Gender in Ancient Cyprus: Narratives of Social Change on a Mediterranean Island.

AuthorKnapp, A. Bernard
PositionBook Review

Gender in Ancient Cyprus: Narratives of Social Change on a Mediterranean Island. By DIANE BOLGER. Walnut Creek, Cal.: ALTAMIRA PRESS, 2003. Pp. xvii + 268, illus. $34.95 (paper).

Recent attempts to engender Cypriot archaeology have not always engaged successfully with current feminist theory or with the now immense corpus of published research on gender, the body, and sexuality. Diane Bolger's new monograph represents a pioneering attempt to highlight the role of women and men in reconstructing the Cypriot past. She roams widely and delves deeply into gendered relations and gendered identities on prehistoric Cyprus, tackling such issues as domestic space, the life-cycle, labor and technology, ritual performance, social agency, and sexual ambiguity. Bolger is more confident when treating archaeological data that lie within her own realm of expertise (the earlier prehistory of Cyprus, especially the Chalcolithic periods), but she treats a span of nearly eight thousand years with a fluency and competence that instill admiration and warrant recognition. She offers up-to-date, succinct overviews of the current literature--archaeological and otherwise--on gender, feminist theory, agency (chapter 3), the life-cycle (chapter 4), childhood and adolescence (chapter 5), and mortuary ritual and practices (chapter 6). Chapter 8--"Who Tells the Story?"--reveals how the published literature in Cypriot archaeology (as in archaeologies the world round) has been and continues to be dominated by men, and is written from an androcentric perspective, one in which women and children have counted for little, and where the "big issues"--social complexity, rise of the state, production and exchange, ritual and ideology--are still tackled by men, and are concerned primarily with men alone, whether implicitly (ungendered "elites") or explicitly (farmers, warriors, kings, priests).

Bolger's ambitious and wide-ranging enterprise, however, inevitably results in some contradictions and errors of fact. Moreover, and not at all atypically in gender-based research that seeks to expose earlier, androcentric biases, she has adopted an overly critical approach to the work of nearly all other archaeologists (with the unwarranted exception of her colleagues at the University of Edinburgh) who have worked on Cyprus. She begins (pp. 1-9), for example, by criticizing Hector Catling's use of the passive voice. James Stewart's retrodiction of the present onto the past, Einar Gjerstad's essentialist (binary) view of men/women, Bernard Knapp's unilinear, economic view of social development and change, Walther Fasnacht's stereotyped division of labor, and Sturt Manning's views on emergent (ungendered) elites as the prime forces of social change.

Those of us still living are all guilty (so too are many others that Bolger fails to cite). Those who are dead would (probably) not be writing today the way they did fifty years ago. And those who are still writing have engaged with theoretical issues such as agency and social identity, ritual and ideology, the social life of things, and many more, long before Bolger herself adopted such approaches. Over the past decade, for instance, both Manning and I have written on issues of gender, feminist theory, and masculinist approaches, in works that Bolger castigates, misunderstands, or overlooks. Granted that previous work must be critiqued and its shortcomings laid bare, it is still unfortunate that Bolger feels the need to criticize repeatedly those who would support her views most strongly.

Readers of this journal may wonder how Bolger views the place and role of Cyprus within the ancient Near East. Well, not very clearly. For the most part, she seems to regard Cyprus as part of the ancient Near Eastern cultural sphere (e.g., pp. xv, 8, 37, 65, 92...

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