Chinese (Mandarin)

Spanish

English

Hindi

Arabic (Modern Standard)

Portuguese

Bengali

Russian

Japanese

Punjabi

German

Javanese

Malay

Telugu

Vietnamese

Korean

French

Marathi

Tamil

Urdu

Turkish

Italian

Chinese, Yue / Cantonese

Thai

Gujarati

Chinese, Jin

Chinese, Min Nan

Dari

Farsi

Polish

Pashto

Kannada

Chinese, Xiang

Malayalam

Sundanese

Hausa

Odia

Burmese

Chinese, Hakka

Ukrainian

Bihari, Bhojpuri

Tagalog

Yoruba

Bihari, Maithili

Uzbek

Sindhi

Amharic

Fula

Romanian

Oromo

Igbo

Azerbaijani

Chinese, Gan

Dutch

Kurdish, Central

Kurdish, Northern

Kurdish, Southern

Malagasy

Lahnda, Saraiki

Nepali

Sinhalese

Chittagonian

Zhuang

Khmer

Turkmen

Assamese

Madurese

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Marwari

Bihari, Magahi

Haryanvi

Hungarian

Chhattisgarhi

Greek

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Akan, Twi

Akan, Fante

Kazakh

Chinese, Min Bei

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Marwari, Dhundhari

Haitian Creole

Chinese, Min Dong

Ilocano

Quechua

Kirundi

Swedish

Hmong

Shona

Uyghur

Hiligaynon

Mossi

Xhosa

Belarusian

Balochi

Anthropology

<OpenstaxParagraph>
	In 2018, the word “mansplaining” was added to the Merriam-Webster dictionary. The word is defined as “what occurs when a man talks condescendingly to someone (especially a woman) about something he has incomplete knowledge of, with the mistaken assumption that he knows more about it than the person he&#x27;s talking to does” (“Words We’re Watching” 2018).
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	The word was inspired by an article written in 2008 by the feminist blogger Rebecca <OpenstaxTerm>Solnit</OpenstaxTerm>. In the article “Men Explain Things to Me,” Solnit described an incident at a party in which she mentioned to a man that she had recently written a book about a particular photographer. Immediately, the man interrupted to inform her about a <OpenstaxEm>very important</OpenstaxEm> book that just came out about that same photographer, a book he had read about in <OpenstaxEm>The New York Times.</OpenstaxEm> After the man had described the book in great detail, Solnit’s friend finally intervened to say that the book he was talking about was, in fact, written by Solnit. In the wake of Solnit’s article, other women writers described similar experiences in their workplaces, schools, and relationships, and the whole phenomenon came to be called “mansplaining.”
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<OpenstaxFigure id="fig-00001" src="https://openstax.org/apps/archive/20240226.174525/resources/99269d9c4c074a761f687750792a728dadbde7fd" alt="Head shot of Rebecca Solnit" mediaType="image/jpeg" width="438" height="585" />
<OpenstaxFigureText width="438">
	Figure 6.13 Rebecca Solnit, the author of the article “Men Explain Things to Me”. The term “mansplaining” has become a well discussed topic in the years since she introduced the term. (credit: “Rebecca Solnit” by Charles Kremenak/Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 2.5)
</OpenstaxFigureText>
<OpenstaxParagraph>
	Have you ever witnessed mansplaining? Have you ever mansplained to someone? Embedded in the very term is a notion about gender and language. The idea is that men and women have different styles of speech, styles that reflect and reinforce inequality between genders.
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	In recent years, many writers have pushed back against the term “mansplaining,” arguing that <OpenstaxEm>all</OpenstaxEm> men do not <OpenstaxEm>always</OpenstaxEm> speak this way to <OpenstaxEm>all</OpenstaxEm> women. Some argue that many men are much more respectful and sensitive to the dynamics of power in their conversations with women. Some argue that privileged White women tend to speak in a mansplaining way to male waiters and salespersons or to people of color more generally. Others suggest that older people speak in a condescending way to younger people, or vice versa.
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	Have you ever become annoyed with a friend or relative who repeatedly interrupts you? Have you ever noticed how some people tend to end their sentences with rising intonation, making everything they say sound like a question? How about a person who ignores what you say but then rephrases your idea and takes credit for it? Many people associate these ways of speaking with gender, the way men speak or the way women speak. As noted in the discussion of language acquisition, every culture has ideas about how language operates, called language ideologies. The idea that American men and American women have distinctive styles of speech is a language ideology. Whether it is true or not is a question for linguistic research, but this idea has become a widespread way of thinking about gender, power, and language in American culture.
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	In the 1970s, linguists inspired by the women’s movement turned their attention to the way gender shapes different patterns of speech. In her influential book <OpenstaxEm>Language and Woman’s Place</OpenstaxEm> (1975), Robin <OpenstaxTerm>Lakoff</OpenstaxTerm> argues that women and men are socialized to speak in distinctive ways that empower men and subordinate women. Lakoff describes women’s speech as uncertain, excessively polite, and full of hedges, emotional language, euphemism, and tag questions (“Don’t you think?”). Other linguistic researchers have found that men tend to interrupt women far more than vice versa, even when the women speaking are doctors and the men are their patients (Zimmerman and West 1975, West 1998).
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	Building on this research, Deborah <OpenstaxTerm>Tannen</OpenstaxTerm> generalized beyond speech patterns to describe two entirely different communicative subcultures for American men and American women (1990). When men and women speak to one another, Tannen argues, they are speaking cross-culturally, deploying different motivations and expectations for talk. Men engage in conversation to assert their status in a social hierarchy, while women are more interested in building solidarity through social connection. Men authoritatively report information <OpenstaxEm>to</OpenstaxEm> their interlocutors, while women engage in conversational rapport <OpenstaxEm>with</OpenstaxEm> their interlocutors. In popular media, differences in the speech styles of men and women are frequently linked to purported differences in specific parts of male and female brains, such the corpus callosum, the amygdala, and the hippocampus. In this way, gendered patterns of speaking are naturalized as biological.
