Applying data from over 150 tribal societies to scales developed to measure power and dominance, Sanday offers answers to basic questions regarding male and female power. The view that emerges conforms to no particular theoretical perspective.

This widely acclaimed and meticulously documented volume illustrates, in painstaking and disturbing detail, the nature of fraternity gang rape. Drawing on interviews with both victims and fraternity members, Peggy Reeves Sanday reconstructs daily life in the fraternity, highlighting the role played by pornography, male bonding, and degrading, often grotesque, initiation and hazing rituals.

In a substantial new introduction and afterword, Sanday updates the incidences of fraternity gang rape on college campuses today, highlighting such recent cases as that of Duke University and others in the headlines. Sanday also explores the nature of hazing at sororities on campus and how Greek life in general contributes to a culture which promotes the exploitation and sexual degradation of women on campus. More broadly, Sanday examines the nature of campus life today and the possibility of creating a rape-free campus culture.

A new approach to understanding the phenomenon of ritual cannibalism through a detailed examination of selected tribal societies demonstrates that the practice is closely linked to people's orientation to the world, and helps distinguish "cultural self."

Beyond the Second Sex is an innovative work that challenges Simone de Beauvoir's notion that women are "the second" in every society. Anthropological inquiry into male-female relations has evolved around debates concerning sexual inequality. Based on original field research, the essays presented in this volume are not concerned with inequality per se. Rather, the authors pose ethnographic and analytical challenges in the assumptions and definitions that, in the past, have supported judgments about sexual equality and inequality. They move away from broad labels and blanket judgments in favor of addressing the conflict, contradictions, and ambiguities that are so often encountered in field research.

These essays maintain that, in discussing the cultural construction and representation of gender, the "culture" that is abstracted from field data cannot be separated from a complex, ongoing, and everchanging local process. From this point of view, the editors conclude, the relationship of the sexes to each other is best discussed in terms of the conflicts, tensions, and paradoxes that are at the heart of daily life in many societies.

Beyond the Second Sex will be of interest to students and scholars of anthropology and women's studies.

Contrary to the declarations of some anthropologists, matriarchies do exist. Peggy Reeves Sanday first went to West Sumatra in 1981, intrigued by reports that the matrilineal Minangkabau—one of the largest ethnic groups in Indonesia—label their society a matriarchy. Numbering some four million in West Sumatra, the Minangkabau are known in Indonesia for their literary flair, business acumen, and egalitarian, democratic relationships between men and women. Sanday uses her repeated visits to West Sumatra in the closing decades of the twentieth century as the basis for a new definition of matriarchy. From the vantage point of daily life in villages, especially one where she developed close personal ties, Sanday's narrative is centered on how the Minangkabau conceive of their world and think humans should behave, along with the practices and rituals they claim uphold their matriarchate. Women at the Center leaves the reader with a solid sense of the respect for women that permeates Minangkabau culture, and gives new life to the concept of matriarchy.

Contrary to the declarations of some anthropologists, matriarchies do exist. Peggy Reeves Sanday first went to West Sumatra in 1981, intrigued by reports that the matrilineal Minangkabau -- one of the largest ethnic groups in Indonesia -- label their society a matriarchy. Numbering some four million in West Sumatra, the Minangkabau are known in Indonesia for their literary flair, business acumen, and egalitarian, democratic relationships between men and women.

Sanday uses her repeated visits to West Sumatra in the closing decades of the twentieth century as the basis for a new definition of matriarchy. From the vantage point of daily life in villages, especially one where she developed close personal ties, Sanday's narrative is centered on how the Minangkabau conceive of their world and think humans should behave, along with the practices and rituals they claim uphold their matriarchate.

Women at the Center leaves the reader with a solid sense of the respect for women that permeates Minangkabau culture, and gives new life to the concept of matriarchy.