I guess my problem in this thread is that I cannot believe that pure force is the organizing factor of society. Otherwise, history would be the story of tall people systematically repressing short people. I live in an area of increadable human diversity. I am about an hours drive from villages where everyone is around five feet tall, and others where even the women are well over six feet tall. Who dominates? A group of short skinny outsiders. C
The truth is, the moment we learned to use weapons and organize our wealth, it stopped mattering so much who was stronger.
Never heard of anyone going on a cooking vacation? Or taking a mushroom hunting class? Or just plain cultural tourism, which is basically watching how other people keep house? Maybe not your idea of a good time, but try pitching a hunting vacation to your Grandma.
Two cases from what’s nowadays the same country, both valid for over 1000 years:
under Lionese (later Castillian, later general Spanish) law, women were, as in Roman law, considered imbecile, i.e., organically unable to make their own decisions. A woman could own property but not sell it or make most of the decissions one would normally associate with ownership. This is not something one would have wanted to argue about with such Castillian highlights as, say Isabel I or her daughter Juana I, but still it’s the way the law was until the 1970s.
Under the Fueros of the Basque and Navarrese areas, there was no such assumed imbecility (there’s many other aspects in which our laws are completely at cross-purposes with Roman Law). There’s for example letters from the French bride of a Navarrese prince to her mother, explaining that “I am expected to learn the laws of the land and to be prepared to act as judge for those who may require it,” something which would have been unthinkable in the French court, where the ladies had been expected to look pretty and embroider a lot. Women sat in Parliament, having both voice and vote (Parliament was a meeting of the King with the people, not a permanent thing as the current ones; the permanent thing was “Diputación”, the “Deputies” of the people, and AFAIK there wasn’t a woman Deputy before the 1970s). As one of my classmates put it “well, if you’re going to spend half of every year away at war or at sea or whatever, you need a wife who can Do Stuff, don’t you? A legal cripple won’t do.”
This doesn’t mean that Basque women did the same things men did: there were fishermen, but no fisherwomen; potters and weavers were more likely to be women than men. The coat of arms of one valley was won in battle by the women, but it was the battle that went to the women, not the women who’d gone to battle.
But this is an example of two societies that were side by side, both agricultural and then some… and the power of decision of their women was quite different.
This is my issue as well - much of the organization of society has at its core a lot to do with sheer practicality and not necessarily with one group deliberately trying to be assholes. Plus, if you’re a jerk to a targeted group of people, they’ll eventually rise up against you until you’re forced to kill them all or they’ll just go away. Making it worth both genders’ while to stay would have been important or the existing societies wouldn’t have continued to exist.
Even in settled societies, only the upper eschelons have truly been able to afford to have despondent, “underutilized” women who are nothing more than baby factories. And in societies where women’s contributions aren’t recognized as important (at least Western societies, but also in some Eastern societies), they eventually decide to leave their “oppressors.” It takes a long time for that to happen - divorce hasn’t been legal for long - but once it’s available, women will start taking advantage of the ability to leave a bad situation.
I’d be the last to argue that women have never been marginalized or that they’re not often marginalized today. But I think you (general) need to look at the issue from a more practical standpoint. Also, I think it’s important to consider whether equality and gender roles are being used interchangeably. In other words, many people tend to confuse equality with being the same as or doing the same thing as the other sex. That’s not always practical or practicable. For example, men can’t carry babies - that’s biology. If we come up with a way for them to do so and have all the same hormones that produce lactation and the same bonding goodness, great. But until then, it’s a fact of life that women and men don’t have the same equipment, so there are bound to be differences - but not necessarily inequalities - in what they do once those differences truly present themselves, such as during puberty.
You’ve heard of au pairs? They do housework and child care in a foreign country. They are paid, but less than live-in nannies would typically be paid. That sounds pretty close to a housekeeping vacation to me…
There is agritourism, in which people vacation on farms and do some farm work.
It’s more important to control both females and young males when there is high variance in male reproductive success. In Pastorialist societies, male reproductive success has high variance because some individuals will have lots of resources (ie, animals), and others will have few. Since these resources are stealable (unlike in Hunter-gatherer societies), males will often band together with their male relatives in order to protect their resources and guard them from thievery.
