CULTURAL MODELS OF GENDER IN SRI LANKA AND THE UNITED STATES

Abstract

Sri Lankan cultural models of gender are compared with those in the United States. Nineteen questions were given to samples of Sinhala Buddhists, Sri Lankan Muslims, and U.S. residents. Most participants were interviewed about their answers. Consensus analysis was used to determine if there were distinctive cultural boundaries between Muslim, Sinhalese, and U.S. samples. This determined that Muslim and Sinhalese informants shared a more or less consistent cultural view of gender that was significantly different from that of the U.S. informants. Within the Sri Lankan sample, the greatest differences were between Sinhalese and Muslim females. The Sri Lankan sample engendered or dichotomized traits as specifically male or female much more than did the U.S. sample. In general, the Sri Lankan sample associated positive traits with males and negative traits with females. The results show that the Sri Lankan cultural model of gender is much more shaped by patriarchal precepts and practices than the U.S. model of gender. (Gender, cultural model, patriarchy, consensus analysis, Sri Lanka, United States) ********** This article describes and compares Sri Lankan and U.S. cultural models of gender. It seeks to shed light on two interrelated questions: 1) What do cultural models of gender look like? and 2) Are these models culturally distinct; that is, with a unique core, but with larger areas of overlap? The Sri Lanka data for this research came from de Munck's fieldwork there from June 1979 to February 1982. Almost all of that time was spent in the village of Kutali, located in the south-central Moneragala District. The comparison of Sri Lanka and the United States is opportunistic, taking advantage of de Munck's more than three years of research in Sri Lanka and the opportunity to apply the same (or very similar) data-collection methods in the United States. It is also an interesting and useful comparison as it treats three religious-ethnic groups: Buddhists, Muslims, and Judeo-Christians, as well as sample populations from Third World and First World cultures. It may be assumed that whatever core similarities exist between these respective populations are potentially cultural universals and unique traits may be limited to the respective cultures or similar cultures. The concern here is with understanding the pattern of thought-feeling complexes of members of the respective cultures and to consider if these complexes are shared across cultural boundaries. The theoretical orientation for this research is based on recent advances in cognitive anthropology and the cognitive sciences. It employs a version of Brumann's (1999:S1) definition of culture as "designating the clusters of common concepts, emotions, and practices that arise when people interact regularly," without specific concern for the "practices that arise" and extending the notion of interacting regularly to include indirect interactions through the mass media and participation in the same social organizations and institutions. This study involves three different fields of interaction. At the theoretical level it draws on cognitive anthropology, methodologically it draws on cross-cultural research, and ethnographically the focus is on gender as conceptualized by Sri Lankans and people of the United States. These three fields are briefly discussed before the data-analysis section. CULTURAL MODELS A cultural model is an intersubjectively shared cognitive apparatus or schema that members of a culture draw on to orient themselves to themselves and to others, ad which they use to communicate. A cultural model is not the same as the model of a culture or of a cultural practice. There may be more than one cultural model for a specific cultural practice. For example, the two cultural models of marriage--for love and to raise a family--presume very different courtship phases and strategies, and rely on different criteria for selecting a spouse. …