</OpenstaxParagraph>
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	Like the pushback against the term “mansplaining,” researchers have begun to challenge the view that women and men are embedded in different linguistic subcultures with different patterns of speech, motivation, and interpretation. Psychologist Janet <OpenstaxTerm>Hyde</OpenstaxTerm> conducted a meta-analysis of hundreds of quantitative studies to see if widespread notions about gender and language were actually borne out by linguistic data (2005). Along with notions of power, Hyde was interested in testing the idea that women are chattier and more deferential than men. Focusing on studies of children, Hyde found that boys and girls exhibited no differences at all in reading comprehension, verbal reasoning, and vocabulary. The tendency for boys to interrupt or speak assertively was only very slightly higher than for girls. The girls’ tendency toward self-disclosure and cooperation with their conversation partners was only slightly higher than for boys. The only significant differences Hyde found were in smiling and correct spelling (girls did more of both).
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	How do we reconcile research demonstrating differences in the way men and women talk with data that suggests very little difference in the speech patterns of girls and boys? One could argue that children have not been entirely socialized into their assigned gender category. Perhaps the discrepancy suggests that gendered ways of speaking are cultural, not biological, and that, for children, the most intense period of socialization is yet to come in adolescence.
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	Moreover, ethnographic research by linguistic anthropologists shows that patterns of speech associated with men and women are culturally relative. Reversing the American stereotypes, anthropologists working in Madagascar and New Guinea have found that women are expected to speak in a more confrontational and argumentative style, while men are associated with more cooperative, euphemistic, and ceremonial speech (Keenan [Ochs] 1974, Kulick 1992, both cited in Ahearn 2017).
</OpenstaxParagraph>
<OpenstaxParagraph>
	So both quantitative and ethnographic research overturn the notion that women and men are biologically engineered to use language in different ways. That leaves us with the conclusion that any differences in the ways men and women talk are entirely cultural. Literary scholar Judith <OpenstaxTerm>Butler</OpenstaxTerm> argues that gender identities are not biological but are performed through language and other cultural practices, particularly those centered on the body (1988). So when men and women speak in certain ways, they are socially performing their gender identities, whether consciously or unconsciously. Moreover, through their linguistic performances, people enact their own versions of gender in complicated ways that transcend the neat dichotomy of male and female. You probably have a language ideology that tells you how men and women speak in your culture, but do you <OpenstaxEm>always</OpenstaxEm> speak in the style associated with your assigned gender category? Nobody does. And some people rarely do. As these contradictory performances build up over time, the very notion of gender can change.
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<OpenstaxNote>
	<OpenstaxNoteTitle> Profiles in Anthropology </OpenstaxNoteTitle> <OpenstaxH3> Kira Hall 1962- </OpenstaxH3>
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		Area of Anthropology: <a href="https://openstax.org/r/colorado">Kira <OpenstaxTerm>Hall</OpenstaxTerm>’s</a> work is situated at the intersection of sociolinguistics and linguistic anthropology. In graduate school, she studied with Robin Lakoff in the linguistics department at the University of California–Berkeley, earning her PhD there in 1995. For her dissertation, she examined the linguistic strategies of Hindi-speaking <OpenstaxEm>hijras</OpenstaxEm> in Banaras, India. Hijras are members of a third-gender group in many Indian communities. Most hijras were raised as boys and later adopted the intersex behaviors and language of the hijra identity. Hall analyzed how hijras navigated aspects of gender embedded in Hindi, such as certain verbs and adjectives that are marked as feminine or masculine. She showed how hijras alternate between these gendered forms, code-switching as a reflection of their own ambiguous identities. She explored how hijras use obscene forms of language to shame people into giving them money. She showed how they had developed their own secret language as a way of communicating with one another, signaling their identity to others, and excluding non-hijras from understanding their conversations.
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		Accomplishments in the Field: Reflecting her work at the boundaries of linguistics and anthropology, Hall has held academic positions in the anthropology department at Yale University and the linguistics department of Stanford University. Currently, she is professor of linguistics at the University of Colorado at Boulder, with a joint appointment in the anthropology department. She is also director of the Program in Culture, Language, and Social Practice at UC-Boulder. Since 2019, she has served as the president of the Society for Linguistic Anthropology of the American Anthropological Association.
	</OpenstaxParagraph>
	<OpenstaxParagraph>
		Importance of Their Work: Hall’s work highlights how language operates within hierarchies of gender, sexuality, and socioeconomic class. In addition to her work on hijras, she has published articles on language and sociality in autism, female mass hysteria in upstate New York, and Donald Trump’s use of gesture and derisive humor in the 2016 Republican Party primaries.
	</OpenstaxParagraph>
</OpenstaxNote>

