7 - The vanishing woman: gender and population health

Summary

Franklin (1997) describes anthropologists as fascinated by the ‘presence of an absence’, particularly when the anthropologist is a woman and the absent figure is female. Traditional ethnographers constructed their complex and elaborate models of political and economic systems, religion, law or kinship based largely on conversations with men. Insofar as they made an appearance in these models, women were usually figures with children, passing silently through public space. Passive actors, they were objects in a script created and recounted by men for the visiting anthropologist. Similarly, this chapter is also concerned with models in which women, while present, are invisible; these models, however, are of more recent origin and are constructed by health economists and health policy analysts rather than by ethnographers.

The advent of feminist scholarship disturbed the comfort of the anthropological world, challenging its theoretical assumptions by showing how differently social institutions – such as kinship – appear when seen by, and through the eyes of, women (Strathern 1995). To see from this different perspective, researchers had to enter the ‘invisible’ world of women and engage with the reality of their lives. Abu-Lughod (1995:22), for example, moved literally and figuratively into the tents of the women, where she discovered that Bedouin women were:

Living in a separate community – a community that could also be considered a subsociety: separate from and parallel to the men's, yet crosscut by ties to men.