Gender and material culture

Despite the fact that both gender and material culture have been crucial to the articulation of anthropological debates and theory, their relationship has received relatively little anthropological attention. Only in the 1990s did there arise a renewed interest in material culture informed by theoretical concerns with issues such as gender. Before this period, scholars mainly focused on non‐Western “art” made by men, with women's creative products often being classified as “craft.” Since then, most material culture studies that are informed by gender have focused on the gendered ways that objects are produced, used, exchanged, collected, displayed in museums, and/or commodified in particular cultural and historical contexts. Few anthropological studies engage with material culture from the perspective of a theoretical concern with gender.