJGS and Leela Dube’s subsequent writings on the subject amply demonstrate (1993, 1994a). Indeed, the twin problematics of that book—the relationship between kinship, gender and social structure on one hand, and between women and family law on the other—anticipated two major themes in the empirical and theoretical work of feminist anthropologists and other social scientists in the decades to come.
Leelaji and I continued to interact, affectionately and respectfully, in a variety of contexts thereafter. Along with my students at the Jawaharlal Nehru University in the late 1980s, I was simply ‘blown away’ by her two recently published papers on the symbolism of biological reproduction and the sexual relations of production (Dube, 1986b) and on the socialisation of Hindu girls in ‘patrilineal’ India (Dube, 1988). Together these papers inserted a provocative ‘gender’ dimension into the otherwise unreflectively androcentric course on ‘Family, kinship and marriage in India’ which it was my lot to teach as the most junior (and at the time the only woman) on the faculty of the Centre for the Study of Social Systems. But, apart from various contingent reasons, our relations were undoubtedly constrained by the fact that we were both married to senior anthropologists/sociologists 1 who, though not professional rivals or enemies, were certainly not close friends. This fact mediated both our personal and our professional relations, and put a certain distance or reserve between us. In retrospect, one wonders whether things could and should have been different.
In her later years, Leelaji was to meditate, matter-of-factly and apparently without rancour, on the well-known practical limitations of being wife-and-mother as well as professional anthropologist, particularly with reference to that sine qua non of disciplinary authenticity and respectability, the conduct of extended anthropological fieldwork (Dube, 2001b, pp. 44ff; Madan, 2017; Palriwala, 2012). Moreover, like many of the well-and lesser-known anthropologist husband-wife pairs (Gottlieb, 1995; Oboler, 1986), her situation was complicated by the fact that she was also, in relation to the towering S.C. Dube, ever in statu pupillari. Indeed, she herself admitted, almost with a tinge of pride it seems, that ‘[t]he acknowledgement of her husband’s intellectual superiority remained an integral feature of her life’ (Sharma, 2005, p. 30). 2 Soon after her marriage, she happily forsook her original discipline of political science to ‘follow’ S.C. Dube into anthropology as, at the time, his ‘lone pupil’, patiently imbibing his ‘descriptions of bizarre customs’ and his ‘discourses on the conception of human worth imparted by anthropology’ (Dube, 2001c, p. 66). Paradoxically, Leela Dube herself remained grounded in anthropology (albeit as this discipline evolved for her in dialogue with feminism), while S.C. Dube increasingly turned his attention to national public policy issues of community development and planned social change, and the grander challenges of theorising ‘modernisation’ from the global South.
Initiation into anthropology was clearly no easy transition for a young, idealistic, city-bred, Brahmin girl. She recalls suffering a ‘minor culture shock’ on attending a lecture on Himalayan polyandry by the famed Lucknow anthropologist, D.N. Majumdar (Dube, 2001c, p. 66) and, in an oft-told anecdote, so irritating her husband with the anthropologically naïve epistles on the ‘predicament’ of women that she had written to him in the field that he had responded curtly: ‘I think ending is better than mending’ (Dube, 2001b, pp. 41–42, 56 f.n. 7). Stunned by this rebuke, she chose both to persevere with anthropology as well as demonstrably fulfil her responsibilities as wife, mother and daughter-in-law. No doubt, her professional career was slowed as a result (ibid., pp. 42, 44–45; Madan, 2017).
Shortly after her marriage, Leelaji joined S.C. Dube to assist him during his second round of PhD fieldwork among the Kamar tribe of shifting cultivators in Madhya Pradesh and Orissa. Here, like so many anthropologist-wives before and after her, she was tasked with filling gaps in the male anthropologist’s data by obtaining from women informants otherwise elusive information on ‘essentially feminine matters’: ‘I fumbled and wanted to back out’, she wrote later. ‘But how could I? This was also the crucial period of my adjustment with my husband.’ Thus came the recognition that anthropology had perforce become ‘an integral part’ of the content of her marriage (Dube, 2001c, p, 66; Madan, 2017; Sharma, 2005, p. 30)—ultimately, ‘a fifty-year partnership in kinship and anthropology’. 3
Hyphenating Women and Kinship
Switching disciplines in the dual context of marriage and professional apprenticeship, Leela Dube was ever conscious of her want of formal academic training in anthropology (Dube, 2001c, pp. 83–84 f.n. 4). Frankly, this too is an existential dilemma with which I can personally identify. Thus, even as she absorbed the basics of anthropology through a process of social osmosis (as hostess, homemaker and informal and formal research assistant for the charismatic S.C. Dube), purposeful reading of anthropological classics, diligent coverage of a huge volume of ethnographic papers and monographs, and finally as herself a teacher of social anthropology at Sagar University (Dube, 2001b, pp. 44–46), the challenge as she saw it was to establish herself as a serious anthropologist in her own right and on her own terms. This she did (and once again I can understand her motivation) by positioning herself at what has conventionally been seen as the hard core of traditional anthropology, that is, the field of kinship studies—a daunting sub-field distinguished by its very special tools and methods, including analysis of kinship terminologies and genealogies collected in the course of intensive participant observation fieldwork. Leelaji was drawn to this area, she later recalled, through her early readings of the classic works by the Polish anthropologist Bronislaw Malinowski on the matrilineal Trobriand islanders of Melanesia; by her meetings with Irawati Karve, the celebrated author of Kinship organisation in India (Karve, 1965 [1953]); and, ‘though perhaps not consciously’, by the supposedly self-evident ‘intimate association’ of the academic field of family and kinship with women’s lives—an existential grounding for empathy between the woman researcher and her female subjects (Dube, 2001b, pp. 45–46, emphasis added). The ‘excitement’ of reading and writing on matrilineal kinship systems, and her own brief stint of field work in 1969 among a matrilineal Muslim community on the Lakshadweep Islands off the Kerala coast—a world away from her own social habitus—further confirmed her lifelong commitment to this field (Abraham, 2017; Sharma, 2005, p. 30).
