Paper short abstract:

The paper discusses the transfer of gender knowledges within the hunter-gatherers' studies, a multidisciplinary field of research composed of feminists, anthropologists, ethnographers, historians, and archaeologists.

Paper long abstract:

The present paper explores the transfer of gender knowledges within the hunter-gatherers' studies, a multidisciplinary field of research composed of feminists, anthropologists, ethnographers, historians, and archaeologists. A brief history of the HG field of research shows that the studies on foragers are a fundamental part of the narratives we (scholars) have been constructing of humanity (Sterling 2014), but which has also long been ignoring women´s contribution and portraying them as passive players (Watson and Kennedy 1991, Bell 1994). For this reason including a feminist approach has been (and remains) essential, especially since the gender studies are rapidly growing in relation to the development of the post-colonial/subaltern/queer studies, and the feminist movements. Drawing on an exhaustive corpus of scientific articles on HG and gender-related issues, we first question the necessity to delimit the HG field of knowledge. As a Kuhnian approach would formulate it, how can we define a field of research without ignoring its paradigm shifts? Is a strict delimitation meaningful? Second, the present paper investigates how women, sex, and gender have been concretely integrated into hunter-gatherers studies. How has the notion of gender been defined and precisely employed? We argue that understanding the impact of the gender studies cannot be achieved without addressing the multiple forms of resistance to the integration of feminist critical knowledges today (Salminen-Karlsson 2011, van den Brink 2015, Thaler and Dahmen 2017).