Abstract
archaeological theory. The basis of these critiques is that sexual difference is not a simple objectively existing fact but is itself the result of social categorization and representation. Medical practitioners, for instance, are taught to prioritize genotypic, endocrine, or phenotypic criteria in “identifying” sex at different ages and to categorize some genotypes and phenotypes as normal and others as aberrant. As Sofaer argues, while these critiques theoretically acknowledge the “material basis” of the body, they focus instead on the “materiality” of the body (e.g., on how a particular culture constructs its understanding of what the body is as a physical object). To Sofaer, this tends to make the actual body vanish in an infinitely regressing chain of representation. As she argues, biological difference is understood through social representations, but that does not mean it is infinitely malleable and can be reduced to those representations. As a solution to a long-standing theoretical problem, Sofaer’s path will not please all parties in archaeology and anthropology, but it may prove much more useful than the assumption that all cultures construct their understanding of sexual difference in a way entirely unconstrained by the body’s material basis. As she notes, in discussing osteoarchaeological methods for sexing skeletons, it is possible to acknowledge that the particular notion of sex is a social construct “without suggesting that the observable differences between men and women are some sort of irrelevant mirage . . . sex has a material reality; it is not simply a representation” (p. 96). The two final chapters of The Body as Material Culture apply this perspective to the study of sex and age. For each topic, Sofaer discusses how the concept has been constructed through anthropological and archaeological methodologies and reviews skeletal evidence for the social plasticity and development of the body, showing clearly how skeletons come to be socially gendered and to develop in a social biography. While these chapters review a broad range of concepts and interpretations, it is clear that they are also manifestos for a field still in its infancy in which much of the seminar work remains to be done. Indeed, the principal limitation of The Body as Material Culture is simply that this elegant and lucid argument, which should be read by all osteoarchaeologists with ambitions to escape from the ghetto of the specialist report in the appendix, really cries out for one more chapter. It would be wonderfully supplemented by a really thorough case study that takes members of a single community—one thinks of Rose’s Cedar Grove (Arkansas) ex-slaves or Molleson and Cox’s Spitalfields weavers—and explores their social world through their bodies. Perhaps such a chapter will be found in the next edition. Correcting the Record
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