Thereafter, and even as she became recognised as a major player in the development of women’s studies in India following on from her role as the sociologist/anthropologist member of the famous Committee on the Status of Women in India (CSWI), Leela Dube insisted that the best contribution she could make to this evolving interdisciplinary field was through utilising the tools and perspectives—what she called the ‘disciplinary capital’—of her own discipline, anthropology: ‘This experience [i.e. as member of the CSWI] changed my perspective’, she later remarked, ‘and I realised that multi-dimensional problems of women could be effectively explored through serious research within anthropology’ (Sharma, 2005, pp. 64–65, emphasis added). The reciprocal position entailed opening up the scope of conventional anthropology to the methods and problematics of other social science disciplines (ibid., p. xix), social demography as one instance (Palriwala, 2017). Or, to put the matter somewhat differently, women’s studies/gender studies 4 was destined to be an inter-or cross-disciplinary project, though hopefully not mish-mash on that account!
Ironically, though, the discipline of social anthropology—one should clarify here, the British style of social anthropology (see Kuper, 1973; Stocking, 1996) into which Dube had been socialised and on which she sought to stake her professional identity—was concurrently in a state of unprecedented ferment in ways that also impinged on professional identities and practices in the non-West. On one hand, the British structural-functional paradigm 5 was under challenge from the French school of structural anthropology, led by Claude Lévi-Strauss (1963 [1958]), which inter alia had generated a completely new approach to the study of family and kinship (Dumont 1957, 1983; Lévi-Strauss, 1969 [1949]). Simultaneously, the very definition of anthropology as the study of ‘other’ (read, ‘simple’/‘primitive’/‘tribal’/‘pre-industrial’) societies in contradistinction to sociology as the study of one’s ‘own’ (read, ‘modern’, ‘western’, ‘urban’, ‘industrialised’) society was under question, propelled by growing recognition of the malign historical linkages between the practice of anthropology and colonial/evangelical expansionism.
Complicating this picture was awareness of the peculiar problems, and also the obvious advantages, of the anthropologist studying his/her ‘own’ society. This anomaly, much debated in India in the late 1960s and 1970s, continues to haunt what has come to be politely termed ‘indigenous anthropology’, leaving the so-called ‘native anthropologist’ forever on the defensive vis-à-vis metropolitan colleagues. Can the native anthropologist be sufficiently detached to present an unbiased account of his/her own society? Or, contrariwise, why is the apprentice native anthropologist automatically expected to study his/her own society, thereby indefinitely perpetuating the status distinction between the disciplinary centres and the peripheries (Bakalaki, 1997)? As did other anthropologists at the time, Leela Dube argued defensively that, in a complex society such as India, the anthropologist could always find ‘others’ to study within his/her ‘own’ national society (e.g., as in her own case, the Gond tribals of Chattisgarh or the matrilineal Muslims of Lakshadweep). But, she also argued that the indigenous anthropologist was in a better position than the outsider to appreciate the wider civilisational traditions to which all the groups are related in varying ways and degrees (Dube, 1986a, p. xv). Indeed, in due course, in dialogue with feminist anthropologists from around the world, she went so far as to state unapologetically that ‘the possible role of indigenous anthropologists in examining concepts and theories seems to be crucial’ for questioning ‘generalisations and theoretical formulations developed in specific regional contexts but transformed into universal or near-universal propositions’ (ibid.). Moreover, going against the contemporary empiricist tide which sought to privilege the anthropologist’s ‘field’ view over the ‘textual’ or ‘Indological’ view of family and kinship relations, 6 she argued for a greater utilisation of textual materials, tapping ‘literary’, ‘learned’ and ‘historical traditions’, as well as legal texts and documents, the better ‘to understand the ideological and jural bases of kinship’ that inform the perspectives of the social actors themselves (Dube, 1974, p. 102).
Last, but certainly not least, this ferment in the theory and practice of anthropology through the late 1960s and 1970s also witnessed the emergence of a global discourse on the ‘Anthropology of Women’ (see Uberoi, 1995, p. 197). As Dube construed it, this field was characterised by four main features: (a) ‘critical evaluation of earlier studies and theories; (b) reinterpretation of analytical frameworks and perspectives; (c) re-studies of communities and problems earlier covered by anthropologists; and (d) freshly designed studies with a conscious new focus’ (Dube, 1986a, p. (e). Indeed, Dube was herself to make a signifi-cant contribution to this evolving discourse on the anthropology of women, while standing her independent ground from within the global South (Dube, 1986a, p. xix, 2001b, p. 55; Dube, Leacock & Ardener, 1986).
