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Featured Researcher: Dr. Peggy Sanday, Consulting Curator  Dr. Peggy Sanday,
Consulting Curator in the Asian section of the Museum and the R. Jean Brownlee
Endowed Term Professor of Anthropology, enjoys being with people. She thrives
on working to understand difference by incorporating it into her consciousness.
An anthropologist with a Ph.D. from the University of Pittsburgh and a seasoned
traveler, she confesses that she feels bicultural wherever she goes, especially
to her two main locations of recent research: the Minangkabau area of West
Sumatra, Indonesia and Australia's Great Sandy Desert.In Sumatra her goal for the past 20 years has been to study and document the matriarchal society of the Minangkabau people. Following publication of her 1981 book, Female Power and Male Dominance, which addressed cross-cultural gender differences in 156 societies, she decided to return to the field and live among the Minangkabau to discern their definition of matriarchy. What she discovered is contained in her new book Women at the Center: Life in a Modern Matriarchy (2002). Her findings, she believes, call for a change in the Western definition of matriarchy. "As one of the first anthropologists to open the field of the anthropology of women, I wrote one of the first articles on the subject of female power in 1972," Sanday explained. "Up to that time anthropologists had virtually excluded the study of women from their ethnographies and theories, either not including women at all or defining their status by reference to a male-defined theory of power." Sanday looks to her Irish and rural roots for her fascination with male and female equality. During her youth she traversed between urban and rural settings, spending summers on West Virginia farms and going to school in Washington, D.C. She observed farm women whose ancestors had migrated from Wales on her father's side and the working class life of her mother's Dutch-Irish family in the city. This background grounded her in a working class tradition of female power and a rural, egalitarian Welsh tradition. This summer the Philadelphia resident returned to the West Sumatran village where she resided to present Women at the Center: Life in a Modern Matriarchy to the people who helped her over the years. She filmed the presentation of the book and asked lots of questions about changes since she left in l999. Sanday believes that ethnography must be an on-going, lifetime venture because of the change over time that takes place due to political events. She plans to write a book about the changes she has observed from 1981 to 2002 for an Indonesian audience. The mother of two grown children, Dr. Sanday spends time these days traveling with her writer husband to an Australian aboriginal community to study their relationship to and representation of the Wolfe Creek Crater, a meteorite crater on their traditional land. She feels a special tie with the crater and the local aboriginal community because her father is credited with "discovering" the crater in 1947. Recently, when she asked aboriginals about the meaning of the crater in their life, they chose to respond by painting stories of the crater. She filmed the construction of the paintings and the telling of the stories. This work will be exhibited at the Museum in 2004. Photo: Peggy Sanday with her Minangkabau namesake, Peggi Sandi. |
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