On Women's Status in Yanoama Societies

of their social roles that have been taking place. After all, it is difficult o transcend established terminologies and still communicate with colleagues, and, despite its weaknesses, a considerably more adequate platform for analyzing relations among women, men, and society exists today than did when The Ojibwa Women was written. In order to demonstrate my good faith in making this point, I would like to tell a story on myself. Dating back 25 years, the incident illustrates my failure at that time to state the full implications of data I gathered in the course of studying territoriality and the fur trade among the Montagnais-Naskapi, since the findings contradicted established views about the greater importance of men than of women in the social organization of hunting bands. I went to Labrador assuming Steward (1936) to be correct in his formulation that hunting bands were patrilocal since men hunted more effectively in areas they knew from childhood. In the course of collecting enealogies on all band members at Natashq'uan, on the north shore of the St. Lawrence, however, I found to my surprise that postmarital residence had been predominantly matrilocal prior to the recently married generation. This finding tallied with references to matrilocality as the norm among the 17th-century Montagnais and the early 18th-century Cree, as I later wrote (Leacock 1955). Yet in my summary formulation of hunting bands as flexible structures within which individuals juggled various preferences with considerations of group viability in making moves, both at their own marriage and at the marriage of siblings, parents, or offspring, I contradicted my own data by writing that the resulting bilocality "perhaps" included a "slight" emphasis on matrilocality (1955:46). I should have stated that the emphasis was clear and important, a reformulation I did not make until over a decade later (1969). Although naught but a phrase in an article, my misstatement remains symptomatic to me of the problems, large and small, posed by modes of discourse that took for granted, in the words of a text written about that time, a "normal importance of men" (Honigmann 1959:302). With regard to the specific points raised by Landes, the statement about women receiving visions more easily than men was not a paraphrase, but a summary of passages reporting that girls and women are "susceptible to spontaneous visions" and "are more conspicuous for getting visions in this informal way than are boys and men" (pp. 6-7), that boys have to be persistently urged while "girls pick up power by the way, adopting suggestions which fall about their ears, but which they are not pressed to adopt" (p. 10). I am aware that those who define women's status as everywhere inferior to men's would be quick to argue that girls' visions must therefore be less important han boys'. I would rebut, "To whom? " and the matter would be up for debate. That visions come more easily to females than to males seems the literal reading of the text. On contradictions arising from latitude for individual expression, rather than from the historical situation of the Ojibwa when Landes studies them and from the established assumptions about female-male relations generally extant at the time, I protest that I did not focus on conflicts between normative statements about behavior and behavior itself. I noted a few of these, but my stress was on contrasts in generalizing statements made about norms and values. On the separation of women's and men's worlds of work, I know this to be true of most societies, including our own. One thrust of my article was that this separateness has different implications in egalitarian societies from those in hierarchically ordered ones. Although the Ojibwa had for many years prior to Landes's study been variously influenced or constrained by the economic organization and legal codes of Canadian society, she documented considerable autonomy and cultural independence among them. Therefore I would ask about Ojibwa women's world of work in what sense it was "never touched by men," since they apparently were interested in it, observed it, talked about it, and used or benefitted from it. Was it, perhaps, that they had no control over it? And in what context or in whose terms was it "unofficial"?