Hyphenating women and anthropology, or more specifically in her case, gender and kinship, was no straight trajectory or moment of epiphany, but rather a lifetime quest that culminated, shortly before Leelaji’s 80th birthday, in the publication of her critically acclaimed anthology, Anthropological explorations in gender: Intersecting fields (Dube, 2001a). In what follows, we retrace briefly the major steps/texts along this zigzag path to highlight the point that Dube in fact did much more than simply bring anthropological methods and perspectives into the interdisciplinary project of women’s studies in the Indian context while conversely contributing to making the Indian social sciences in general more gender sensitive. Embedded in these twin enterprises, for which she was justly renowned, was a project that was, in her own disciplinary context, more or less unappreciated for the bold breakthrough that it was. This was her challenge to current Indian sociological/anthro-pological theory and practice by the self-conscious deployment of the ‘comparative method’ for engaging with empirical problems of social structure—not merely within, but also across, countries and regions. Once again, this aspect of her work was an evolving process rather than an epistemic rupture, beginning with her fascination for the perturbations of matrilineal kinship systems in different sociocultural settings (Abraham, 2017). It was also sharpened by her recognition of the global context within which the CSWI exercise was nested, persuading her that ‘[c]ross-cultural understanding and comparative analyses of various family systems in the world could help [in tackling gender bias]’. For instance—and here Leelaji gives her game away—when compared with kinship systems based on the principle of patrilineal descent and inheritance, ‘gender relations are different in matrilineal systems as also in those with bilateral descent’ (Indian Journal of Gender Studies [IJGS], 1998, p. 94). 7
Gond Women
For her doctoral dissertation, Leela Dube had undertaken a study of women of a section of the Gond tribe located in southern Chattisgarh (Dube, 1956, 1975). Her fieldwork there was logistically enabled by her father-in-law, who held the position of Manager of the Court of Wards in this region, while the ‘women’ theme was commended by her husband on grounds that, as a woman field worker, she ‘would have an advantage over male field workers for whom the inner world of women is generally a closed book’ (Sharma, 2005, p. 31). In retrospect, she also discerned another motivation in S.C. Dube’s advice, namely that he ‘had perhaps wanted me to see other worlds and face facts beyond my sheltered existence, in order to better think through my confusions and contradictions’ (Dube, 2001b, p. 42, emphasis added). The Gond ethnography did just that, opening her eyes to gendered lifestyles very different from her own sociocultural habitus and producing at once ‘both mild shock and great exhilaration’ (ibid., p. 43). While Dube’s dissertation on Gond women was never published, this ethnographic record became, over the years, ‘a source of revelations, both personal and anthropological’, with implications far beyond the specificities of Gond women’s lives (ibid., p. 44). For instance, the metaphor of ‘seed and earth’, used not merely to express the contrasting roles of men and women in biological reproduction but also to justify their relative status and material entitlements, was a case in point, linking the belief system of the Gond tribals of Chattisgarh to an insidious, pan-Indian ideology of gender inequality (Dube, 1986b; Madan, 2017).
In any case, following the Gond study, Leela Dube deliberately turned away from working on ‘women’—the conventional default option for the woman anthropologist/sociologist even now—to focus on what she considered to be ‘mainstream issues like caste, family and kinship’. As Mary John astutely observed in an interview with Leelaji some four decades or more later, it appeared that at this point in time ‘women’ were still not considered ‘integral to understanding “the mainstream” of the discipline of anthropology’, whether in kinship or in other domains of social life (Sharma, 2005, p. 91, emphasis added; cf. Papanek, 1975). Dube concurred, confessing that her synoptic review of the sociology of kinship, undertaken in 1969 on behalf of the newly founded Indian Council for Social Science Research (ICSSR) (Dube, 1974), ‘touched on women only peripherally’ (Sharma, 2005, p. 31): ‘Only two paragraphs about women were there, and that too because my husband suggested it!’ (ibid., p. 92).
Surveying the Sociology of Kinship
No one expects a survey of literature to be exciting reading, but Leela Dube’s diligent summary of the current state of Indian kinship studies (1974) was interesting in both its structure and its substance. Structurally speaking, we observe Dube transcending the received disciplinary distinction between anthropology and sociology as she chose to link kinship studies, the traditional playground of anthropologists studying ‘primitive’ societies, with the sociology of the family—a sub-field of sociological research, developed within the so-called ‘modernisation’ paradigm, that postulated a social future foretold for developing societies such as India. Mediating these polar opposites, the primitive and the modern, were the numerous distinctive kinship systems of India’s many castes and communities which, though overwhelmingly patrilineal in their systems of descent (see Singh, 1993, pp. 48–49), nonetheless exemplified in their totality ‘almost the entire gamut of known kinship systems’ (Dube, 1974, p. 1).
