An aberration that came with the advent of agriculture
May 17, 2015 11:18 AM   Subscribe

A study has shown that in contemporary hunter-gatherer tribes, men and women tend to have equal influence on where their group lives and who they live with. The findings challenge the idea that sexual equality is a recent invention, suggesting that it has been the norm for humans for most of our evolutionary history. Mark Dyble, an anthropologist who led the study at University College London, said: “There is still this wider perception that hunter-gatherers are more macho or male-dominated. We’d argue it was only with the emergence of agriculture, when people could start to accumulate resources, that inequality emerged.”
posted by byanyothername (43 comments total) 52 users marked this as a favorite
 
Closely related.
posted by grobstein at 11:21 AM on May 17, 2015


This has fascinating implications for the study of politically-oriented conceptions of masculinity. Thanks for posting, byanyothername.
posted by clockzero at 11:22 AM on May 17, 2015


What an interesting companion read to the "wife bonuses" FPP!
posted by mondo dentro at 11:29 AM on May 17, 2015 [1 favorite]


I think this is very much a reductio for the mass market, but it's true at least that, say, a foraging San has neither the resources nor the cultural idea that he could keep multiple wives in a cloistered harem. Nonetheless, gender relations among hunter-gatherers are not necessarily nice. Small-scale raid warfare practiced among bands of humans often includes rape and sex slavery, and archaeological evidence indicates that our ancestors were as violent as we were.

Still, right now I'm just happy to think of one of those Return of Kings types dying of an infection brought on by a hunting injury because there was no wise-woman willing to treat him.
posted by Countess Elena at 11:31 AM on May 17, 2015 [8 favorites]


I will mention Elaine Pagel's, The Chalice and the Blade, and then run away. Hunting / gathering is a pretty balanced scene, in which peoples work their areas of expertise, in order to enjoy a safe dinner.
posted by Oyéah at 11:34 AM on May 17, 2015 [1 favorite]


Just so long as you don't mention Marija Gimbutas, because pffft
posted by Countess Elena at 11:35 AM on May 17, 2015


I looked up Marija Gimbutas, hey I'd read that! Thanks.
posted by Oyéah at 11:42 AM on May 17, 2015 [2 favorites]


Very similar in theme to this other post from today, Poor Little Rich Women.

The worldwide ethnographic data is clear: The more stratified and hierarchical the society, and the more sex segregated, the lower the status of women.

Whether they are Hadza women who spend almost as much time as men foraging for food, Agta women of the Philippines participating in the hunt or !Kung women of southern Africa foraging for the tubers and roots that can tide a band over when there is no meat from a hunt, women who contribute to the group or family’s well-being are empowered relative to those in societies where women do not. As in the Kalahari Desert and rain forest, resources are the bottom line on the Upper East Side. If you don’t bring home tubers and roots, your power is diminished in your marriage. And in the world.



I've had conversations about this idea before and people like to bring up the fact that there were still wars and violence and "you can't idealize". But I think you can acknowledge that a condition was overall better without calling it perfect. Nothing is perfect, people still died and people still hurt each other but I think it was on a human scale. After agriculture stuff just got out of control.
posted by bleep at 11:43 AM on May 17, 2015 [11 favorites]


Is that Riane Eisler's The Chalice and the Blade? Not Pagels, unless my memory is all wrong.
posted by librosegretti at 12:00 PM on May 17, 2015 [3 favorites]


Maybe in the process of agriculture in the Middle East and southern Europe, husbandry was figured out, then the question of loyalty and patriarchy, was born, bloody and screaming. Among a certain present day, tribal people, the firtborn in a marriage is given a name. It is the second born son, who is called Junior, after time has passed and the marriage is more visible to others.

Also agriculture meant storage of resources which could become an object of envy, or spoils of war. All equality is lost when women and girls become the spoils of war. Survival skills may increase the value of female lives thus appropriated, but it is likely, young girls were appropriated, while everyone else perishes, like Boko Haram, like Ghengis Kahn, like, like, like.
posted by Oyéah at 12:01 PM on May 17, 2015 [2 favorites]


Pagels dodn't write Chalice, sorry, she wrote The Gnostic Gospels. I read them in the same week, long time ago.
posted by Oyéah at 12:05 PM on May 17, 2015 [1 favorite]


Equating a hunter-gatherer lifestyle with some measure of egalitarianism has been normal in anthropology for decades, and I don't think that's wrong, but I wouldn't overestimate how uniform it was in the past or make too many assumptions about the emotional realities.

Here's Jean L. Briggs writing about the topic in her classic ethnography, Never in Anger: Portrait of an Eskimo Family (1970) in the section "Men and Women: The Warmth and Luxury of Male Dominance":
Utku women, as far as I could tell, did not feel beleaguered by the demands of their men. A woman did not resent it when her husband took the best of the lighting and cooking equipment with him on his trips to Gjoa Haven, leaving her to suffer from the cold. She did not feel unjustly put upon when her husband waked her in bitter darkness to chase a loose dog, usually in vain, through the camp. She rationalized these vicissitudes in terms of the feeling that it is the men who have the hardest work to do, going out in the coldest weather to fish or hunt and making long difficult sled trips under the most adverse conditions. "We want to do what we can to help them because they take care of us."
That's from research conducted in the 60s, and it sure sounds like an ordinary 60s idea, hunter-gatherer or not.

