as small as a world and as large as alone

7:20am June 24, 2014

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It’s weird how a lot of historians, archaeologists and evolutionary psychologists can’t conceive of a time when gender roles were different or nonexistent, racial ideology was not formed, or childrearing was done differently, etc, and yet seem to think that…

Oh. I don’t know a lot about this, but I find it interesting. What are some good examples? :-)

It’s sort of a weird question to answer because there are examples everywhere — the gender ideology and roles of every culture is specific to it. We’ve just been blinded into not seeing them, and our culture has taken over so much of the world that others are pressured to conform to our ideology.

But to give some examples within western, British-derived culture, prostitution being illegal only dates to Victorian times; women have always fought in armies, and IIRC make up something like twenty-five or thirty percent on average of armies which don’t actively prevent women from joining; women being smaller than men with very different appearances is based at least as much in cultural ideals of eating food and exercise (girls are encouraged to eat substantially less than boys and not to play rough, even in families which do not think of themselves as sexist, which naturally leads to them being smaller, skinner and less muscled, with more fatty tissue in percentage) as anything else; both men and women always worked towards meeting the family’s needs and income in the middle ages, and the idea of women as housewives who only cook, clean and do childcare, or decorations is a Victorian ahistorical invention; it was common scientific medical knowledge in the Victorian era that women were incapable of sexual arousal, something which is obviously not true; despite what archaeology courses will inevitably say, complete restrictions on women hunting are rare, and women have likely always hunted in cultures that relied partially on it; etc. I’m just listing examples here because that’s what was asked for, I can provide more detail and/or citations if anyone’s curious about one or two of them.

Yes, all of this. There’s much about our culture that we take for granted that are really quite recent developments. Such as how we measure time (hours, minutes, seconds), the concept of only one sleep period per day being the default case, etc. etc.

Of course sexism and (some degree of) male dominance is very widespread in the known current and past cultures and it does seem to be the default way in almost all societies*. But very strict male dominance and gendered division of labour has always been the odd case out, not the default case. And the hyper-misogynist ideas from various cultures seem like they’ve been originally created out of fear that women get more power and disrupt the order of things. So it’s always been known that women are capable of it if those (men) who have the power let them.

*When we look at pre-agrarian communities this becomes much more muddled.

Honestly, I don’t believe the standard “male dominance has always been the standard in post agrarian societies” line, because I’ve seen how evidence that might question is gets interpreted. (eg, sex graves as male by finding weapons in them; when skeletons are sexed female, declare the weapons ceremonial because after all, only male graves normally have weapons in them.) I’m not interested in a big argument about it (if you reply along those lines I will ignore it) because I think it’s impossible to answer when all of the prospective evidence comes from a field where respected professionals can hold forth that women are physiologically incapable of hunting, or that the nuclear family (which originated in the twentieth century as a “standard”) was a cause of the course of human anatomy’s evolution

The standard theories have been written by largely male, largely white archaeologists who took decades to accept the idea that women might, under some circumstances, deviate from Victorian gender norms, even when plenty of women were doing it in modern times in front of their faces. The field has to progress a lot more before I’ll accept categorical, sweeping statements about gender relations that precisely back up its values — if you can’t even consider the idea that one female might have spear hunted, or fought in war, when the evidence is directly in front of your face, how on earth can I trust your word that there was never a society where most did?

It’s true that some form of patriarchy seems to be common on earth today, but colonization is a thing, and has left very little of the world untouched. Cultures from a couple of very limited geographical ranges, with only a handful of religions and languages have dominated much of the world and changed everything they touched since global conquest became a technological possibility. I’m not going to extrapolate that the whole world has always been patriarchal because of it any more than I would extrapolate that Europe has always been monotheist because of it, or that something about North America caused its inhabitants to develop light skin*.

That’s not saying that I think it’s completely impossible that agricultural societies brought in patriarchy, although I do think it’s unlikely to be a total blanket case. My main point is that we don’t know, and we can’t know until mainstream archaeology honestly considers the idea that patriarchy might not be a societal constant, and looks for evidence with an open mind through scientific inquiry. (Nineteenth century theories about “primitive matriarchy” and “civilized patriarchy” do not count.)

*although sadly I have actually seen some people argue for this based on latitudes, generally with the aim of suggesting the Peoples resident to North America before Europeans invaded were themselves invaders, making the land “fair game”

I’m not historian or an archaeologist (or anthropologist), and I claim no deep knowledge of those fields. But the notion that patriarchy is very widespread is supported by a field that I do know rather well (as in, have actually studied in an university): linguistics. Linguistic typologists have found that in pretty much every language that has grammatical gender, the male is either unmarked or “less marked” than the female, and various other factors do point to tendency that the “default” human is considered male. Linguistics of course does not prove that the “male default” could not have included some women, but still. Only very very few languages have any real signs that point to a matriarchal society (mainly, interestingly, the languages of the Amazon).

