Jane Collier

Jane Collier
Born	Charleston, South Carolina, U.S.
💼 Occupation
Title	Professor Emeritus of Anthropology

Jane Fishburne Collier is an American cultural anthropologist best known for her ethnographic work in Chiapas, Mexico, and Spain, and for her contributions to feminist and legal anthropology. She is a Professor Emeritus of Anthropology at Stanford University.

Biography

Collier was born in Charleston, South Carolina. Her father was in the foreign service, and her mother was actively involved in the Foreign Service magazine, and other ways to strengthen Foreign Service communities. She lived in five countries, including Colombia and Belgium, during her childhood, learning French and Spanish. Collier received her Bachelor of Arts and Master of Arts degrees at Harvard University, where she studied with Evon Z. Vogt, who was an important mentor. She joined the Harvard Chiapas Project in, Mexico, where she began doing research on Zincantecoan women’s experiences in households. She earned her PhD in 1970 at Tulane University. In 1972, she became assistant professor at Stanford University. She and Michelle Rosaldo were the first women to hold tenure-track positions in that department.

Collier has written or edited numerous important works in legal anthropology and the anthropology of women and gender relations and co-founded the Program in Feminist Studies at Stanford University. Over the course of her career, she received grants from the National Science Foundation, the Wenner-Gren Foundation, and was a fellow at Stanford’s Humanities Center and a Fellow of the Bunting Institute at Radcliffe College. Alongside her research, Collier trained a host of students who went on to become prominent in the field, including Evelyn Blackwood, Susan Coutin, Saba Mahmood, Bill Maurer, Heather Paxson, Anu Sharma, Katherine Verdery.

Work

Legal processes and legal change

As part of the Harvard Chiapas Project, Collier focused on social stratification and dispute handling among Tzotzil communities in Zinacantan, Mexico. She showed how local elites managing conflicts sought to maintain social relationships while preserving hierarchy. Elites’ roles shifted, however, as the community became more incorporated into Mexican state development programs and as external legal options became available. Her focus on dispute handling, rather than national legislation, became important in legal anthropology and the emerging law and society movement as scholars shifted away from “law on the books” to “law in action.”

Gender, politics, and social complexity

In collaboration with Michelle Rosaldo, Collier challenged traditional views on gender roles in so-called simpler societies. Their research into hunter-gatherer and horticulturalist groups suggested that:

• Male Independence: Disputes involving women were often proxies for a man's ability to assert autonomy and defend his claims against other men.
• Labor and Marriage: In these societies, marriage was an "earned" status through bride-service, making the physical defense of a spouse a matter of maintaining one's social standing.
• Institutionalization of Conflict: Collier observed that as societies increased in complexity, shifting from labor-based marriage to the exchange of material valuables, physical confrontation was replaced by negotiated settlements and formal moots overseen by leaders.

This line of inquiry culminated in her 1988 work, Marriage and Inequality in Classless Societies, which argued that the methods used to validate marriages shape nearly every facet of social belief and interaction. There, Collier developed three ideal-typic models of societies to explain gender, inequality and social hierarchy in what she called bride service, equal bride wealth, and unequal bridewealth societies. Initially she had drawn from data from classical ethnographies of Native North America but broadened the focus to include many more ethnographic sources. Her argument relied on the observation that the existing distribution of rewards in societies determines the nature of the values people hold, after the British social theorist Ralf Dahrendorf. In other words, it is not that “values organize inequality,” but that the behaviors, attitudes, and material possessions that people in power already exhibit determine what is valued and what those not in power aspire to. This perspective also derives from her reading of Bourdieu, and the influence on her thinking by the feminist Bridgit O’Laughlin’s reinterpretation of Marxist assumptions about biological and social reproduction. Later, she would develop a model for chiefdoms, and societies organized according to social contract doctrine and capitalist relations.

Feminist anthropology and the "biological" fallacy

Joining the Stanford faculty in the 1970s, Collier became a central figure in the emergence of feminist anthropology. She was instrumental in dismantling the "public/private" and "political/kinship" binaries that had previously dominated the field.

