Abstract
It has been unanimously agreed, since Foucault, that power is not an intermittent and isolated force. Rather, the concept manifests itself daily as a continuous network of power struggles exerting on any individual regardless of his status in society, "from the great strategy of geo-politics to the little tactics of the habitat"(1980). As a result, Foucault argues, spatial arrangements do provide an analytical framework for the study of inequalities as valuable as economic or sociological explanations.
In 1974, Michelle Rosaldo was the first to apply such a paradigm to gender stratification. With the publication of her essay, Women, culture and society, she depicts a domestic-public dichotomy accounting for the variability of conditions throughout societies: empirically, it appears that the finest the boundary between the domestic and the extra-domestic is, the highest women's status might be (she mentions the Mbuti pygmies as a shining example of that link).