We call this “contest competition” in comparison to “scramble competition.” In scramble competition, efficiency is favored, in contest competition, status and fighting matters more. It pays for males to put resources into controlling and defending large groups of women and fighting and preventing other males from accessing those women. This simply cannot be done in a Hunter-gatherer society. Because you have a few men controlling large groups of females, female sexuality has to be heavily controlled and regulated through religion, threat of violence, etc.
What I find most interesting is that these societies tend to be more violent too. As female sexuality is more controlled, the more men gain from fighting over resources (and women) and the more battles occur. I personally believe the long and recent history of polygyny and inequality in resources among males is the primary reason why the Middle East is so violent today. As was repeatedly said in my biology of sex differences class – the leading cause of violence is maleness. Particularly large groups of unmarried males.
Well that may also be true, but it ignores the fact that HGs have far more strict controls on sexual relations than most primitive agriculturalists. If you want to find a society that is sexually liberated and where young women are free to have multiple partners then you need t look for an agricultural society: various Polynesians, American Indians, even many European peasant societies accepted sexual promiscuity in young women and women were routinely pregnant when they married.
In contrast the HG groups living next door to such people were shocked at their promiscuity. HGs almost never permitted an unmarried woman to have sex at all, every woman was expected to be a virgin at marriage. And their was a good reason for this. While HGs had no property to be inherited they also had very low population density. A typical HG band was 5-10 people who might form part of tribe of 200-500. And that was the entire gene pool. Inbreeding has always been the major threat to survival in HG groups. Marriage and female sexuality has always been strictly controlled in HGs to prevent inbreeding. Marriage partners were very limited and strictly regulated by custom. By the time you weeded out close blood relatives the potential number of marriage partners available to a HG was probably less than 5 .
The worst possible occurrence in a HG society is for a child to be born who is of doubtful paternity. Such an individual can often never marry because all the potential marriage partners are close relatives of one of the potential fathers. This is a tragedy not just for the individual but for the tribe, because they are forced to support an individual who can never contribute to genetic diversity or reproduction. As a result in most HG cultures any child of dubious paternity was killed at birth.
So the idea that female reproductivity became more closely controlled after agriculture seems to be provable nonsense. With few, if any, exceptions, all HGs are serial polygamists where females have no sexual freedom whatsoever. In contrast all societies that I can think of that give sexual freedom to young women, including our own, are very definitively agricultural
Umm, why do you think that HG men were nay happier with their role than the women? Or if you prefer why do you think women were unhappier? These are the roles that humans of both evolved to fill. Why would you expect that either would be fundamentally discontented in that role?
It varies depending on environment. The big problem is that contemporary HGS have all lived in areas that are marginal or impossible for agriculture, which is why agricultluralists never displaced them. Such areas also offer little in the way of game. For a long time anthropologists assumed that such HGs were typical and that the typical HG ate little in the way of large game. Better evidence and a bit if reasoning has changed all that, and the best assumption ATM are that the “typical” HG diet consisted of about 30% of calories from large game such as kangaroos or deer, 35% from small game like lizards, rats, and insects and 35% from vegetable matter. In terms of sexual division, basically all the vegetable matter would have been gathered by women, all the large game by men, and the small game about equally split.
You are overlooking the fact that HGs had no access to contraception. Whether children were a burden or not a HG woman was continually pregnant or breastfeeding from the age of 15 to the age of 50, just as agricultural women were. It is true that most HG children were killed during infancy to control population, but that probably made the situation worse, not better, because it removed the little protection that breast feeding affords agricultural women. IOW rather than being forced to look after children continuously HG women were pregnant continuously.
No, no, no, no, no.
Most Indian HGs were not in any way dependent on Buffalo. Far more HGs were dependent on salmon than were dependent on buffalo. They couldn’t have given a shit if all the buffalo were exterminated.
The only Indian HG groups traditionally dependent on the buffalo were some tiny bands on the Great Plains. These groups were all exterminated long before the buffalo numbers declined. They were wiped out by agricultural groups that gave rise to the horse cultures, including the Comanche that you mention. These groups were long-settled agricuturalists who farmed the river valleys. When horses were traded into the area from Spanish possessions in Central America around 1650 some groups, such as the Comanche, split off and took up a lifestyle as horse nomads. IOW they had always been agriculturalists and remained agriculturalists, they just weren’t farmers any more, they were now horse herders. These groups did depend on the bison herds to an extent, but they were far more dependent on their horses. It was these agriculturalists who displaced the few HGs who depended on the bison, and they did s long before any contact with Europeans and long before bison numbers declined.
