Week 11 — Who Does Which Job? Gender, Generation, and Who Moves — Traditional alternative (no AI)

Instructors: publish this instead of the adaptive version if you prefer, and unpublish or delete the adaptive one.

Assignment 10 of the term — work four short problems from the market's family stall and the kinship set, read them as an anthropologist, and explain gender and the division of labor to someone who has them mixed up.

This week you met sex, gender, and sexuality as three separate ideas, gender roles as culturally organized, the gendered division of labor and the debate over how often women hunted, documented gender diversity in communities' own terms, Mead's 1935 study and its critics, and the question of who moves at marriage. In this assignment you work four short problems, interpret each one, and explain this week's ideas to someone who has them mixed up. This week's lecture tutorial, quiz, discussion, and Ethnography Workshop practise the same ideas from other angles. It builds on Week 9's kinship set and its lesson that matrilineal is not matriarchal, on Week 10's residence rules, and on Week 2's idea that culture is learned, shared but never uniform, and changing.

The task

The running fieldwork site is an illustrative, unnamed weekly neighborhood farmers' market of 24 stalls. The kinship set is a three-generation diagram centred on ego, constructed for this course and describing no real family. Kin-type strings read outward from ego, so FZH is father's sister's husband. From the market and the set:

• at the family-run stall, the founding grower, a woman in her seventies, directs the stall; her son drives the truck and restocks, his wife runs the card reader, and her daughter keeps the books; her granddaughter, the son's daughter, a teenager, restocks and weighs produce, and her grandson, the daughter's son, a college student, handles online orders;
• the founding grower's late husband and the daughter's husband do no stall work;
• field-note entry 6, 8:50 a.m., records an older woman directing a man and a teenager who restock the bins while a younger woman runs the card reader;
• in the parents' generation of the kinship set, ego's father F, his brother FB and sister FZ, and ego's mother M, her brother MB and sister MZ, are each married (FBW, FZH, MBW, MZH, and F and M to each other), so the generation holds 10 positions.

A friend sees your notes and says, "Men's and women's jobs are set by biology, and the man-the-hunter model proves it for every society." Your job is to answer the way an anthropologist would, starting from a few plain numbers.

Work these four problems, showing your arithmetic:

1. At the running fieldwork site, an illustrative farmers' market, the family-run stall has 1 working role in the first generation, 3 in the second generation, and 2 in the third generation. How many working roles does the stall have?
2. The illustrative family-run stall's family has 8 roles across three generations, and 2 of them, the founding grower's late husband and the daughter's husband, do no stall work. How many of the family's roles do stall work?
3. At the illustrative family-run stall, 3 of the 6 working roles sit in the second generation. What percent of the working roles sit in the second generation?
4. In the illustrative kinship set, the parents' generation holds 10 positions, and every position belongs to a married couple of 2 people. Under patrilocal residence the wife moves in every couple. How many women move?

Beside each answer, add one brief interpretation:

• Problem 1: describe the six working roles by role and by generation, never by name, and explain why counting who does each job is an observation while any rule about why is an interpretation the field notes cannot yet settle.
• Problem 2: count the working roles by gender, 4 women and 2 men, naming each role, and explain why that uneven split does not by itself prove a gender rule, using the restocking job and the fact that one family is one case.
• Problem 3: read generation as a second way the stall divides its work, naming who directs and what the middle generation runs, and keep sex and gender apart by calling the split a gender arrangement the family organizes, not something set by the body.
• Problem 4: state who moves under patrilocal and under matrilocal residence, and explain with the Haudenosaunee or the Trobriand case why matrilineal descent is not rule by women.

Explain it to a non-expert

Your friend thinks men's and women's jobs are set by biology and that the man-the-hunter model proves it for every society. Write a 3–5 sentence message that keeps sex (the body's traits) apart from gender (the roles a culture builds around sex); explains that the classic foraging model has many documented exceptions and that how often women hunted is still debated, with no verdict; and names one limit, such as that the stall is one illustrative family. Explain any technical term in everyday words. More than one good answer is possible.

For a different, ungraded example, imagine a teammate who says that "the newest player always carries the team's equipment because that is how teams work." Model answer: "That is a custom our team learned, not a law of nature. Other teams rotate the job, or give it to whoever lives closest to the field, and our own team could change the rule at the next meeting. Calling it a custom means people taught it and people can rewrite it. One caveat: one team's habit does not tell you how every team handles its gear."

Use that pattern for your friend, with your own wording and evidence.

Show your arithmetic. A reader should be able to reproduce every number you report from the figures in the problems without guessing which figures or steps you used.

Deliverables

Submit a single report containing:

• the four answers, each with the arithmetic shown and the brief interpretation the task names for that problem;
• your message to the friend, keeping sex and gender apart, explaining the classic foraging model as a model with exceptions and the hunting debate as open, and naming one limit; and
• a one-line restatement of the figures you used, so your answers are reproducible.

Keep it to roughly one page. Clear and correct beats long.

Choose how you show it. Present your report as written text, or as a recorded audio or video explanation of about three minutes with a transcript, or as a labelled chart of the stall's roles described in words with a short explanation. Every form is graded by the same scoring criteria. Submit in any accessible file type or as a link; a recorded response may be submitted as audio or video with a transcript, or as text.

How you'll be graded

The full analytic rubric is attached to this assignment in Canvas.

Academic integrity and AI use

This version is designed to be completed without AI: do the computations, the interpretations, and the writing yourself, without a chatbot or other AI tool. You may use a calculator or a spreadsheet for the arithmetic. Describe the stall and the kinship set only as the course describes them, name people only by role, and do not borrow a custom or a detail about any real people from another source without citing it. Submitting AI-generated work as your own, or copying another student's work, is an integrity violation under the course policy.

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