Edwin Ardener
Edwin Ardener | |
|---|---|
| Born | September 21, 1927 England |
| Died | July 4, 1987 |
| Alma mater | London School of Economics |
| Known for | "Muted Group Theory", Ethnographic research in Cameroon, Study of Nyongo witchcraft |
| Spouse | Shirley Ardener |
| Scientific career | |
| Fields | Social Anthropology, History |
| Institutions | London School of Economics, University of Oxford |
| Doctoral advisor | E. E. Evans-Pritchard |
Edwin Ardener (1927–1987)[1] was a British social anthropologist and academic. He was also noted for his contributions to the study of history.[2] Within anthropology, some of his most important contributions were to the study of gender, as in his 1975 work in which he described women as "muted" in social discourse.[3]
A graduate of the LSE, Ardener took up an Oxford lectureship in social anthropology at the invitation of E. E. Evans-Pritchard.[4] His ethnographic research concentrated on Africa, particularly on Cameroon.[2] His history of the Bakweri of Cameroon in the nineteenth century is regarded as definitive.[2] In his works about Cameroon, he also wrote about a form of witchcraft in Cameroon known as Nyongo.[5]
One of his best-known contributions to anthropology came in the 1975 article " 'The Problem' revisited", in Perceiving Women, a volume edited by his wife and fellow anthropologist Shirley Ardener. In this essay he advanced the theory that women have been a muted group,[6] comparatively unheard in social discourse, whose relative silence might also be seen as a function of the dominant group's deafness to them. He identified a problematic tendency in anthropological methodology to talk only to men and about women, thereby ignoring at least half the sample of people they were supposed to be observing.[7] Ardener diagnosed the problem as a result of the fact that ethnographic methods were both devised and verified by male anthropologists, who did not realise what they were overlooking.[7]
References
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