Du, Shanshan. CHOPSTICKS ONLY WORK IN PAIRS: GENDER UNITY AND GENDER EQUALITY AMONG THE LAHU OF SOUTHWEST CHINA

Du,Shanshan. CHOKTTICKS ONLY WORK IN PAIRS: GENDER UNITY AND GENDER EQUALITY AMONG THE LAHU OF SOUTHWEST CHINA. Columbia University Press, 2002. $26.00.Genuine gender equality has been the holy grail for feminist anthropologists. They have traveled throughout the world for almost a century in quest of a society that does not place men above women. Margaret Mead attempted to show that there was absolute variation in three adjacent-by societies, the Mundugumor, Arapesh, and Tchambuli of Papua New Guinea (Mead 1963 [1935]). Anthropologists combed the globe, always tempted by the notion that around the bend is a more genuinely egalitarian society. By 1974, Sherry Ortner had concluded that this quest was in vain; she attempted, sadly, to explain why all societies regarded men more highly than women. (It is because women are equated with nature, and men with culture, and culture is superior.) But there were still some cases that provided hope: The matrilineal societies of Native America-Navajo, Northwest Coast groups, etc.-seemed to suggest that male dominance was not ubiquitous and unchallenged (Klein and Ackerman 1995). Peggy Sanday has labored to show that the Minangkabau of Indonesia are genuinely matriarchal (2002). In China, an Amazonian kingdom of matriarchy was alleged to exist among the Mosuo (Shin in press). Chinese and foreign ethnologists have flocked to Mugu Lake in Yunnan province to study these marriage-free, strong women, though they can be analyzed in various ways that do not support claims of Mosuo matriarchy.But now meet the Lahu. This is a "primitive" group (according to Han Chinese classification) in Yunnan province in southwest China (but also in Myanmar, Vietnam, Laos, and Thailand), who demonstrate genuine gender equality. Shanshan Du has been regaling us in articles with information about these unusual people for quite some time now. Her book is a welcome longer treatment of the topic.Using information from folk sayings, creation myths (cross-sex twin gods Xeul and Sha are virtually indistinguishable), weddings and other rituals, Du demonstrates what she calls the Lahu's "dyadic" view of gender. Just as one cannot have just one chopstick and make it function, and ritual candles are made by dipping both ends of string into wax, so one cannot value one gender without the other. Her claim is essentially that there are gender-equal societies, but that they have not been identified as such by scholars because of certain preconceptions about what such societies would look like.Du defines " gender-egalitarian" societies as those "whose dominant ideology, institutions, and social practices value its male and female members equally, regardless of the roles they play" (p. 9). She then provides evidence from a wide variety of domains, including proverbs, rituals, postmarriage residence and labor obligation to parents, division of labor in the family, ideals of personhood, the ideal life cycle, traditional leadership, ideas of dyads that permeate many institutions, definitions of relations and obligations to affines, labor exchange, and even those exceptions to the ideal of monogamy that nonetheless operate according to gender-egalitarian notions. …