Can the Hegemon Speak? Reading Masculinity through Anthropology

Abstract

Prefacing a recent edited collection on late antique gender, Virginia Burrus observes that ‘our own mappings of the mappings of ancient texts extend an iterative process of transformation that conveys both orders of intentionality and degrees of unpredictability that exceed teleological constraint’.2 Twentieth-century ethnography has similarly delivered gender as a remapping of what is always already mapped. My interest in this chapter is the use of anthropology in relation to ‘masculinities’, as a late addition to the gender studies portfolio. In part, I wish to reflect upon whether anthropology can fault philologists and others for their ‘myths’, ‘errors’ and ‘failure [ … ] to ask the most basic questions’ regarding gender/sexuality categories, as Holt Parker put it some years back.3 More generally, can anthropology act as cultural critique, and, all the while, ‘avoid a rhetoric of a clash of paradigms in order to confront more directly the extreme fragmentation of research interests and the theoretical eclecticism of the best work’?4 Can anthropology help, in other words?