Is this all just a pipe dream on the order of Atlantis, or is there hard evidence for it?
(BTW, this idea is given fictional treatment in S.M. Stirling’s Nantucket Island series – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S.M._Stirling#Nantucket_series – set about 1250 B.C., where two Bronze-Age cultures, the peaceful, matriarchal Fiernan Bohulugi or “Earth People” and the warlike, patriarchal Iraiina or “Sun People,” are struggling for control of the island of Britain. “Fiernan Bohulugi” probably is inspired by “Firbolgs,” the legendary pre-Celtic people of Ireland.)
I think it’s an IMHO, but I’ve seen the artifacts associated with this supposed civilization. I’m not convinced either way, though I lean against it only because of the fruity nature of its supporters. Invariably, this ‘civilization’ starts out being described as gender neutral, but as the explanation progresses it gets described as pacifistic, enlightened, one with nature, yadda yadda.
At some point while watching a video tape of Marija Gimbutas trying to explain how a bronze hand axe wasn’t really used for violence, but is instead really a butterfly sculpture, you may begin to realize you’re just hearing a politically reconstructed utopian myth with western feminist theory elements.
Maybe it existed, maybe not, but in my opinion the adherents have done more damage to the theory than the detractors ever did. And no artifact I ever saw lent any real weight to the contention of a ‘gylanic’ society. Matriarchal? Maybe.
But I’m just a layperson, and ten years out of date on this stuff.
Well, the hypothetical “gylanic” culture had equality between the sexes. A matriarchal one would be female-dominated, just as a patriarchal one is male-dominated. Neither structure has sexual equality.
In The Golden Bough, Robert Graves accumulated a lot of circumstantial evidence pointing to an immediately-prehistoric matriarchal culture in Greece and surrounding areas. How much validity there is in his conclusions is met with great skepticism. (J.R.R. Tolkien’s assessment of Graves: “A brilliant man, but an ass!”)
Correct. Graves wrote an extensive anthropological analysis of Greek Mythology (title of the book) based in large part on Frazer’s work. It was, however, Graves who postulated the matriarchal culture which the Homeric Greek culture replaced.
It might be true. Or it might not. Chances are, no-one will ever know.
Occam’s Razor would suggest that whatever preceded the Indo-Aryans was pretty representative of the average human civilization that has been found elsewhere. Pacifist equal-opportunity Utopia is not the usual practice as far as I am aware. Unfortunately.
Thanks. I kept thinking it meant gyno-something pan-atlantic, but I knew that couldn’t be right.
As far as the whole gender-equal utopia goes, I think what we have now is as close as we’ve ever come to that ideal. Men are generally bigger and stronger than women and as such, usually have the power to place themselves in charge. I’m not saying that this is right or wrong, just that it’s the way things are.
Actually, many hunter-gatherer societies were more egalitarian than what we’ve got even now. You can find citations in pretty much any modern anthropology book, but here are two online that popped up at the top of the list in a google search.
(from a page regarding Jared Diamond’s appearance on the Paula Gordon show).
We’ve got much more inequality in lifestyle and relative power than any hunter-gatherer society, and by some measures the relations between the sexes are still more unequal in industrial societies than in more “primitive” ones too.
After all, in hunter-gatherer diets women’s work provides most of the calories. Acknowledging their importance with equal social status seems like plain common sense.
I don’t think common sense has anything to do with it. There are plenty of farming societies where women do the bulk of the work, and the men are clearly dominant. You have to remember that hunter/gatherer societies are small and unstratified. With little or no accumulation of goods, no one person has a way of asserting his dominance over the rest of the group.
I have my doubts that any culture of a structure “later” than hunter-gatherer was sexually egalitarian, and the hunter-gatherer folk didn’t tend to leave behind history books and are generally not considered “civilization”. There’s a still-extant thread on hunter-gatherers and what would happen to a lazy person within such, which contains many posts and links which explain in large part why the adoption of farming (vs h/g) tended to mean the adoption of patriarchy.
Patriarchy is neither “intrinsic human nature” nor an evil plot dreamed up in the boy’s bathroom 8000 years ago in which the guys conquered the chicks. It’s a functional (if unpleasant) adaptation that our species made to circumstances. It was stable for the thousands of years in which those circumstances prevailed, and has only begun to crumble in earnest as we’ve shifted from agrarian to post-agrarian civilization, a transformation still underway.