But then, who’s to say that the shaman wasn’t a prostitute? There’s a long tradition of religious prostitution in history.
Well, true, but that’s not necessarily exclusive with having private property. Presumably they still owned their chattels, and they often had limited inheritance rights (i.e. unless the lord decided to step in and take the land after the tenant died it would pass by default to the tenant’s oldest son). Anyway the time period we’d be talking about here would have predated the feudal system.
Engels based his theory on the works of the anthropologist Lewis H. Morgan, who looked at a lot of “primitive” societies in existence at the time and found otherwise. I’m no anthropologist myself but I certainly remember learning in Sociology 101 about non-monogamous pre-industrialised cultures. But I’m not sure how widely accepted Morgan’s writings still are.
>Cite as to where you heard this?
I don’t remember where I read it, and it was a while ago.
I hope I’m not misremembering what I read. Here’s a contradictory tidbit I turned up:
“Cracking nuts with stone and wood hammers is a widespread chimpanzee subsistence activity (McGrew, 1992), and one thet requires a degree of control over fracture properties similar to that involved in flintknapping. Chimpanzees cracking nuts with stone hammers occasionally produce fractured and battered stones that are superficially similar to some components of Early Paleolithic assemblages (Mercader, Panger, and Voesch, 2002). Where Early Paleolithic stone tool production differs from chimpanzee stone breakage is in the former’s emphasis on the systematic production of sharp-edged flakes. Controlled experiments suggest that chimpanzees can be taught to fracture stone and to use the sharp-edged flakes that result (Toth et al., 1993), but they do not appear to make and use stone-cutting tools in the wild.”
[Evolution of the human diet By Peter S. Ungar]
If I can find something consistent with my memory I will post it, but now I am not so sure I was correct. Pyper may be right and I may have it wrong.
Among nearly all believers, the oldest profession is god/creator. In all the creation stories I have seen, the creator/god was working before man or any other creatures appeared.
Among many folks who don’t believe in gods/creators, the oldest profession is banger. That’s right, the substance, material, or something which banged, bigly.
Surely not any old job counts as a profession. The paradigmatic examples of professions are lawyer and doctor. They share a number of things in common, such us: (1) they typically provide a personalized service (rather than goods) for individual clients; (2) they require specialized skills and knowledge, and considerable education; (3) they have professional codes of ethics; and (4) they carry relatively high social status, even when (as occasionally happens) they fail to bring financial security. Other types of people who like to be called “professionals” approximate to these criteria to different degrees (e.g., teachers meet (2) and (3) quite well, they probably have a social status at least a little above their poverty level, and they provide a service, but it is not really an individualized, personalized one.)
When people call prostitution a profession it is a sort of ironic joke, because although it clearly fits criterion (1) very well, and perhaps partially fits (2) (at least for the ones who make the best money), it fails abysmally, ludicrously, to fit (3) and (4).
To say it is the oldest profession compounds the irony, because being a long established profession is often supposed to go along with respectability. No doubt prostitutes have been providing sexual services to their clients since time immemorial; doesn’t that make whores at least as respectable as doctors and lawyers? (Answer: No it doesn’t, ha-ha, how amusingly incongruous.) (Also, bringing them under the same rubric this way serves as a subtle put down of the high social status, but much despised, legal profession.)
As to whether prostitution really predates doctoring and lawyering, I don’t know and I doubt if anyone else does for sure. I would be inclined to say that lawyering depends on literacy (no doubt there were people who would sometimes argue on someone else’s behalf in pre-literate times, but did they make it their living?), but that people were willing to pay well for sexual and medical services long before that. Do shamans and the like really count as medical professionals? I am not sure, but if so, doctors may well have been around longer than prostitutes.
I just used feudal as an example of an agricultural society without land ownership by the farmers that most people have heard of. If you count chattel, then you’d have to explain why all herding societies were/are monogamous (or polygamous). I’m sure there is some counterexample somewhere, but I don’t know of it.
Sorta kinda. You’re talking about a more techincal (and more “correct”) definition of “profession”. There’s also a looser usage in which, for most people, “profession” means “what you’re paid to do for a living”, i.e., “vocation” or “job”. Compare “professional sports”.
Cheers,
bcg
Go ahead and link! Some of us do read Dutch, even on this side of the pond.
Edit: Unless it’s a rule violation, of course. If so, I didn’t know that foreign language links were such, although of course I know we’re supposed to post in English.
Shaman is generally thought in anthropology to be the first specialization. For most of human history there really haven’t been professions as we think of them today. Hunter gatherer and horticulturalist cultures are for the most part generalists, meaning that except for a division of labor between the sexes most members engage in the same activities. Among hunter gatherer cultures, all the men generally hunt and all the women generally gather. Nobody really engages in any one activity enough to excuse him from other subsistence activites that everybody engages in. What specialization there is comes in the form of shamanism, which is only practiced by certain members of the group.
Personally, I’ve always considered selling/trading/bartering to be the oldest profession.
Prostitution is “selling” sex for money. The sale is made first and the sex comes next.