Contemporary Native Women: Role Flexibility and Politics

Authors

  • Bruce G. Miller University of British Columbia

Abstract

Some recent efforts to reconceptualize contemporary Native gender systems (1) argue that tribal and band political life is best understood by reference to social formations other than gender systems and (2) rely on poorly defined notions of one feature of the gender system, role flexibility. This article argues that these two issues are connected; differences in role flexibility by sex help channel the political participation of men and women. Several notions of role flexibility, each with different properties and implications for women's political role, are employed in the literature. A comparative framework of role flexibility is constructed, building on the work of Kopytoff (1991), and ethnographic examples are used to build the case that the analysis of gender (including role flexibility) is important in understanding Native women's recent successes in politics.

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Author Biography

Bruce G. Miller, University of British Columbia

Bruce Miller received his B.A. from Brown University and his Ph.D. from Arizona State. He has conducted research on gender roles and on political and legal systems among First Nations peoples. He has done fieldwork with the Coast Salish peoples of British Columbia and Washington State. He is currently Assistant Professor of Anthropology at the University of British Columbia. In the spring of 1995 he will become anglophone editor of Culture.

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Published

2022-06-02

How to Cite

Miller, B. G. (2022). Contemporary Native Women: Role Flexibility and Politics. Anthropologica, 36(1), 57–72. Retrieved from https://cas-sca.journals.uvic.ca/index.php/anthropologica/article/view/1969

Issue

Vol. 36 No. 1 (1994)

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Articles

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