I don't hear a lot about modern matriarchies, though we're told there used to be a wonderful matriarchy before the horrible Bell Beaker people showed up and did bad things. I gather that the professionals don't think much of Marija Gimbutas anymore, but like the claim that Columbus proved the Earth was round, pop culture won't let go of it. If we restrict ourselves to modern cultures, there don't seem to be very many. This is a representative list of what one finds in a brief search.
In that list, the Mosuo are tiny and isolated; the Minangkabau seem to use a division of authority; the Akan, though with matrilineal clans, have men as kings and women as queen-mother who may or may not have authority; Bribri are also matrilineal and men and women share distinct authorities; the Garo are matrilineal but men manage; and the Tuareg also have division of roles. It looks as though women inheriting is taken as the key feature of a matriarchy. Most of them seem to have distinct but roughly equivalent roles for men and women--which would fit under egalitarian, wouldn't it? (Except for extreme definitions that draw no distinction between the sexes...)
Why so few? Why are there essentially no tribes where women run the show? There seem to be two competing hypotheses: That in every place on Earth men succeeded in leveraging their greater strength to seize power, or that patriarchies survive better than matriarchies. The distinction between the two may be a bit blurry, but the assumption behind the first is that the power is not held legitimately, and the conclusion of the second is that it is held this way because it arises naturally and works better, with no moral implications.
I have a suspicion or two about the first hypothesis--it seems too facile.
3 comments:
Reading that Marie Claire article convinced me that even the matriarchies weren't that matriarchal. As for Gimbutas, she fell deeply out of favor but now has a reluctant resurgence. They still don't like the deeply matriarchal societies part -nor do I, terrible evidence - but that the Yamnaya were even more patriarchal than usual and overran lots of European tribes is looking ever-more convincing.
It is all very good evidence, against everyone, how the symbolic value of how other societies organise themselves is amusing. So women have/don't have enormous authority among the Dinka or the Saramaccans, what is that to you? How in the world are you drawing meaningful conclusions about what this means about men or women in general?
When the call comes to remodel society along different lines, it's legitimate to ask "Is the plan likely to work?" The obvious followup is "Has it ever been tried, and did it work then?" Social theorists leave so much out of their models that you can't trust them, and you even have to take skeptically what ethnographers find --they oversimplify too (how often does it wind up validating their old thesis research?).
But--are there patterns to how people organize? What does this imply for the theories?
The standard account of the Pictish interaction with the Scots points to one issue. The Picts were matrilineal and inherited along the female line; the Scots, patrilineal etc. Thus in marriages Scottish men gained their father's wealth and their wife's mother's wealth; Pictish sons gained wealth from neither their own family nor their spouse's. Over time that located all the wealth, and therefore nearly all of the power, in Scottish hands. The Picts vanished almost completely from history as a consequence.
If you were trying to devise a new society, you could potentially avoid that if you could manage to force universal acceptance of the matrilineal system. This often proves to be the weakness of these 'redesign society' schemes: they can only possibly work if no competition is permitted by other systems. (Cf. the current administration's proposal for a 'global corporate tax,' so that no government can compete for business by offering lower taxes as an incentive; or the gun control lobby's claim that gun control in Chicago doesn't work only because guns rights are respected in neighboring states; etc.)
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