All that said, it’s fairly common that languages do not really have any definite grammatical imprints of a patriarchal society either. Were patriarchal cultures actually universal across time and geography, we ought to expect almost all languages to portray that.

Yeah. I’m not disputing the idea that patriarchal societies have always existed as some portion of humanity, or even a larger than random portion, just the idea that every post-agrarian society in existence was patriarchal, and not just that but so patriarchal that women never broke from gender norms in a significant way, and this was because of something inherent about human biology, which is the party line in archaeology. *flails*

Out of curiosity, is there any pattern in which languages? Eg, PIE society was probably patriarchal and a lot of Eurasian languages are, of course, descended from it, but that’s a relatively recent thing in the overall timescale of human existence. (Honestly, agriculture is a relatively recent thing too, but Indo-European languages more so.) I don’t know as much about languages other than the PIE family and Arabic as I wish I did.

I’ve actually seen hypotheses that extreme patriarchal societies are more likely to be colonizers, which I think is somewhat problematic, but has some explanations other than the standard essentialist “women are inherently peaceful and good-natured” horseshit. That would be a possible explanation for the linguistic patterns (language descendents of militant/colonizer societies being more likely to be around to be analyzed) as well as present day arrangements without making sweeping and patently false claims about human nature.

Although the other problem which dos come to mind here is — how do we define a society as patriarchal? How static is the classification of societies as patriarchal? Gender roles are not static. They change decade to decade, let alone century to century or millenium to millenium. It’s a mistake to attribute conscious reform or agency of oppressed groups solely to modern agents. Grammatical structures of languages persist for a very long time, or we wouldn’t be able to study this sort of thing at all. So there’s that.

Disclaimer: I am not a linguist, just a language dabbled with an interest in linguistics. But, I am really not sure about that sort of research, either. Partly because there are rather a lot of languages/whole language families which use totally different grammatical gender schemes (such as animate-inanimate). Throwing in a few Wikipedia links, which actually look to be decent overviews.

http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=List_of_languages_by_type_of_grammatical_genders

http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Grammatical_gender

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‘Many authors prefer “noun classes” when none of the inflections in a language relate to sex, such as when an animate–inanimate distinction is made. Note however that the word “gender” derives from Latin genus (also the root of genre) which originally meant “kind”, so it does not necessarily have a sexual meaning.’

http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Noun_classes

- 'The term gender, as used by some linguists, refers to a noun-class system composed with 2, 3, or 4 classes, particularly if the classification is semantically based on a distinction between masculine and feminine. Genders are then considered a sub-class of noun classes. Not all linguists recognize a distinction between noun-classes and genders, however, and instead use either the term “gender” or “noun-class” for both.’

So, there looks like plenty of room for that to go kind of circular, especially if the only languages getting treated as having grammatical gender are the ones that do use masculine-feminine-(neuter) organization. Which, if you look at the listing, are mostly clustered in certain parts of the world, including a lot of Indo-European languages. Using that type of scheme as the default and then trying to find social relevance there is maybe not going to work so well.

I can’t find that now, but I have also seen some utter train wreck in that basic genre (ha!), where the authors decided to map animate/active as “masculine”, inanimate/passive as “feminine” in ISTR one group of Algonquian languages—and concluded that women must have had very low status pre-Contact from looking at some nouns with a totally wrong system overlaid, filtered through their own value judgments. I only wish I were joking there.

But yeah, I only had the spoons to comment on one point here. Interesting discussion, though.

Yeah, also? The presence or absence of grammatical gender (and whether it reflects social gender categories or something else altogether, like animacy in Algonquian and Na-Dene languages) tells you very little about the society’s gender roles, let alone their historical ones. It’s very easy to get the idea that a language’s grammar must have a strong influence on thought and everyday culture, but it’s actually almost infinitely easier to guess *wrong* from that kind of information! You really can’t infer much from it, at least not without some serious cultural familiarity — and once you have that, you already know the answer. So it’s of little predictive value.

Moreover, grammatical gender is the kind of thing that can easily spread through language contact between vastly different cultures, with vastly different languages. That sort of thing happens given enough time — languages from seperate families, found in the same broad area, will often come to resemble each other in terms of sounds or common structures (but it’s a very abstract sort of influence; they can still be grammatically or phonetically quite different at the same time).

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