6.5.1 Gender and Language

1 What Is Anthropology?

1.1 The Study of Humanity, or "Anthropology Is Vast"

1.1.1 The Heart of Anthropology: Central Narrative and Commitments

1.1.2 Central Commitment #1: Exploring Sociocultural Diversity

1.1.3 Central Commitment #2: Understanding How Societies Hold Together

1.1.4 Central Commitment #3: Examining the Interdependence of Humans and Nature

1.2 The Four-Field Approach: Four Approaches within the Guiding Narrative

1.2.1 Biological Anthropology

1.2.2 Archaeology

1.2.3 Cultural Anthropology

1.2.4 Linguistic Anthropology

1.2.5 How the Four Fields Work Together: The Example of Race

1.3 Overcoming Ethnocentrism

1.3.1 Enculturation and Ethnocentrism

1.3.2 Primitivism and Orientalism

1.4 Western Bias in Our Assumptions about Humanity

1.4.1 Primitivism and Orientalism in Popular Culture

1.4.2 The Bias of Backwardness

1.5 Holism, Anthropology’s Distinctive Approach

1.5.1 Society as an Integrated Whole

1.5.2 Sources of Contradiction, Conflict, and Change

1.6 Cross-Cultural Comparison and Cultural Relativism

1.6.1 Relativism Is Not “Anything Goes”

1.6.2 Morality, Activism, and Cultural Relativism

1.7 Reaching for an Insider’s Point of View

1.7.1 The Challenge of Representing Others

1.7.2 Collaborative Methods of Representation

1.7.3 Working across Cultures toward Common Goals

1.7.4 Suggested Readings

2 Methods: Cultural and Archaeological

2.1 Archaeological Research Methods

2.1.1 Archaeological Techniques

2.1.2 Archaeological Dating Methods

2.2 Conservation and Naturalism

2.2.1 Early Efforts

2.2.2 Salvage Anthropology

2.2.3 Museum Collections

2.2.4 Interpretation and Voice

2.3 Ethnography and Ethnology

2.3.1 The Development of Ethnography and Ethnology

2.3.2 Perspective and Interpretation in Ethnography

2.4 Participant Observation and Interviewing

2.4.1 Participant Observation

2.4.2 Interviewing Informants

2.4.3 Ethical Considerations

2.5 Quantitative and Qualitative Analysis

2.5.1 Differences between Quantitative and Qualitative Information

2.5.2 Modeling

2.5.3 The Science of Anthropology

2.6 Collections

2.6.1 Archives

2.6.2 Three-Dimensional Collections

2.6.3 Ownership

2.6.4 Suggested Readings

3 Culture Concept Theory: Theories of Cultural Change

3.1 The Homeyness of Culture

3.2 The Winkiness of Culture

3.3 The Elements of Culture

3.3.1 Culture Is What We Make

3.3.2 Culture Is What We Do

3.3.3 Culture Is What We Think

3.4 The Aggregates of Culture

3.4.1 Symbols

3.4.2 Ritual

3.4.3 Social Structure

3.5 Modes of Cultural Analysis

3.5.1 Evolution, Adaptation, and Historical Particularism

3.5.2 Functionalism

3.5.3 Structuralism

3.5.4 Ontology

3.6 The Paradoxes of Culture

3.6.1 Paradox 1: Culture Is Continuous, but It Changes

3.6.2 Paradox 2: Culture Is Bounded but Mobile

3.6.3 Paradox 3: Culture Is Consensual but Contested

3.6.4 Paradox 4: Culture Is Shared, but It Varies

3.6.5 Suggested Readings

4 Biological Evolution and Early Human Evidence

4.1 What Is Biological Anthropology?

4.1.1 Looking to the Deep Past

4.1.2 Exploring What It Means to Be Human

4.2 What’s in a Name? The Science of Taxonomy

4.2.1 Defining the Science of Taxonomy

4.2.2 Defining a Species

4.3 It’s All in the Genes! The Foundation of Evolution

4.3.1 The Units of Life

4.3.2 Gregor Mendel and the Laws of Heredity

4.3.3 Mendelian Inheritance in Humans

4.4 Evolution in Action: Past and Present

4.4.1 Early Evolutionists and the Fixity of Species

4.4.2 Charles Darwin’s Role in Changing Views of the Natural World

4.4.3 Understanding Darwin’s Theory of Natural Selection

4.5 What Is a Primate?

4.5.1 What Is a Primate?

4.5.2 Primate Behavioral Variation

4.5.3 Explaining Primate Success

4.5.4 Primate Classification and Taxonomy

4.6 Origin of and Classification of Primates

4.6.1 Understanding Concepts of Time

4.6.2 Fossils and Dating Methods