All In The Mind
January 17, 2005 top

Here is an interesting transcript from an Australian Broadcasting Corporation show about vision, perception and how our brain constructs the visual world we live in.

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Added A Wind Named Amnesia to the 'movies that make you think' page.

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I have added a new article to the science section: Interrupting Natural Selection.

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An interesting article here on a cultural practice in Albania where some females join the male gender and in some sense become men while remaining biologically female. They take on not only masculine dress and habits, but are legally treated much like biological males - they can inherit property in the patrilineal society, for example.

Granted, some of the practices of the culture may be problematic to us (marriages are arranged, women are treated like property), but it is interesting nonetheless to see the ways in which gender can be perceived differently in another culture.

Perhaps to some extent it is us imposing our own modern Western views - gender as a social construct - on what we see in these other cultures. That is one danger in any form of anthropology. How to study and learn about another culture when your own concepts already prime you to interpret certain data in one way rather than another?

But all the same, it is hard to deny that there is something significant in this cultural practice. Perhaps, looking at it from the perspective of a Westerner, we could say that these Albanians actually have three genders, since the "sworn virgins" are still in some ways distinct from biological males of the masculine gender (they must remain unmarried, e.g.). Or are they treated similar enough to say that there are two genders, but that they do not map directly onto biological sex?

Either way, it goes against the 'traditional' conception of sex = gender and seems to show that sex not being the same as gender is not completely just an invention of Western society.

I wonder what the future of gender and sex will look like. As technology like gene therapy, bioengineering and nanotech propel us into a drastically changed future, will we humans move on from the simple two-sex scheme we've been stuck with for a long time? Technology can change sex, but if gender is as much a social thing as is now suspected, technology may not change that directly; but certainly changes to the sexes or additional sexes being added would eventually lead to social changes that might cause the rise of new genders.

Or, if we can fully separate sex and gender, we may not need new sexes; or we may end up with a few different sexes (or just one) but a multitude of genders. At that point, what is gender and how is it different from other social structures like a caste system where people of certain castes are socially expected to act certain ways and treat each other in certain ways?

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