#kung!

Before I start, I’m not claiming to be an expert. These are just things that I’ve learned while studying sociology and anthropology in college.

Every society has gender roles. To be very brief, the gender roles in the US tell us that men should be aggressive and unemotional while women should be nurturing, emotional, passive, and less outgoing than men. If these roles were biologically based, we would see similar roles in every society around the world. However, that isn’t the case.

Margaret Mead, a cultural anthropologist, traveled to Papua New Guinea to study three tribes: the Arapesh, the Mundugumor, and the Chambri (previously known as Tchambuli). She wrote a book called Sex and Temperament in Three Primitive Societies about her studies. She found a lot out about each tribe, but I’m only going to touch on the Arapesh and the Mundugumor since there’s a lot of debate about the true gender roles of the Chambri.

She found that Arapesh men and women were both peaceful in temperament. In addition, women were the primary food providers. However, this didn’t mean that men were submissive to women. Neither competed for dominance because they didn’t view one as submissive to another. They utilized egalitarian parenting, so both the mother and the father took care of the children. Among the Mundugumor, both men and women were very aggressive in temperament. Their society actually used to center around war, cannibalism, and headhunting until a few years before Dr. Mead got there. They held many traditions of aggression and both men and women were arrogant, jealous, violent, very aggressive, and masculine (by US standards).

I also wanted to touch upon the Mosuo people (who refer to themselves as the Na). They are a small ethnic group that live in the Yunnan and Sichuan provinces in China. They’re a matriarchal society, meaning that lineage is passed down through the female line. Women make the business decisions and control all financial decisions in the home as well as the job assignments for everyone living in her house. However, political power lies in the hands of men. For the average household, the women take care of the housework as well as the production/trading of goods for the house. The men have no jobs except for fishing and slaughtering the livestock. The rest of the time, they relax.