Edwin Ardener

Edwin Ardener (1927–1987)^[1] was a British social anthropologist and academic. He was also noted for his contributions to the study of history.^[2] Within anthropology, some of his most important contributions were to the study of gender, as in his 1975 work in which he described women as "muted" in social discourse.^[3]

A graduate of the LSE, Ardener took up an Oxford lectureship in social anthropology at the invitation of E. E. Evans-Pritchard.^[4] His ethnographic research concentrated on Africa, particularly on Cameroon.^[2] His history of the Bakweri of Cameroon in the nineteenth century is regarded as definitive.^[2] In his works about Cameroon, he also wrote about a form of witchcraft in Cameroon known as Nyongo.^[5]

One of his best-known contributions to anthropology came in the 1975 article " 'The Problem' revisited", in Perceiving Women, a volume edited by his wife and fellow anthropologist Shirley Ardener. In this essay he advanced the theory that women have been a muted group,^[6] comparatively unheard in social discourse, whose relative silence might also be seen as a function of the dominant group's deafness to them. He identified a problematic tendency in anthropological methodology to talk only to men and about women, thereby ignoring at least half the sample of people they were supposed to be observing.^[7] Ardener diagnosed the problem as a result of the fact that ethnographic methods were both devised and verified by male anthropologists, who did not realise what they were overlooking.^[7]