Paper short abstract:

During the last decade, anthropology has challenged the traditional conceptual binary sets used by many gender researchers and most development practitioners. This paper suggest the hypothesis that beyond misunderstandings and bias, gender concepts have lost their analytical role to become tools, that with a strong ideological background, are weapons of use in the political game. As a consequence, new challenges to these concepts are at risk of being denied or neglected in the technical and institutional agendas for a long period of time.

Paper long abstract:

During the 80s and 90s, Feminist Studies from the social sciences, in their attempt to denaturalize inequality, found a favorable ideological context for the consolidation of the different analytical categories they developed to understand power inequalities. Currently, some divisions like sex/gender, equity/equality, public/private, political/domestic, productive/reproductive have become unquestionable sets of concepts widely used by institutions and social actors, including many researchers and most practitioners from the development sector and policy making. Nowadays, new ethnographic evidence from different places of the world on the human-nature relatedness point to the Eurocentric rootedness of these binary sets, while the critical apparatus of the anthropological discipline is challenging their validity. These binary sets appear now as concepts by which western cosmologies understand and explain social and gender hierarchies and frontiers.

Anthropology is nowadays calling for a revision of these concepts, but such a revision, which currently remains in the academic sphere, has not yet been incorporated into the development sector or even into gender analysis as a sub discipline. This paper addresses some of the obstacles of such transference, by which new epistemological positions are moved from the academic realm to the implementation of development initiatives and to the discourse of most institutions. The paper points out how the old conceptual sets have become part of the strategies of most institutions, and how questioning them the own institutions would have to revise their institutional discourses. In sum, we suggest that once the institutions appropriate the concepts they are no longer analytical tools, but ideological weapons in nature ready to be used in the political arena.