The issue of disciplinary boundaries or, specifically, the division of labour between sociocultural anthropology and sociology, much debated back in the 1970s and flickering even today, need not detain us further. What was more interesting in Dube’s Sociology of kinship was her close attention to new comparative and analytical work on Indian kinship systems (Chapter IV), particularly issues raised by Claude Lévi-Strauss’s monumental The elementary structures of kinship (1969 [1949]) which focused not so much on the role of descent as the basis of group formation and social action (the so-called ‘Descent’ model), but on the social logic of the exchange relations established by marriage (the so-called ‘Alliance’ model). 8 In Sociology of kinship, Dube provides a remarkably coherent account of the heated and rather convoluted debates between advocates of these competing models of kinship organisation as these were instantiated in the South Asian context by the French anthropologist Louis Dumont, among others (Dumont, 1957, 1983), adding her own pertinent ethnographic observations to the discussion (Dube, 1974, pp. 45–57). Nonetheless, in Leelaji’s own comparative work, as it was to evolve, the descent principle (patrilineal/matrilineal/bilateral) remained, from a woman-centric perspective, the effective original cause or basic structuring feature of family and social life, even as she acknowledged regional, caste and class variations within each category (cf. Ganesh, 2001, pp. 18ff.) and the complex intersections of rules of descent with rules of residence, marriage, inheritance and succession, etc. Indeed, it would be another two decades before feminist social scientists were in a position to re-demarcate the field of family and kinship relations in South Asia more holistically to foreground emerging social trends and issues from a gender-sensitive position (see Palriwala, 1994).
Summing up her overview of the sociology of kinship in South Asia, Dube emphasised the importance of generating ‘richer and fuller ethnography’ in the key areas of kinship and family in order to provide the dense qualitative and quantitative ethnographic data required for ‘comparative analyses and sound generalisations’, whether ‘about India as a whole or about any of its regions’. The North versus South India controversy, by then encompassed within the analytical framework of the ‘Alliance’ model, was a pertinent case (Dube, 1974, pp. 97–98), to which she added the rider, obviously a concern arising from her personal location and experience, that a more detailed examination of the hybrid Central Zone between these two contrasting systems of kinship and marriage would be critical to resolve the theoretical puzzle of India’s kinship unity in variety (ibid., p. 44; cf. Dube, 1998, p. 90). As with her discussion of matrilineal social organisation, Leelaji’s foregrounding of regional variations in systems of family and kinship was articulated as a conceptual problem in anthropological theory, rather than as a factor influencing the social position of women in the family and society. Thus, even as she discussed at some length writings by Irawati Karve (1965 [1953]) and Pauline Kolenda (1967, 1968) that were in due course to provide a compelling basis for exploring the political geography of gender relations in the Indian subcontinent (as, e.g., Agarwal, 1994), 9 including with respect to female-adverse sex ratios (Palriwala, 2017), Leelaji herself at this time appeared unable or reluctant to draw the consequences of her prescient observations.
Looking Abroad: Insights from Southeast Asia
As earlier noted, membership of the CSWI and the production of the Towards Equality report (Committee on the Status of Women in India [CSWI], 1974) proved to be a life-changing experience for Leela Dube, as for other members of the Committee, shattering the complacency of the immediate post-independence decades. At the same time, the CSWI exercise brought Indian women activists and academics into productive dialogue with a global community of ‘second-wave’ feminists, whose shared agenda took shape during the 1975 U.N. International Year of Women. The Tenth International Congress of Anthropological and Ethnological Sciences, held in Delhi in 1978, provided the occasion for Leela Dube (chairperson of the Commission on Women of the International Union of Anthropological and Ethnological Sciences [IUAES], 1976–1993) to frontally address the issue of the neglect of women in mainstream anthropology (1986a). She also availed this opportunity to stress that researchers from the Third World could and should play an important role in interrogating the presumed universality of the theories, methods and concerns of western-dominated feminist research and praxis (ibid., p. xv; cf., Dube, 2001b, 57–58, f.n. 14).
Though she was familiar with the growing body of feminist critiques of the marginalisation of women in anthropological research, Leelaji was nonetheless of the opinion that the discipline of anthropology was particularly suited to contribute to the promotion of the women’s studies agenda. First, she asserted, women had always been relatively more ‘visible’ in anthropology than in other social sciences in consequence of the importance of sex as ‘one of the important organising principles of society’, and anthropology’s ‘special emphases on the study of kinship, family and marriage in “other cultures”’ (Dube, 1986a, p. xii). In this sense, the alliance of gender and kinship, which she believed lay at the core of the project of feminist anthropology, was virtually pre-ordained.
Second, Leelaji was at pains to point out that the discipline of anthropology was also, fortuitously, anchored in the so-called ‘comparative method’. Indeed, it could hardly be otherwise, for the anthropologist was tasked with ‘translating’ into his/her own language and disciplinary categories the culture of an‘other’ society. The comparative method was a veritable article of faith in British social anthropology during the 1950s and 1960s, Leelaji’s professionally formative years. It was also a subject on which all the leading social anthropologists of the day had their say one way or another, in unison and dissension, while debating the question of whether or not and to what extent social anthropology might aspire to a truly ‘scientific’ status as the natural science of human social life and culture. 10 We will return briefly to this question in our concluding section when we consider Leelaji’s own audacious attempt, writing as a woman anthropologist from a non-Western location, to compare and contrast the kinship-gender nexus in the geographically adjacent regions of South and Southeast Asia (1997a).
