How Early Anthropological Studies Shaped Our Understanding of Gender

The way we think about masculinity, femininity, and what counts as “natural” behaviour for men and women has been quietly shaped by anthropologists working a century ago. Long before gender studies became a recognised academic field, early ethnographers travelled to distant villages with notebooks, theories, and a strong set of Western assumptions. Their observations laid the foundation for modern debates on whether gender is born or made. Understanding their work helps us see how today’s conversations on equality, identity, and biology trace back to fieldwork done in the jungles of Papua New Guinea and the prairies of North America.

The evolutionary lens: ranking men and women on a ladder 🔗

Nineteenth-century anthropology was deeply influenced by Darwin’s theory of evolution. Scholars like Lewis Henry Morgan and Edward Burnett Tylor believed that all human societies progressed through fixed stages, from “savagery” to “barbarism” to “civilisation.” Gender roles were slotted neatly into this framework. The dominant claim was simple: as societies became more advanced, the division between male and female roles became sharper and more rigid. Western Victorian-era family structures, where men worked outside and women managed the home, were treated as the natural endpoint of human progress.

This evolutionary perspective was not just descriptive; it was prescriptive. It told readers that strict gender roles were a sign of social development, and that cultures with more fluid roles were somehow “primitive.” Looking back, the bias is obvious: the anthropologists were comparing every society they encountered to their own and assuming theirs sat at the top.

The “man the hunter” hypothesis 🔗

One of the most influential ideas to emerge from this evolutionary framework was the “man the hunter” hypothesis, which gained prominence in the 1950s and 1960s. According to this theory, hunting by males was the primary engine of human evolution. It supposedly selected for traits like aggression, spatial reasoning, intelligence, and tool use, while women, burdened by pregnancy and childcare, stayed at a “home base” and gathered plant foods.

This narrative had enormous cultural pull. It implied that male dominance in public life, leadership, and decision-making was rooted in millions of years of evolutionary pressure. The model treated meat-eating and weapon-making as the defining markers of being human, sidelining the everyday work of food gathering, child-rearing, and food processing that women contributed. As later critics noted, this framework projected modern American folk models onto early human ancestors, mistaking cultural preferences for biological destiny.

The bias hidden in the data 🔗

One of the biggest problems with early evolutionary accounts was that the data itself was shaped by who collected it. Male anthropologists usually had easier access to male informants, so they recorded men’s activities, men’s rituals, and men’s worldviews. Women’s lives were often described second-hand, or treated as background to the “real” cultural action. This created an androcentric bias that ran through early ethnography, where the male experience was treated as the default human experience.

Margaret Mead and the cultural turn 🔗

The most significant break from the evolutionary framework came from Margaret Mead, an American anthropologist who studied under Franz Boas and Ruth Benedict at Columbia University. Mead’s fieldwork in the South Pacific during the 1920s and 1930s would change how social scientists thought about gender for decades to come.

Sex and Temperament in Three Primitive Societies 🔗

Mead’s most cited contribution is her 1935 book, Sex and Temperament in Three Primitive Societies. The book documented her observations of three groups in the Sepik River basin of Papua New Guinea: the mountain-dwelling Arapesh, the river-dwelling Mundugumor, and the lake-dwelling Tchambuli (now spelled Chambri). What made her findings explosive was the sheer variation in how each society defined masculinity and femininity.

Among the Arapesh, both men and women displayed temperaments that Western observers would label “feminine.” They were gentle, cooperative, nurturing, and responsive to the needs of children. Aggression was discouraged in everyone, regardless of sex.

Among the Mundugumor, the picture was reversed. As described in records held by the Library of Congress exhibition on Mead’s work, both men and women were violent, competitive, and aggressive. Mothers reportedly resented their own children, and warmth was rare across the board.

Among the Tchambuli, Mead found yet another pattern. Women were the dominant, practical, and managerial figures who controlled fishing and trade, while men spent their time on artistic pursuits, gossip, and ceremonial life, behaving in ways the West would have called “feminine.”

Why these findings mattered 🔗

Mead’s three cases hit the assumptions of biological determinism with full force. If aggression were biologically male, why were Arapesh men gentle? If nurturing were biologically female, why were Mundugumor women fierce? If men were “naturally” dominant, why did Tchambuli women run the practical affairs of village life?

Her conclusion was that so-called masculine and feminine traits were largely shaped by cultural conditioning, not by biology. This was a radical claim in the 1930s, when most Western scientists, doctors, and educators believed that men and women had fundamentally different brains, emotions, and capacities. Mead’s work introduced the idea that gender, as we live it, is largely learned behaviour, picked up through child-rearing, ritual, and everyday social life.

