Tempels’s silence on women avoided replicating biased anthropological narratives

Evidence

These silences can be attributed to the fact that Tempels was male, missionary and European, living in an age of worldwide patriarchy. From a feminist analytical point of view, perhaps the strength and value of Tempels’s Bantu Philosophy lies in that, in remaining silent about the roles of traditional Bantu women (except his reference to childbirth in passing), he did not replicate the biased narrative of most anthropological studies, which have traditionally emphasized the artificial side of Bantu women, such as child bearing and subsistence agricultural production, while ignoring the subtle but agenda setting aspects of leadership and decision making that occurred behind the scenes. — Frans Dokman, Beyond Bantu Philosophy_…, 957

Categorization

• DEEPTHINKING: A genuinely counterintuitive reframing: the very omission criticized as a gap may be a virtue, since it avoids the distorting lens of colonial anthropology. This deserves extended thought about absence-as-resistance in canon.
• QUESTION: Could the feminist-turned-apologist reading be pushed further: does silence itself constitute a kind of proto-feminist gesture in colonial texts?
• XREF: connects to: Nineteenth-century anthropologists’ gender bias rendered women’s moss uses invisible — Robin Wall Kimmerer, Gathering Moss: A Natural and Cultural…, 430