Gendered cordage production in cross-cultural perspective

Abstract Gender is essential to the organization of labor, especially among non-state societies. Cross-culturally, craft production is socially prescribed by gender; depending on the cultural group, either men or women dominate a particular craft’s production. This is true for pottery and textile-related crafts such as weaving and basketry. However, the production of cordage (synonymous with rope, string, twine, and yarn), the most basic unit in weaving, is typically not considered a craft product in and of itself in deference to the view that it is ‘merely’ raw material to produce other objects. Using the electronic Human Relations Area Files database, I here examine the evidence for gendered cordage production cross-culturally from ethnographic research over the last 150 years. Based on a sample of 120 cultural groups with data on plant—and animal—based cordage production, cordage production is a gendered task, with female-dominated production characterizing 57.5% of the sample. Only 12.5% of the groups surveyed document men as the producers of cordage. For 30% of the sample, when both men and women make cordage, they primarily do so using different technologies and raw materials or have different applications and end products in mind. Interpreting these data is challenging owing to uneven data quality and sample size, but despite these limitations, new questions about gendered cordage production suggest a need for renewed attention to cordage production both on its terms and concerning scholarship on gendered textile-related craft production.