These horse nomad groups did indeed revert to plant agriculture in the 19th century, but not because bison declined but because they had to as part of their treaties. They could have happily subsisted on their horses as they had done form almost 200 years previously and as people in central Asian prairies have been doing for almost 4, 000 years.
I know nothing of the Asmat, but the Bedoiun and the Comanche have both been agriculturalists for at millennia. Just because people are farming grazing animals rather than plants, that doesn’t make them HGs. It makes them herder, and herders are just as much agricuturlaists as people who grow sorghum or maize. Doesn’t matter whether they are Laps, Watusi, Bedouin, Isrealites or Comanche, they are just agricultural herders, not HGs.
I can’t think of any where that was the case.
Once of the links provided says that 80% of the food came form gathering, but gives no source. You can be certain that it is base don the San, Australian desert Aborigines or similar groups that have been restricted to game-poor environments. As I mentioned earlier, all anthropologists now accept that such groups are obviously atypical. More importantly it never actually says that women were responsible for most of that gathering. Instead what we find in HG groups is that in game poor environments the male role shifts to the acquisition of small game such as fish and honey which men are then not allowed to collect. In more game-abundant territory women can gather such small game.
But I won’t buy that in any HG group most of the food was ever obtained by the sex that is smaller, weaker, slower and had a good proportion of its members in varying degree of incapacitation due to pregnancy and childcare. Any group that practiced such a ridiculously inefficient social policy would be eliminated by simple competition and reproductive selection, nevermind wars.
How do you reconcile this with the evidence which says that HG societies were in a state of near constant warfare and exceptionally violent, for example Gat’s work on war ion primitive societies? The evidence seems to indicate that in HG societies battles were more common than in agricultural societies.
I have studied several Hunter-Gatherer groups as part of my major and this is completely different from any population I have studied in detail. I am curious as to what populations you are referring to. The prototypical Hunter-Gatherer group is the !Kung and women in that culture had many sexual partners. Nisa, the major character of the most famous book about this culture seems to be a pretty typical !Kung woman and she had lovers before marriage as well as some after marriage. Any account I’ve read of Hunter-Gatherers has described people having lovers off in the bush and such.
My boyfriend is a cultural anthropology major and I just asked him if he had heard that and he agreed with me that all the ones he’s studied weren’t sexually restrictive at all and that you really only see virginity highly valued when property is important (which is exactly what I have been taught). Not to mention I was taught in my Bio of Sex Differences class that young females in HG societies tend to be highly sexual active with multiple partners.
So… cite?
This is completely opposite of everything my boyfriend and I were taught. Cite?
Again, completely opposite of everything I have read and studied. Not to mention that polygyny doesn’t necessarily sexually restrict women. For example, the !Kung allow polygyny and it is occasionally practiced there, but the women are fairly sexually free.
Not true from what I’ve studied. Even in my primate socioeology class we talked about how the closer you are to the equator, the more important meat is in the diet. Because of these variances, male and female roles and the acquisition of meat vary depending on geographic location.
Not true based on any ethnographies I’ve read. First of all, infanticide wasn’t very common. I wrote a term paper on it, and infanticide by mothers is fairly rare. I don’t have the papers with me right now, but I think it was estimated at 1 in 300 births among the !Kung. Instead, lactational infertility helped to space births. It is also incorrect to say that they had no methods of contraception. For example, the !Kung talk about how there are certain herbs they can take to stop pregnancy or make a woman infertile. Other methods were used such as wrapping tight bandages around the stomach and such. As most !Kung women didn’t have menarche until late teens or early 20s, and lactational infertility naturally spaced birth, the average !kung woman only had 5 births on average.
babies incapacitate females to such a high degree (not found in primate studies or in most ethnographies of HGs that I read). Any account of birth I’ve read of HGs describe the women giving birth and going straight back to work the next day.
that just because females have less strength than males, they can’t gather the majority of food (again, not supported by the evidence)
that males provide most of the food in the majority of HG cultures (again, not supported by the evidence). As I was taught in Bio of Sex differences, males go after high risk, high reward game which a lot of the time is very risky and often they have to fall back on the foods collected by females.
