"Mankind The Story of All of Us"... Or Most of Us

As part of our recent readings leading us into the topic of Feminist Anthropology we read Sally Slocum’s “Woman the Gatherer: Male Bias in Anthropology” (1975). In this piece Slocum demonstrates an attempt to identify the many biases that have yet to be acknowledged in anthropology and anthropological research. In this attempt she uses the work, Man the Hunter, as a means to deconstruct the idea of a solely male evolution and examine the importance of the female role in evolution with her example, Woman the Gatherer.  

In reading this article I could not help but to link it to some recent research of my own. As part of my Primate Behavior and Biology class we have a final paper that is coming up and for this paper we can either choose to make it a literary review or propose a research question. While on Google, trying to find a topic on primates that strikes my interest, I come across a series of human evolution books and videos/movies. Being the aspiring biological anthropologist that I am, I take a particular interest in these things and start clicking around ending up on www.history.com looking at a series of videos documenting the collection known as “Mankind the Story of All of Us”. I found the video titled “Defining Humans” to particularly interesting as it relates to many of the points made in Slocum’s article.

Before even pressing play one could make the correlation between Slocum’s work and the title of the collection, “Mankind the Story of All of Us”. Slocum makes a point in her argument when she talks about the display of male bias in our language. As an example she brings to our attention the “all too often” use of the word “man”. Here she argues that the word “man” is no longer just a reference to sex but is used in such a fashion that it’s become synonymous with the word “male” and now the human species as a whole (Page 308). Going back to the title of the documentary, if we look at this from Slocum’s point of view it is almost a contradiction. How could a term such as “mankind” be relevant to a story about all of us, men and women? Here we see an example of the very point Slocum makes in her article, connecting male bias to language use.  

Another huge point, and possibly the focal point of the article, is the idea of what women were doing while “man” was evolving. Slocum says that history has painted the picture of the evolution of man as one in which males were out hunting, developing skills, inventing language and creating tools, while females are seen as the dependents, sitting home and having children. She argues that anthropology fails to account for the importance of the female’s role of being a gatherer and child bearer (Page 310). She goes on to say that the females role of gathering to provide food for the dependent infants and their families was a precursor to hunting of larger bodied animals, activities done by men (Page 310-311). Males are seen at the forefront of every step of evolution; hunting, learning to cooperate, inventing art and weapons. This is something I found in the video after pressing play. The video notes the milestones of “man” (humans) documenting things such as the cave paintings found at Lascaux with a male figure, the survival of the ice age with varies male figures leading the group, while the females were depicted as needing a mans assistance or with child. The video also looks to define what makes humans different than our primate ancestors, stating that we are a species that “likes to be remembered” or “a species that looks beyond survival”. In these parts the video shows men building the railroads, men creating buildings, men creating the first cars, men taking authoritative roles during the 60’s, men creating electricity, men playing with fire, men building the pyramids, and in all of these pivotal shots, not a single woman is shown. The observations I've made from this documentary on “mankind” directly correlate with the points made by Slocum in her article. Our knowledge of man and the evolution of man as a whole leaves out a vital character; the woman. In all aspects of anthropological teaching, female figures take a backseat to the more prominent male roles in society and this is the story of history, or “mankind” that we teach the world through resources, such as the documentary mentioned above. It’s important to acknowledge the importance and the contributions made by both man and woman in order to get a holistic understanding of ourselves. If we do not consider both, we are only getting part of the story. 

Link to "Mankind the Story of All of Us" :  http://www.history.com/shows/mankind-the-story-of-all-of-us/videos/mankind-the-story-of-all-of-us-defining-humans