Carol Ember – Encyclopedia of Sex and Gender Men and Women in the World Cultures

The central aim of this encyclopedia is to give the reader a comparative perspective on issues involving conceptions of gender, gender differences, gender roles, relationships between the genders, and sexuality. We do this in two ways. First, we have invited scholars to write comparative overviews about what may be universal, what is variable, and to discuss theory and research that might explain those patterns. Second, each of 82 specific cultural articles provides a “portrait” of what it is like for boys and girls to grow up and become men and women in that society. Some societies have other gender classes and where these occur, or where boys and girls can cross into other roles, these are discussed.

Our portraits also discuss important male-female relationships and a culture’s sexual attitudes and practices. We deliberately chose to include cultures from the widest possible spectrums–from egalitarian to stratified, from foragers to intensive agriculturalists, from those with kin groups structured around males to those structured around females, from those where the status of women and men is relatively equal to those where status is mostly unequal. We also have cultures from every major geographical region. The combination of topical overviews and varying cultural portraits is what makes this encyclopedia unique.

About Author:

CAROL R. EMBER is President of the Human Relations Area Files at Yale University. Previously she served as Executive Director from 1996 to 2009. She is also the editor of the journal Cross-Cultural Research, the President-Elect of the Society for Anthropological Sciences, and she currently serves on the Board of the Evolutionary Anthropology Society. She has served as President of the Society for Cross-Cultural Research and co-directed the Summer Institutes for Comparative Anthropological Research, which were supported by the National Science Foundation. Most of her research career has been devoted to cross-cultural research on variation in marriage, family, kin groups, gender roles, predictors of war and other forms of violence. She is interested in research that integrates the fields of anthropology as well as anthropology with other disciplines. She is the first author (with Melvin Ember) of Cultural Anthropology, now in its 13th edition and Anthropology (with Melvin Ember and Peter N. Peregrine), now in its 13th edition. She and Melvin Ember also wrote a primer on how to do cross-cultural research (Cross-Cultural Research Methods), now in its 2nd edition.

Acheivements / Contributions :

Carol has done cross-cultural study on marriage, family, war and peace, and tumble groups, all with her now husband Melvin Ember whom she married in 1970.
She taught at Hunter College in New York from 1970 to 1996, and has served as President of the Society of Cross-Cultural study.
Carol is at present Director of the Summer Institutes in Comparative Anthropological Research, and is also Executive Director at the Human Relations Area Files at Yale University.

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