Research Paper on:
Arapesh Society and Gender

Unformatted Sample Text from the Research Paper:
thirty New Guinea peoples listed in the Ethnographic Atlas and are perhaps the better known to Western audiences than almost any other Melanesian people (Roscoe, 1994). The following examination of  the Arapesh people will concentrate on their conception of gender. However, before exploring how the Arapesh see male and female societal roles, it is clarifying to define precisely what is  meant by "gender" and how this differs from "sex." Although "sex" and "gender" are often used interchangeably in the media, these terms of two distinctly different meanings. "Sex" refers  to biological functions. Sex dictates that only men can be fathers; only women can give birth. "Gender" refers to the connotations that each culture attaches to the sexes, i.e. what  a particular culture regards as "proper" behavior for men and women. Each culture, no matter its degree of sophistication, tends to look on its own cultural gender roles as  "natural" or inherent. However, if this were the case, it would be logical to expect gender roles to be uniform throughout the globe and this is not the  case. Gender roles differ in their construction from culture to culture (Holme, 1972). As this suggests, while biological roles are preset, the cultural evidence argues that gender is completely a  social construction. For example, in the US, it is generally believed that women are more emotional then men. The societal concept of the female gender assigns girls and women  this attribute. However, in Iran, it is the men who are considered to be "naturally" more emotionally. Iran is a patriarchal country-men are definitely the dominant gender-yet in this culture  women are considered to be the coldly practical sex, while emotionality is considered to be a trait of the masculine gender (Holme, 1972). The people of this culture inevitably live