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]
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,[5] 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.[6] 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.[6]