Leela Dube’s UNESCO-sponsored survey report, Studies of women in Southeast Asia (1980), was explicitly undertaken with the dual purposes of critically assessing the existing body of knowledge on the status of women in Southeast Asia and simultaneously preparing the ground for the promotion of women’s studies as an academic discipline, both in the region and globally. From her own disciplinary standpoint as an anthropologist, it could be said that this study was also a part of her longterm objective to correct the ‘invisibility’ of women in anthropological discourse (Dube, 1986a). For this assignment, she reviewed, country-wise, a huge volume of studies on women in Indonesia, Malaysia, Philippines, Singapore and Thailand, becoming increasingly conscious ‘that many of the issues concerning women that were thought important in the sixties in the West, particularly in North America and in Britain, were of little relevance in the cultures of the ASEAN region’ (ibid., p. 1). On the other hand, as her concluding remarks disclose, many of the gender-related questions to which writers in this region had spontaneously gravitated suggested new foci for women’s studies in South Asia, if not elsewhere in the global South as well.
With the notable exception of some writings by western ‘Area Studies’ anthropologists working in the Southeast Asian region (e.g. Murdock, 1960; Ward, 1963), Leelaji was not greatly impressed by the quality, quantity or direction of the studies she examined. To begin with, a point made earlier by her friend Hanna Papanek (1975), it was apparent that studies of women in the region were for the most part narrowly focused on problem-solving and action-oriented research on issues such as population control and poverty eradication (in essence, the agenda of national and international development funding agencies from the 1950s through the 1970s), without adequate sensitivity to local contexts or systematic baseline data to support assertions and generalisations (Dube, 1980, pp. 29, 34). In fact it appeared to her that women’s studies research in the region was poised between twin dangers: the Scylla of inapposite western models, categories and definitions; and the Charybdis of futile pursuit of a ‘nonexistent “Asian” model’ of gender relations, in disregard of the fundamental differences in kinship and gender relations between pre-dominantly ‘patrilineal’ South and East Asia, and ‘bilateral’ Southeast Asia (ibid., pp. 30–31).
Studies of women in Southeast Asia was very much, as its subtitle suggests, a country-wise ‘status report’ on women’s studies research in the region—conscientiously executed but predictably drab, and presumably little circulated or read, except among the cognoscenti. Appearances can be deceptive. This modest text actually occupied a pivotal position in Leelaji’s intellectual biography. From her perspective, it both proble-matised the unquestioning acceptance of western categories and defi-nitions in women’s studies research (how different from her earlier perspective in Sociology of kinship!) and vindicated the value of the comparative method as a means of self-reflection on the part of the non-western anthropologist routinely engaged in research on his/her own society, with the West assumed as the default ‘other’. Remarkably, Leelaji equally distanced herself from the widely prevailing (and still powerful) ‘Greater India’ approach to society and culture in the Southeast Asian region.
Concluding the report, Leelaji identified, in no particular order or precedence, some 15 embryonic themes in research on women in the Southeast Asian region that held promise for the further development of women’s studies from a genuinely comparative or cross-cultural perspective, if only information gaps could be plugged and data made systematically comparable (Dube, 1980, p. 38). Here we highlight merely an illustrative sub-set of these themes, focusing on concerns that Leelaji came to internalise in her own research and writing or that were to be taken up independently by Indian women’s studies researchers in the years to come: (a) the impact of colonialism on subject cultures (as in the Philippines for instance), erasing the substratum of indigenous culture and providing the new transformations with the patina of cultural ‘tradition’ and social acceptability (ibid., p. 33). Understanding or correcting this distortion required a re-evaluation of the received histories of the pre-colonial and colonial periods. (b) Content analysis of folk literature and oral traditions that, Dube maintained, ‘are among the richest sources of data’ for understanding gender roles, particularly if combined with ethnographic fieldwork (ibid., p. 34). She herself utilised such materials to good effect in her own work (see Madan, 2017), as have feminist historians, folklorists and anthropologists of South Asia through the last three decades or more. (c) Ethnoreproductive beliefs, that is, notions about the nature of male and female sexuality, and about the role of the two sexes in procreation that ‘provide insights into some fundamental aspects of man-woman relations’ and are typically deployed to justify rights over children, over property and over inheritance (ibid., p. 35; also, Dube, 1986b). (d) The relationship of women and law, that is, probing the dynamics of the relationship between law (statute, religious and customary law) and actual practice—‘the written law, the people’s view of it, and how it really functions’ (1980, p. 35) —in relation, especially, to the very material question of women’s rights of inheritance (Dube, 1993). The Southeast Asian scenario persuaded her of the need to broaden her vision to include, for instance, legislation relating to social issues and institutions (abortion, prostitution, massage parlours, etc.), linked to an understanding of indigenous perceptions of sex-related professions, concepts of legitimacy and attitudes to adoption, presaging the increasing interest of Indian feminists in addressing the hitherto unspeakable issues of male and female sexuality in a variety of historical and contemporary contexts. (e) Social hierarchy among women, referring to the fact that ‘[n]ot only relations between the sexes but relations within a sex have to be studied in order to analyse the sources of women’s oppression’ (Dube, 1980, p. 36). In Leelaji’s view, oppression of women by women was a characteristic trait of the patrilineal extended family system, in contrast to the relatively supportive role of female kin in matrilineal and bilateral family systems (ibid.), but she also noted the more important, complicating factor of what is now termed ‘intersectionality’, where ‘class and economic differences are more significant than sex-based ones’ (ibid., p. 31). (f) Additionally, Leelaji stressed the importance of generating well-designed research on socialisation into gender roles and on indigenous perceptions of sex-linked attributes, roles and behaviour, while also cautioning social scientists of the region ‘not to rely on structured tools with borrowed categories lest the subtleties and actualities of the situations and processes being studied are lost’ (Dube, 1980, p. 37).
