Women of the Forest (COLUMBIA CLASSICS IN ANTHROPOLOGY)

It's a text book.

This was a very interesting book.

Since this book was written in 1974, a huge number of trees have been turned into pages written on the relations between men and women and the position of women vis-à-vis men. Women and their differing roles in society have been the subject of innumerable theses, books, articles, and newspaper reports. Every writer has her or his own slant on things. I am not well-versed in this topic, nor do I have my well-thought-out, but unpublished opinion. I chose to read this book more because it is about a small tribe of Indians in the Amazon forests than because it’s a study in which the general problem of inter-gender relations is addressed. As an ethnography, it ranks as a well-written one in which you definitely can get some of the flavor of life back then and in that remote place.Every ethnography has its particular angle. In this one, Yolanda Murphy, who lived among the Mundurucú Indians with her husband way back in the early 1950s, writes about the lives of the women among them and contrasts them consistently with those of Euro-American women. She happened to be there in the midst of a time of change. The Mundurucú of southern Pará state in Brazil had lived in savanna villages where they could hunt in nearby forests, but also grow manioc along the rivers. But desire for money and new material goods pushed many of them to shift to riverside quarters where they tapped rubber trees so as to sell their product to Brazilian traders. This change produced the ideal chance for the anthropologists. The more traditional savanna villages still preserved the old relationships between men and women. The men hunted and did some of the heavy work, like building houses and clearing forest for new fields. Otherwise, they hung out in a separate men’s house which harbored sacred flutes. Women were not allowed to see such flutes on pain of gang rape. The men slept in a special men’s house and led almost separate lives. The women grew manioc, cleaning and processing it to make farinha, the Mundurucú staff of life. Several generations of women lived, took care of children, cooked, and bonded in a large house to which the men came on many occasions---for instance, for sex and cooked food. Murphy felt that though the ideology of the tribe was that men were superior and rightly had power, it was more in theory than in fact. No man would try to organize the activities of women. The women wielded considerable daily authority, acting quite independently. Mutual aloofness and separation seemed to be the tone between the sexes. It spoke of separation of the sexes and a loose interdependency as contrasted to “the hothouse quality of American marriage” (p.159) All this changed once they moved to the riverbank settlements. There, tradition collapsed. The men’s house disappeared. Men lived with their wives, in smaller family groups, and worked at tasks which they never touched back in the savanna environment. Women enjoyed more support from their husbands. Fishing replaced hunting. Fishing is a more solitary task, plus it did not occupy so much time. So men’s solidarity also broke down. Selling rubber to the Brazilian traders brought in cash that they formerly did not have. The women were able to buy material goods that they had lacked. For women, the new environment was positive, while the men looked back at a better age in the past. The book concludes with a general overview of male-female relationships in Western and Mundurucú cultures. The Mundurucú are still there, fighting large dams and environmental degradation. It is unlikely that they will survive. We might learn a lot from their traditional society, but I am quite sure that we won’t.

"In the morning we sat behind our house drinking coffee and watching the mists rising from the hillside in thin tendrils that were said by the Indians (who knew that it was really mist) to be the campfire of a mythical inambu bird. And the evenings often closed in brilliant, iridescent sunsets, kaleidoscopes of shifting colors. It was an enchanted land existing in a distant place and peopled by descendants of a remote age. To enter it was to step through the looking glass."What would it be like to be a woman living in the Brazilian Amazon Basin? What if you lived in the moment, survival being a daily challenge? How would you set up your life so you had the support you needed when a man walked out of your life leaving you to care for his children? The women in the Amazon have it all figured out. In the first four pages you see the exotic beauty and undeniable reality of life.The authors were a newly married couple when they first walked into a Mundurucu village in 1952. This book was written in the 70s and explains life from the perspective of a female anthropologist. Yolanda spent time with the women who accepted her as a friend and sister. Robert spent time with the men and learned about the ways they felt towards the women and how seriously they took their religious beliefs. This book really does include both sides, but has a definite focus on women.This is a fascinating study of how the Mundurucu women humor the "mythically dominant" males, how they care for their men and how they survive when their marriages don't work out. It is a story about how women have found a way to survive by bonding with other women and sticking together through life.When you read this book you realize how universal women really are. They all seem to basically want the same thing. You have to laugh when you read how the women encourage their husbands to work harder so they can buy new clothes and are even quite willing to do the work themselves. In fact, from this book, it does appear both sexes are working rather hard all day long just to survive. Afternoon naps are however a necessity because of the heat.This story is also a beautiful look at survival. Of how men and women depend on one another to meet their basic needs. In the Mundurucu society, women and men took on various roles and responsibilities although the women tended to do most of the menial tasks and raised the children. Sound familiar? Well life is changing all over the world and by the end of this book, you can see how the Mundurucu Indians have already adapted to change.Contents:Woman's DayThe Land and the PeopleMunmdurucu CultureWomen in Myth and SymbolThe Woman's WorldWomen and Married LifeWomen and Social ChangeWomen and MenThe work of Yolanda and Robert Murphy encourages an understanding of women's lives in the non-Western world. It focuses on gender relations and the social roles women play in the Amazon forest. Yolanda explains how the women rear their children, take care of their husbands, form groups to complete tasks and keep control of their lives even in difficult situations. There are descriptions of bathing in rivers, preparing foods, gardening, feasts, childcare, rubber collection and all sorts of interesting facts about the lives of the Mundurucu people.While I thought this book would be only focusing on the women, the second chapter surprised me with information about the land and there are a few maps. There is also plenty of information about the men and what they desire, miss about the older cultures and how they even laugh and say that the homes really do belong to the women and in some areas the men live in a "men's house." There is information about hunting trips and the crafts the men work on in their spare time.The processing of the manioc plant will interest anyone who has ever cooked tapioca. The myths are entertaining and it was interesting to read their version of the Adam and Eve story.A widely read and beautifully written classic study of Brazil's Mundurucu Indians.~The Rebecca Review