Q. Explain Leela Dube’s concept of ‘Seed and Earth’. (2022)

Q. Explain Leela Dube’s concept of ‘Seed and Earth’. (2022)

Leela Dube’s work was centered on gender and kinship and was highlighted by the explicit feminist perspective. Her work was pioneering as she combined the insights of anthropology with women’s studies. She used the ‘comparative method’ of anthropology to bring in insights of different cultures to explain the position of women.

In her article “On the Construction of Gender: Hindu girls in Patrilineal India” (1988), Dube explains that the process of forming a gendered identity begins much prior to the birth of a child:

• It is a part of the collective cultural consciousness of a particular group or society
• This process is explained in her statement that ‘Gender is a social construct and sex is a biological phenomenon’
• It is a process of gender socialization, which is not just a consequence of the belief system, culture and ritual practices, but also determines the structural needs of production relations of a society’s economy
• With the progression of society, there is constant restructuring of these cultural practices

• She analyzes this largely used metaphor of the role of the man and the woman in reproduction
• The general saying is that man provides the seed for sowing and the woman is the earth/soil in which the seed is sown
• The implicit idea of this saying is that the nature of the crop (off-spring/child) depends largely on the seed which is the most important contribution while the earth provides only nutrition to the seed
• Therefore, the child owes his/her identity to his father, whereas the mother has no material rights but only moral rights to the child
• This idiom is used by Dube to explore the ‘Materiality of patrilineal kinship’ that exists in the country since a paternal identity is most important in securing group placement and rights to resources (like inheritance)
• The unequal social arrangement is perceived as the arrangement of nature which gives different roles to men and women in procreation
• She further explains how gender roles are lived out in terms of family structures and kinship which makes rules about recruitment, marital residence and rearrangement of the family
• These in turn are impacted by the institution of caste