Besides Leelaji’s official mandate to survey the state of women’s studies research and writing in Southeast Asia, the UNESCO commission afforded her the opportunity to explore further a problem in kinship studies on which she had long been cogitating, namely, the relationship between types of descent systems and the social position of women in a region of the world characterised largely by bilateral descent. As she wrote in her introduction to the survey:
Anthropologists took a long time to lose their preoccupation with unilineal descent systems [i.e., patrilineal or matrilineal systems]
11
and accept the fact that sizeable parts of Asia and Oceania followed the bilateral pattern. Studies of a number of communities in the countries of the ASEAN region provided rich material for generalisations about non-lineal systems….
12
Most of these studies were not, however, specifically concerned with the position and roles of women in their respective societies (Dube, 1980, p. 1).
However, while her survey of the women’s studies literature from the Southeast Asian region had thrown up a number of issues that had the potential to enrich the comparative study of gender and kinship both regionally and globally, Leela Dube’s basic hypothesis concerning the relationship of correspondence between descent systems (patrilineal, matrilineal, bilateral) and women’s status was only weakly corroborated in her survey of the women’s studies literature from the Southeast Asian region, lost in the mass of country-specific detail and annoyingly obfuscated in many instances by faulty research design and indifferent execution.
Interlude
Then, serendipitously, something happened to provoke Leela Dube to assert more forcefully the imbrication of cultures of kinship with the political economy of gender relations. The specific context was one of Leela Dube’s rare ventures into public debate, namely, the ongoing controversy in 1982/1983 in the columns of the Economic and Political Weekly over the (mis)use of the new reproductive technology of amnio-centesis for the purpose of sex-determination, linked to an increase in the practice of female foeticide, and the consequent likelihood of further exacerbation of the strongly female-adverse sex ratios in many regions of India (Palriwala, 2017). Standing her ground as a professional anthropologist rather than a morally outraged feminist (which was the tenor of much of the debate), Leela Dube drew on her 1980 UNESCO survey to contrast the androcentric patrilineal culture of kinship in South Asia with the more women-friendly and ‘flexible’ bilateralism of Southeast Asian systems of kinship and marriage. Specifically, she rejected the narrowly economistic explanation of son-preference/daughter aversion advanced by her chief protagonist in the debate, the economic historian, Dharma Kumar, arguing to the contrary that kinship is not ‘just a set of moral principles’ (i.e., a cultural phenomenon) but ‘a set of principles of organisation rooted in material conditions and governing the distribution and control of resources within and between socio-economic classes and between males and females within a kinship unit’ (Dube, 1983, p. 1633, emphasis added): It is simply ‘not possible to talk in terms of cultural factors and economic factors as if they are independent of each other and function autonomously’, she said. ‘Not only that the two are enmeshed but often they are not even identifiable as “cultural” or “economic” while analysing complex social phenomena’ (ibid., p. 1634).
Reassembling the Pieces: South Asia/Southeast Asia, Gender/Kinship
Another decade was to elapse before Leela Dube could give final shape to her ideas and provide a robust substantiation of her guiding hypothesis, first in her J.P. Naik Memorial Lecture for the Centre for Women’s Development Studies (1994b), and subsequently, in expanded form, in her book, Women and kinship: Comparative perspectives on gender in South and South-East Asia (1997a), published by the United Nations University Press, Tokyo. Thus, (a) from an initial field study of women as the ‘default’ option for the woman-or wife-anthropologist; (b) to an overview of family and kinship studies in India (with minimal reference to women/gender); (c) to a survey of studies of women in Southeast Asia (with only occasional reference to family and kinship); (d) to a com-parative account of gender and kinship in South and Southeast Asia—Dube’s work had come full circle. And it was the application of the comparative method in relation to the gender-kinship nexus in another (an-‘other’) non-western society that enabled the indigenous anthro-pologist to critique gender relations in her own society without succumbing to what she saw as the ethnocentric biases of western feminist discourse.
In her introductory chapter to this comparative study, Leelaji sets out her now familiar argument, namely, ‘that differences in kinship systems and family structures account for some critical differences in the ways in which gender operates’ (Dube, 1997a, p. 2). These basic differences are in the first instance encoded in the ‘descent’ principle—predominantly patrilineal in the case of South Asia (with small pockets of matriliny); 13 and bilateral in Southeast Asia, with some representation of matriliny and patriliny (ibid.). Of course, given her keen eye for ethnographic detail, Leelaji also con-ceded that while the ‘bare structural characteristics’ of descent systems provide the ideological and material substructure of gender relations, they nonetheless function in complex ‘interplay’ with religion, with social structural variables of caste and class, and within the wider compass of economic and political processes, national and global (ibid., p. 3).
