On October 20, 1991, a dry, hot day with unusual, turbulent winds, a spark from a fire of the previous day that the tranquil residents of Oakland and Berkeley, California were totally unaware of, reignited. From that spark developed a ferocious firestorm that swept down from the hills, leaped a multilane freeway, and, although the fire burned for two more days, within essentially four hours destroyed 3,356 homes and 456 apartments.
The Oakland Firestorm was the largest urban fire that the United States has ever witnessed. In the aftermath the area devastated, block after block, acre after acre, once filled with homes, yards, streets and avenues, looked like Dresden after the bombing, that razed, but with less debris. With temperatures of…show more content… Six thousand people were left homeless. Ninety-five percent of them lost virtually every possession they owned, for the fire had moved faster than sixty miles per hour. Most people received no warning and got no evacuation order. Those who did had little time and rarely the presence of mind to gather any belongings.
I am one of the survivors. In the fire I lost my home and all my possessions. I lost my clothing, furniture, photographs, heirlooms, art work, beloved objects, one car and two pets. Since my office was in my home, I also lost twenty-five years of anthropological research, seven manuscripts not yet to publishers, all my other writings, ideas, projects in development, the slides and photos of travels, lectures and course notes, and my entire…show more content… It is based on the distinction between male and female. We eschew borrowing symbols from our environment and grouping people according to totems of, say, bear, eagle, and wolf. We superficially note, but little heed, more literary categories such as occupation, caste, or family name to delineate people’s place and define their actions (Levi-Strauss 1964). Rather, our core organizational principle, the one that says who’s who and what they should do, operates according to sex (Hoffman 1973, 1976, 1997). The employment of gender to categorize and circumscribe people arises from sensory perception. The fact of two sexes is a phenomenon that exists in nature, a phenomenon that can be heard, touched, and most importantly seen. It is then lifted from sensory perception, from its actual physicality, and used in an abstract or “cultural” way to sort all manner of matter that are not connected and not gendered in actuality at all. Nature does not declare who wears a shirt and who a skirt, who chops wood and who cooks, who is a C.E.O. and who an R.N. But, because gender as the basis for defining division derives from nature, and because the distinction is so ever close at hand, so readily visible, it seems constantly justifiable and results in a very tenacious pattern. The use of gender as a device to define grouping and declare action is long fixed and very