Collier’s work underwent a significant theoretical shift regarding biological determinism. Initially, like many of her peers, she believed female subordination was a reflection of reproductive biology. However, she eventually argued that gender is a cultural construct used to rationalize and reproduce inequality.

"Gender conceptions must be seen as aspects of cultural systems through which people understand, manipulate, rationalize, resist and reproduce relations of inequality within complex social wholes." — (Collier 1997)

Collier developed a specialized critique of the perceived "handicaps" that supposedly limit women’s access to social authority and prestige. She posited that these perceived limitations are not rooted in actual ability but are instead analogous to the "failings" used to explain why certain men do not achieve high status. Her analysis of hunter-gatherer societies serves as a primary example of this phenomenon:

• The Myth of the Great Hunter: Traditional views suggest that men attain wives through their prowess in hunting. However, Collier proposed a reversal of this logic, suggesting that men engaged in hunting to demonstrate the physical strength necessary to protect the wives they already possessed from rivals.
• Redefining the "Problem" of Gendered Labor: While ethnographic data often showed women killing game, they were socially barred from being classified as "hunters." Collier argued that the true barrier for women was not a lack of skill, but rather an inability to participate in the social system of claiming and defending wives, which served as the primary metric for prestige.

By "reversing the causal arrow," Collier’s framework suggests that the behaviors and capacities celebrated as the causes of male success are actually the products of pre-existing social advantages. This perspective shifts the focus from biological differences to the social processes that dictate which traits are deemed valuable for achieving status.

Comparative studies: rural Spain

Collier’s ethnographic work in rural Spain between the 1960s and 1980s provided a longitudinal look at shifting inequalities:

• The 1960s (Agrarian/Inheritance Focus): Social status was tied to land. Consequently, cultural anxiety centered on female chastity to ensure legitimate lines of inheritance.
• The 1980s (Wage Labor Focus): As the economy shifted to paid employment, inequality was redefined through the lens of the "selfless" mother versus the "competitive" earner, effectively dismissing women as lacking ambition.

Selected publications

Books

• 1973 Law and Social Change in Zinacantan. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
• 1987 Gender and Kinship: Essays Toward a Unified Analysis. Stanford CA: Stanford University Press. (Edited with Sylvia J. Yanagisako).
• Collier, Jane Fishburne (1988). Marriage and Inequality in Classless Societies. Stanford, Calif: Stanford University Press. ISBN 978-0-8047-1365-8. Search this book on
• 1989 History and Power in the Study of Law. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. (Edited with June Starr).
• From Duty to Desire: Remaking Families in a Spanish Village. Princeton studies in culture/power/history. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. 1997. ISBN 978-0-691-01664-1. Search this book on

Articles

• Collier, Jane F. (May 1979). "Stratification and dispute handling in two highland Chiapas communities". American Ethnologist. 6 (2): 305–328. doi:10.1525/ae.1979.6.2.02a00050. ISSN 0094-0496.
• Collier, Jane F. (February 1986). "from Mary to modern woman: the material basis of Marianismo and its transformation in a Spanish village". American Ethnologist. 13 (1): 100–107. doi:10.1525/ae.1986.13.1.02a00060.
• Collier, Jane F. (1999). "Models of Indigenous Justice in Chiapas, Mexico: A Comparison of State and Zinacanteco Visions". Political and Legal Anthropology Review. 22 (1): 94–100. ISSN 1081-6976.

Awards

• 2002 Harry J. Kalven, Jr. Prize, Law and Society Association
• 1984-85 Stanford Humanities Center Fellowship
• 1988-89 Fellow at the Mary Ingraham Bunting Institute of Radcliffe College.

External links

• Oral History Interview with Jane Collier

This article "Jane Collier (anthropologist)" is from Wikipedia. The list of its authors can be seen in its historical and/or the page Edithistory:Jane Collier (anthropologist). Articles copied from Draft Namespace on Wikipedia could be seen on the Draft Namespace of Wikipedia and not main one.

---