In the structural functional model in which Leelaji had been socialised, the ‘ideal type’ patrilineal descent system (sometimes identified as ‘patriarchy’) was characterised by: (a) the rule of descent in the male line, that is, ‘the children belong to the group of the father’; (b) the rule of patrilocal (or patrivirilocal) residence, meaning that ‘the wife removes to the local group of the husband’; (c) inheritance of property and succession to rank in the male line; and (d) patri-potestality, meaning that ‘the authority over the members of the family is in the hands of the father or his relatives’ (Radcliffe-Brown, 1952a [1924], p. 22). ‘Matriarchy’, or the ideal-typical kinship system based on matrilineal descent, had inverse properties (Radcliffe-Brown, 1952b [1935]), with the very important exception that power would repose not with senior women but with the mother’s male relatives, typically the mother’s brother. This asymmetry was the core of the so-called ‘matrilineal puzzle’, and the source of the supposed instability or fragility of kinship groupings based on matrilineal descent, or indeed of matrilineal kinship as an institution destined for extinction in the course of human evolution. As Janaki Abraham’s essay shows (Abraham, 2017), Leelaji would not accept this stereotype at face value, and instead highlighted the flexibility and potential for ‘negotiation’ that the asymmetry enabled in actual practice (1997a, pp. 154–156), as for instance in the Lakshadweep case, the pragmatic accommodation of the strongly ‘patriarchal’ bias of official Islam with Kalpeni island’s pre-existing matrilineal kinship system.
In demonstrating her hypothesis with reference to the kinship systems of communities in South Asia (India, Nepal, Bangladesh and Pakistan) and in Southeast Asia (Malaysia, Indonesia, 14 the Philippines and Thailand), Leelaji broadened the received understanding of the social concomitants of descent systems to include, besides the four formal features mentioned previously in respect of patrilineal descent systems, numerous other supposed indicators of women’s ‘bargaining power’ or scope for ‘choice’ and ‘negotiation’ in a wide range of social contexts. These other factors were essentially those already highlighted in her 1980 review of women’s studies in Southeast Asia. In fact, by the 1990s, they were reasonably common currency in Indian women’s studies research. 15 These included features such as: patterns of resource distribution; the management of female sexuality; the degree of women’s seclusion; attitudes to bodily processes and limitations on women on this account; women and living spaces (beyond the formal rules of post-marital residence); aspects of marriage (including arranged/self-choice marriage, polygyny and polyandry, 16 divorce and widowhood, types of marriage prestations, conjugal relations, etc.); and discrimination against girl children in respect of nutrition and education—on all of which she compared ethnographic evidence from the two regions.
At the end of this mammoth exercise, Leela Dube clearly felt vindicated in her demonstration, first, of the nexus between gender and kinship and, following on from this, the fundamental difference in gender relations between the South and Southeast Asian regions. Needless to say, ‘patrilineal’ India came off badly in the comparison on all counts. But that was not the whole story. As far as Leelaji was concerned, given the widespread tendency in feminist circles to valorise matrilineal over patrilineal social organisation, ‘in both types of unilineal descent system [i.e., the patrilineal and the matrilineal] it is necessary to underplay the role of one parent—that of the father in matriliny and that of the mother in patriliny’ (Dube, 1997a, p. 154, emphasis added). By contrast,
[b]ilaterality in South-East Asia seems to enshrine the principle of flexibility. Anthropological literature classifies a number of societies all over the world as following bilateral or cognatic kinship, but bilaterality in South-East Asia is unique in some ways. It accepts hierarchies of age, seniority and class rather than of gender. In spite of the patrilineally inclined religions that have come to the region [i.e., Islam and Christianity], bilaterality has been able to hold its own and maintain relative parity in gender relations (ibid., p. 157).
17
That summation left Leelaji with the rather awkward task of explaining how and why women in the West, where the kinship system is also formally bilateral/cognatic, should claim to suffer gender oppres-sion on account of gender-unequal laws (relating to property, con-jugality, divorce, custody, etc.), the separation of home and work, the sexual division of labour, stereotypical sex roles and characteristics, etc. Her explanation of this seeming anomaly was somewhat curious for a scholar otherwise so urbane and open-minded:
18
A pervasive feeling of envy of men, who seem to have far greater freedom and opportunities, and of rivalry with them is characteristic of the West. In many ways women’s solidarity is a war against patriarchy and male oppression. This war drives women to ignore men altogether (ibid., pp. 157–158).
On the other hand,
The gender ideology of South-East Asia derives from an entirely different tradition of bilaterality. Ego-centred family and kinship structures have rendered social organisation flexible. Women have been enabled to maintain a fair share of control over family and community resources. Women can work independently of men, manage their own and their spouse’s incomes, participate in trade and business, and be efficient producers in agriculture and agro-based industries. …. Even in situations of change and mobility the system has offered ways of making choices in limiting or expanding the kinship circle (ibid., p. 158).
Leela Dube’s Women and kinship was indeed an ambitious project requiring the analysis and deployment of a huge mass of ethnographic data from the South and Southeast Asian regions, along with synthesis at both the intra-regional and inter-regional levels. 19 Like the magician’s rabbit in the hat, her conclusion was so surprising that it must be told in her own words: ‘If kinship acts as a buffer in this uncertain and competitive world, the flexibility and existence of choices in bilaterality seem the most promising’ (ibid.). This finale takes us to some concluding thoughts on Leelaji’s truck with the comparative method of anthropology.