Again, completely opposite from what I’ve studied. Although there was great variance among these societies, Yanomamo [agriculturalists] are far more violent (and sexually restrictive, rape is very common) than the !Kung [HG]. Not to mention that war is impossible in Hunter Gatherer societies. If he actually used the term war, he is completely wrong. HG (and chimps) are categorized by raids which is an entirely different thing. We don’t see war until much later in human history.
I’ve already made some mention of them. The Aborigines and the Khoi San have been almost the only true, traditional HGs in recent times. Most American Indian groups were agriculturalists, and those few who were not were in such intimate contact with agricutural peopel that it became impossible to use them to judge HG lifestyles. The same applies to the African Pygmies, New Guionean HGs and most other HG groups. Eskimos of course are so a typical that it’s hard to use them as a reference point for anything but Eskimos.
Even Aboriginal societies are a bit hard to work with. Most of the people living on the better country were decimated by disease before they were ever encountered by Europeans, so what Europeans saw was a degenerate culture that had suffered losse sit coudl never recover from. In fact most groups immediately adopted a form of semi-dependence on Europeans upon initial contact. Only the poeple in Northern Austrlia and those in the desert lands were spared the impact of disease and persisted with a fairly traditional lifestyle.
From those groups we can say that the idea of gender equality was a total myth. These people had very distinct roles for men and women, far stricter than anything seen in any agricultural society. If women even talked about men’s business or vice versa they were put to death, Similarly if a woman picked up a spear or a man picked up a digging stick they were punished severely, ranging form sevaral weeks bansihment through being speared inthe leg to being killed on the spot. There were also numerous places that either sex was not allowed to even travel to on pain of death.
In Northern Australia at least a man had total authority over any wives, and was able to rape her, beat her or even kill her. Women had no such privilieges concerning their husbands and wonmen that killed their husbands were killed by his family, Women were able to beat their husbands, but this seems to have usually been met with retailiation when the husband recovered so it was probably an act of desparation. Women were traded or as property and serial polygamy was the norm, with a man divorcing his oldest or most troublesome wife if a newer wife became available. In contrast women could not leave their husbands
So the idea that HG societies were all gender equal is simply ludicrous, they were far more divided on gender lines than anything that any agricultural society has ever produced.
No, I made no such assumption and never stated any degree, high low or moderate. I stated the fact that pregnancy incapacitates women to some degree, a fact that nobody on Erath disputes is true. So long as pregnancy incapacitates women to any degree then for any given amount of effort and risk a group where the majority of food is collected by the women must collect less food than a group where food is collected by the men. That is the very definition of incapicitation. IOW I never made any assumption, I simply stated a perfectly uncontroversial fact.
The only assumption was made by you, and that assumption was incorrect.
Again the assumption made has been by you, and again it is incorrect.
My point was quite clearly and explicitly that males are stronger than women and thus have the potential to obtain more food for any given amount of effort and risk. Nobody said that women can’t gather the majority of the food, just that any group in which this was true is placing themselves in an untenable competitive position WRT to adjacent groups where all individuals gather as much food as is usable.
Again, I made no such assumption
And this fact is not disputed by the evidence either. All the evidence I have seen suggests that in HG societies males either obtain the vast majority of the food (as with the Inuit or Tierra del Fuegans) or else food gathering is split about equally with most food returned to cmap ebing from males.
Well that isn’t true of course. It is no more risky to hunt a possum than it is to hunt a lizard.
But even if it is true, so what? Playing the stock market is a much more risky way to obtain cash than working as a waitress. By your ‘logic’ a waitress should contribute more food to a family than a wall street trader. Of course that isn’t true because you have failed to understand that an analysis of risk is meaningless without and analysis of payoff. Even if a male only catches one buffalo a week he will still be contributing vastly more food than a female who collects 16 lizards every single day.
Firstly be very careful when saying that the Yanomomo are agriculturalists. The survivors are today, but most of them have traditionally been HGs or at best supplementary agriculturalists.
But that aside, so what? You have simply selected to disparate and favourable data points in what you admit is an overlapping spectrum. I select two other data points and get exactly the opposite points. Yolgnu are far more violent and probe to rape than Tibetan peasants.
