Varenne: notes on Rosaldo and Lamphere (1974)

Lamphere, Louise and Helena Ragone and Patricia Zavella, eds.

The volume edited by Lamphere is one of the earliest in a genre that has flourished since it was first published in 1974. One sign of this is that it remains firmly grounded in the ethnographic record. The papers detail how exactly women reveal themselves to be political actors, strategizing their lives within particular fields.

The paper by Carol Hoffer on "Madam Yoko" of the Kpa Mende confederation in Sierra Leone (West Africa).

The paper is framed as an argument against a "Western" view of women as weak and passive by presenting evidence of the activity of one clearly extra-ordinary woman who may, however, be offered as an example of what many women in Mende society can in fact do on a smaller scale.
The paper can be read on at least four levels:

as history (biography)
as a brief ethnography of significant features of Mende society (matrilateral cross-cousin marriage (p.177), ease of divorce (p.177), the organization of polygamous households (p.178), initiation, women secret societies, etc.

There is strong evidence here that the Mende social field is strongly structured and could be analyzed using any of the structuralist theories we have covered earlier.

as a relative failure in making her case since, on the principles she herself uses would reveal arguably related cases elsewhere, and particularly in "Western" societies, for example: female rulers in Britain Elizabeth I [also a barren woman] Queen Mary, Queen Victoria), female resistance and quasi secret societies (e.g. nuns in Catholic countries), political movements like push for the suffrage, and, later, political feminism, etc.
the success of the argument, since the critique of the paper is in fact grounded in the principle that drive it: women as actors.
this could easily be discussed in terms of a general discussion between culture as system, enculturation and the identified activities of 'I's' in G.H. Mead's sense.

The paper by Bette Denich on women in Montenegro (generalized to the whole Balkan, and possibly Mediterranean culture area)

Another summary ethnography emphasizing relationships between men and women.
A most radical instance of patriarchy with an emphasis on the fundamental dilemma facing this system: the women needed to reproduce the men's collective (i.e. the "family" in the extended sense) are not drawn from this collective and cannot initially be assumed to be loyal to it, thus an inherent contradiction reproductive of drama, personal difficulties and, perhaps, change.