Concluding Thoughts: Adventures and Misadventures in Comparative Anthropology
As earlier remarked, at the time when Leela Dube was socialised into the British style of social anthropology, the so-called ‘comparative method’ was seen as central to the discipline’s self-image as an aspiring scientific pursuit. Subject to varying interpretations and evaluations, the comparative method has had a chequered history coterminous with the history of social anthropology itself (Evans-Pritchard, 1965, pp. 13–14). On one hand, as earlier remarked, comparison was deemed to be implicit in the very act of ‘translating’ from one culture into the disciplinary language of another. On the other hand, the comparative method was seen to embrace, or be polarised between, two distinct streams: the reconstruction by the ‘armchair’ anthropologist of supposed historical connections between cultures; and the elaboration, based on intensive fieldwork in small-scale societies, of ‘general propositions’, moving ‘from the particular to the general [and] from the general to the more general, with the end in view that we may in this way arrive at the universal characteristics which can be found in different forms in all human societies’ (Radcliffe-Brown, 1951, p. 22). Across the Atlantic, the Yale University Human Relations Area Files project sought to encode cross-cultural ethnographic data in such a way as to enable statistical correlations between various social institutions and cultural traits worldwide (Murdock, 1949).
Regardless of the cacophony of contemporary opinion, Leelaji’s own recension of the comparative method, increasingly informed by feminism, was actually more aligned to an earlier tradition of comparative anthropology in which the exploration of cultural diversity was conceived as something of a ‘public responsibility’ (Fox & Gingrich, 2002, p. 2), that is, designed to draw attention in the anthropologist’s home setting to the possibility of ‘alternative worlds’ (Palriwala, 2017). The writings of anthropologist Margaret Mead (1929, 1930), which were among Leelaji’s first readings in anthropology, clearly had a lasting effect on her (Dube, 2001c, p. 84, f.n. 4). As she subsequently wrote:
The use of a comparative perspective in looking at different cultures and going back into the past can guard against the ethnocentric tendency to universalise on the basis of notions regarding gender relationships derived from one’s own cultural experiences. … The starting point for women anthropologists looking for explanations of gender relations in other cultures were the puzzles and problems which confronted them in their own societies. This has influenced the course that [the] anthropology of women has taken in terms of the choice of issues considered as seminal and the theoretical frameworks developed to understand and explain the predicament of women. … [S]ome of these formulations have been seriously questioned and explanatory frameworks deriving from situations in entirely different cultures have been put forth.
But,
Whatever may be the direction and point of view in these studies, they all depend upon the comparative method and cross-cultural verification (Dube, 1986a, pp. xix–xx, emphasis added).
While the comparative method fell into some disrepute from the 1970s, with many anthropologists unconvinced of the value of applying statistical methods to large anthropological data sets (see Evans-Pritchard, 1965) and generally sceptical of universal ‘grand theory’ built on a precarious empirical base, the method has recently undergone a cautious revival (e.g., Gingrich & Fox, 2002; van der Veer, 2016). The latter process includes recognition of the fact that, in a global world, anthropological knowledge cannot be bounded by the national borders within which we all live, or ‘sub-regions’ and ‘regions’ definitively identified for all time to come (van Schendel, 2002). This perspective invites one to wonder why Leela Dube excluded Ceylon/Sri Lanka from South Asia on account of the messiness of its kinship system, including a pronounced leaning to bilaterality (Dube, 1997a, p. 2); or failed to appreciate the now routine geo-political formula that ‘Southeast Asia begins where Northeast India ends’; or deliberately excluded the Chinese and Indian diasporas/or Sinic (Confucianist) and Indian (Hindu-Buddhist) cultural influences from her exegesis of the culture of kinship in Southeast Asia lest it contaminate her experimental design.
No doubt the comparative method in anthropology has been a fraught project—even discredited in some quarters—yet it is one that is essential to the reconciliation of inductive and deductive methodologies, whether moving from the particular to the general or from the general to the particular. Leela Dube’s writings exemplified the inherent tensions between attention to the empirical variety of kinship systems and practices at the micro-level, and the quest for understanding the fundamental organising principles that shape women’s lives. Sceptic that she was, she was by no means convinced that received anthropology or received feminism or received feminist anthropology—rooted as they were in the historical experiences and intellectual traditions of the West—held all the answers. Or rather, to put the matter more positively, understanding the intersection of gender and kinship ‘at home’ in South Asia was to be undertaken not merely in reference to the West as default ‘other’, but in relation to other societies in Asia (Southeast Asia in particular), and indeed elsewhere in the global South. One must acknowledge this as something of a breakthrough in the context of Indian social anthropology which, as already noted, has been and remains still overwhelmingly focused on the area study of Indian society. Two decades on, Leelaji’s effort remains exceptional, an object of admiration for its ambitious scope and impressive coverage of ethnographic materials, but not of emulation, even as the erstwhile forsaken ‘comparative method’ in anthropology undergoes a mild, if self-critical, revival.
Epilogue
I end this article with a return to its colophon. Writing in retrospect of her comparative study of kinship and gender in South and Southeast Asia, Leelaji noted: ‘Importantly, my involvement in gender studies opened up South-east Asia to me’ (Dube, 2001b, p. 55). As one follows her circuitous path of self-discovery in anthropology through the intersection of gender and kinship, one might as well flag the reciprocal of this confession: ‘My involvement in South-east Asia opened up gender studies to me.’