Mead’s mentor circle, including Franz Boas and Ruth Benedict, supported a broader move in anthropology to treat culture as learned behaviour rather than as the product of biology or environment alone. This view, often called cultural relativism, became a cornerstone of twentieth-century social science.

Limitations of early anthropological studies on gender 🔗

While Mead and her colleagues opened new doors, early gender research had serious blind spots. Even the work that challenged biological determinism often slipped back into stereotype.

Lingering biological determinism 🔗

Despite the cultural turn, many early studies continued to assume that some aspects of gender were biologically fixed. Women were frequently linked to “nature” because of childbirth and lactation, while men were linked to “culture” and public life. This nature-culture dichotomy, later critiqued by anthropologist Sherry Ortner, made certain inequalities look inevitable. For instance, the assignment of childcare to women was often presented as a universal biological fact rather than a social arrangement that could be changed.

As scholars at Sociology Institute have noted, the core problem with biological determinism is that it treats social outcomes as inevitable when they are not. By rooting gender roles in biology, early anthropology often justified the very inequalities it claimed to study objectively.

The colonial gaze 🔗

Most early anthropologists were Western, white, and operating in territories under colonial rule. They often viewed non-Western societies as “primitive” or “exotic,” even when they admired them. Gender systems that did not fit Western binaries were treated as curiosities rather than as serious alternatives to consider. This colonial framing skewed the data and made it harder for early ethnographers to see indigenous gender categories on their own terms, such as the existence of third-gender roles documented in many societies, including India’s hijra communities.

Overlooking women’s labour and authority 🔗

The “man the hunter” model is the clearest example of how women’s contributions were systematically minimised. As anthropologist Sally Slocum later argued, gathering plant foods, which women typically did, often provided the bulk of daily calories in foraging societies. Yet the dominant story credited men’s hunting with driving human evolution. Similarly, women’s roles in trade, politics, religion, and conflict resolution were under-reported in many ethnographies because the researchers were not looking for them.

Methodological gaps even in Mead’s work 🔗

Even Mead’s celebrated research has been questioned over the years. Some critics have argued that she spent relatively short periods in each society, sometimes only a few months, and may have generalised too quickly from limited data. Others have pointed out that her categories of “masculine” and “feminine” still relied on Western assumptions, even as she challenged them. She measured each society against an American baseline, which limited how fully she could see each culture on its own terms. Feminist anthropologists in later decades built on her insights while pushing the field to take women’s perspectives, power, and inequality much more seriously.

Why this history matters today 🔗

The work of early anthropologists is more than a museum piece. The questions they wrestled with, whether gender is rooted in biology or shaped by culture, still drive debates today in classrooms, courtrooms, hospitals, and homes. The “man the hunter” hypothesis has been replaced by more balanced accounts of human evolution that include women’s contributions to subsistence, technology, and social life. Mead’s insistence that gender is largely learned has informed everything from school curricula to public health programmes that try to change harmful norms around masculinity.

For students in India, where conversations about gender often run into claims of “tradition” and “nature,” this history is especially useful. It reminds us that what feels natural is often the product of long social training, and that other arrangements have always existed somewhere. The pioneers got many things wrong, but their willingness to ask whether gender could be different opened up the space in which we now ask the same question with sharper tools.

What do you think? If gender roles are largely shaped by culture, which everyday norms in your own community do you think would change if children were socialised differently from a young age? And how much of what feels “naturally male” or “naturally female” in your surroundings might actually be the legacy of stories told by earlier generations?

References

1. https://socialsci.libretexts.org/Bookshelves/Anthropology/Introductory_Anthropology/Introduction_to_Anthropology_(OpenStax)/12:_Gender_and_Sexuality/12.02:_Sex_Gender_and_Sexuality_in_Anthropology
2. https://perspectives.americananthro.org/Chapters/Gender_and_Sexuality.pdf
3. https://www.oxfordbibliographies.com/display/document/obo-9780199766567/obo-9780199766567-0009.xml
4. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sex_and_Temperament_in_Three_Primitive_Societies
5. https://www.loc.gov/exhibits/mead/field-sepik.html
6. https://www.sociologygroup.com/margaret-mead-sex-and-temperament-in-three-primitive-societies/
7. https://www.livinganthropologically.com/history-of-anthropology/
8. https://sociology.institute/sociology-of-gender/role-biology-gender-identity-social-constructs/
9. https://pressbooks.openeducationalberta.ca/anth/chapter/gender-sex-and-sexuality/