That is why he is widely published on this topic in actual peer reviewed journals and several books form prestigious publishing houses and is considered an authority on the subject of human warfare. I believe I shall trust Gat and the editors and reviewers of some of the most prestigious anthropological journals and publishing houses in the world before I believe a baseless and unreferenced denial on a message board.
Bollocks.
Here is what actual academics have to say on this subject:
“The chimp raiding-behavior is predicated on male coalition building and aggressive defense of group territories against outside groups of conspecifics. In humans these patterns of coalition building and in-group versus out-group territorial defense have been tremendously augmented by language and its corollary, enhanced cultural transmission. Consequently, the history of civilized man is a record of wars, both great and small. Of the modern hunter-gatherer societies studied, only ten percent have been found that do not participate in war on a regular basis. “
Hmm, that’s an interesting contention. How, then, do you explain that such journals and institutions as The Univeristy of Maine, “Anthropological Quarterly” ,” Archaeology” (see LeBlanc, S.A. “Prehistory of warfare” 56: 3) and “Ethnology (See Ember C.R., “Myths about Hunter-Gatherers”, 17:4.) all state unambiguously that HGs engage in routine warfare?
Seriously kimera, you may be an evolutionary Ethnology major, but when you start gainsaying Azar Gat about human warfare and declaring to be uncompromisingly wrong things stated explicitely in the finest peer reviewed journals on the subject then you really should reflect on the fact that you haven’t graduated yet and maybe you have a lot to learn.
You seem like a smart and articulate and clearly passionate, and I applaud any undergrad willing to argue against such authority, most postgrads wouldn’t do so. But please don’t baldly state that I am wrong when I am quoting facts and utilising terminology from the seminal works and sources on the subject. By all means say that you disagree with the use of the term warfare if you have sources that suggest it is erroneous. Bur around here you can’t just say it’s wrong because some professor said it was wrong despite the fact that the greatest authorities say that it is right.
I make no claim that HG people were fundamentally unhappy. I also agree that these roles evolved. That is why men are comfortable with hunting, responding to comraderie, risk thrills, skill achievement. Their brains had adapted to linear thinking and focus, and their bodies adapted by strengthening, ability to throw, and interpret spatial information more effectively. These characteristic have evolved for much longer than the history of Homo Sapiens and very liitle of these characteristics have changed since ariculture was introduced.
I would expect that women were contented as well, fufilling the roles of their society that men aren’t adapted to do, like nurturing and home making . HG is the society where the relationship between genders was comfortable and didn’t need any institutions to regulate.
When people moved on to agriculture, it was the men who faced the most adaption, With civilization accompanying agriculture, The concept of heirarchy and distribution of assets emerged, and control being establish by force of shear strength put the physically weaker woman, still biologically content with her role, in a position to be regulated.by society as chattels of men. This has never been challenged (I think) until technology has been able to equalize the ability of women to compete with men.
Interesting idea Dutchman, but I think it overlooks just how much the lives of both men and women were regulated by institutions within HG societies. I know the popular belief is that HGs were egalitarian and sexually liberated and that it was the agriculturalists that were uptight and controlled gender roles and so forth. But as I pointed out, exactly the opposite is true.
The really sexually liberated and sexualy egalitarian societies such as the Solomon Islands are all agricultural societies. In contrast to that HG societies were extremely restrictive and repressive to the point of maiming or banishing people for even carrying the tools of the other sex. It is hard to find an agricultural society, even amongst the most extreme Islamic societies, that is less sexually egalitarian than the typical HG society.
I take your point that agriculture has added a lot of additional stressors that we aren’t adapted to deal with. What I don’t see is any evidence that the typical agriculturalist is more regulated than the typcial HG. From what I know the opposite is true: they typical agriculturalist has more choices and is less controlled than the typical HG. I’m also not sure I would buy that women are more controlled in agriculture societies than men. Women and men are controlled in different ways, but I coudl make a very strong case thati in your typical chiefdom or feudal society men were far more contolled and treated far more as chattels than women ever were.
Contrary to the popular belief that all men were as happy as pigs in shit prior to the rise of feminism it simply isnt true. The factis that most people had miserable lives in the pre-modern world. People weren’t very nice, and they were no nicer to men than they were to women.