Bible Review

The Pontifical Biblical Commission is a commission of Roman Catholic scholars who take positions on important problems of Scriptural interpretation. This report was published by the Vatican in late 1993; all quotations are from the Vatican’s English translation.

Michael Herzfeld, The Poetics of Manhood: Contest and Identity in a Cretan Mountain Village (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1985), p. 16.

P. Kyle McCarter, II Samuel. The Anchor Bible 9 (New York: Doubleday, 1984), p. 270.

Pierre Bourdieu, Algeria 1960 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1979), p. 100.

Maud Gleason, “The Semiotics of the Gender: Physiognomy and Self-Fashioning in the Second Century C.E.,” in Before Sexuality: The Construction of Erotic Experience in the Ancient Greek World, ed. David Halperin, John Winkler and Froma Zeitlin (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1990) pp. 399–402.

Gayle Rubin, “The Traffic in Women: Notes on the Political Economy of Sex,” in Toward an Anthropology of Women, ed. Rayna Reiter (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1975), p. 174.

An important caution needs to be stressed here. One should always inquire about the person carrying out this sort of evaluation. Even within one culture, women and men may hold different ideas about prestige and its relation to gender and sexual practice. Thus, the criteria that women use to evaluate the social worth of men or of other women may not be identical to the criteria used by men to evaluate women or one another.

Sherry B. Ortner and Harriet Whitehead, “Introduction: Accounting for Sexual Meanings,” in Sexual Meanings: The Cultural Construction of Gender and Sexuality, eds. Ortner and Whitehead (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1981), pp. 16–17.

See Jonathan Culler, Framing the Sign: Criticism and Its Institutions (Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press, 1988) pp. xiii–xiv.