Encyclopedia of social and cultural anthropology 394
differentiating system, ascribing ideal attributes rather than determining or speaking to
individual behaviour. As the case of the berdache performing like a woman, or the Mount
Hagen woman behaving like a Big Man make clear, however, it is also important to
distinguish symbolic systems and cultural meanings from the range and diversity of
things which individual people actually do. As La Fontaine points out:
It is increasingly obvious that to link the categories of gender, especially
as they are symbolically displayed in myth and ritual, directly with the
social behaviour of living individuals creates problems of interpretation
rather than solving them.
(La Fontaine 1992:91)
She suggests that both personhood and kinship are ‘critically implicated’ in the
understanding of gender. Symbolic systems provide cultural metaphors for roles, statuses
and behaviour; they do not dictate what individual men and women actually do.
Strathern, for example, showed that in Mount Hagen individual self-interest was
associated with the female and social good with the male, but these gender concepts were
metaphors for social value, not prescriptions for -or reflections of—individual men’s and
women’s behaviour.