Also, contemporary hunter-gatherer groups may not be comparable to the many more that existed in the past. La relación of Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca (1537) is by no means the most reliable ethnographic document you could hope for, but it's suggestive with regard to the variability even among hunter-gatherer groups living near to one another. After the expedition he was with broke up disastrously, Cabeza de Vaca lived for many years among groups along the Gulf coast, first staying for a long time with a group he called the Capoques. Here are some notes I took while reading his description of living with them (just selecting the bits that have something to do with gender):
  • They are clearly a hunter-gatherer society and, in many ways, a classic example of the lifestyle.
  • The men hunt with bow and arrow; the women work constantly, mostly gathering roots from under water.
  • They're very generous and have no chief.
  • Each man has one wife, except for shamans who may have two or three.
  • If a son dies, folks wail every day at dawn, noon, and sunset for a year.
Later, he stayed with a group he called the Quevenes, and here's what I have in my notes about their attitudes on gender and sexuality (as well as a few notes on subsistence, just to reinforce that they're hunter-gatherers):
  • Female infanticide is common--newborn girls are often fed to the dogs. The men strongly prefer exogamy for their own mates, and raising girls to give to other groups would supposedly tend to help those groups.
  • People eat deer rarely--more often roots, fish, spiders, ant pupae, worms, lizards, salamanders, and snakes. They also save bones and pulverize them to eat them too.
  • Men buy wives from other groups for like a bow and two arrows or maybe one square net.
  • However, marriages are informal and easily dissolved.
  • The houses are matting bound to four hoops, and houses are carried on the backs of women.
  • Men bear no burdens, but women work very hard.
  • The men can run without rest and follow a deer all day.
  • The whole group moves every two or three days and plants nothing.
I don't mean to hold this up as great evidence, but over-generalizing based on what two groups in Africa do today and over-romanticizing hunter-gatherer lifestyles in general is probably not warranted. And please note, I especially don't mean to say any of this is representative of a "natural" human condition. There is a wealth of anthropological material on gender and sexuality that suggests culture always intervenes in whatever that might have been.
posted by Monsieur Caution at 12:12 PM on May 17, 2015 [37 favorites]


newborn girls are often fed to the dogs.

:o
posted by onlyconnect at 12:31 PM on May 17, 2015 [1 favorite]


Anybody have a copy of the actual paper? There seem to be a whole ton of dubious assumptions in this, and a big oversell as to the conclusions, so I'd like to look at what the actual research shows.
posted by klangklangston at 12:36 PM on May 17, 2015 [2 favorites]


I'll second the recommendation for The Chalice and the Blade. Sex at Dawn also makes a similar argument from a different angle, and is well worth reading if you're interested in the sexual politics of hunter-gatherer societies.
posted by shponglespore at 12:51 PM on May 17, 2015


Herding cultures are also more gender equalitarian -- things get a lot tricker and uneven with agriculture and long term property holding.
posted by The Whelk at 1:01 PM on May 17, 2015


All equality is lost when women and girls become the spoils of war.

I am not an anthropologist or historian, but this rings true to me. It takes a certain amount of resource surplus and concentration to be able to keep human chattel, and from my limited understanding of hunter/gather societies they don't usually have that level of surplus. You need haves and have-nots (or is it haves-not?), and we have tended to structure those hierarchical societies such that women are the ultimate have-nots.
posted by Dip Flash at 1:11 PM on May 17, 2015 [1 favorite]


Here's the paper, and here's the supplementary material with more information about the methods.
posted by dialetheia at 1:36 PM on May 17, 2015 [7 favorites]


Depending on who you read, widespread slavery, warfare and great gender power imbalances have all been linked to humans settling down with agriculture.

These are not new ideas.
posted by edgeways at 2:50 PM on May 17, 2015


The idea that hunter-gatherer societies were not just generally egalitarian but specifically more gender egalitarian than the more complex agrarian societies that followed them is actually an extremely old and now Wikipedia-enshrined idea that can be traced back first to Frederick Engels' The Origins of the Family, Private Property and the State. That got picked up in the 1970s as Marxist anthropology and feminist anthropology cross-fertilized to produce Marxist feminist anthropology, with Eleanor Leacock's oft-anthologized "Women in Egalitarian Societies" serving as somewhat of a manifesto in those circles. There followed significant debate over just how egalitarian hunter-gatherer societies are (and as Monsieur Caution cautions, it's a mistake to lump them all together as socially identical).

This article does seem to add an interesting source of data and meshes up with a pattern that anthropologists identified long ago, which is that bilateral kinship systems (essentially, that a person has the same quality of relatedness to their paternal kin as they do to their maternal kin) are quite rare and most often seen in nomadic hunter-gatherer societies (although not all HG societies have bilateral kinship systems).
posted by drlith at 2:56 PM on May 17, 2015 [7 favorites]


Semi-related: I saw a recent argument that the Biblical ban on "lying with a man as if with a woman" was not based on the sexual acts but rather upon the expected gender roles, that treating a man as you would a woman would be considered the ultimate insult. Because the Judea-Christian culture proscribed in the Bible wanted all women to pay for what Eve did in the Garden of Eden. It now seems obvious that Male Privilege must have come out of Organized Religion since the only way you could really sell men on being subservient to an All-Powerful God was to let them have somebody else (women) equally-or-more subservient to them. Which supports my argument that you can't be an honest Humanist without being a Feminist. Sorry, so-called 'Atheist' dudebros.
posted by oneswellfoop at 3:18 PM on May 17, 2015 [2 favorites]


Is this what we would call equality if we observed it in our own society? Influence over the choice of who to live with? I mean I'm sure it's a good thing, but it seems like it's very different from equal opportunity.

I mean, some older couples who have a very patriarchal division of labour also seem to have their social engagements maintained and managed almost entirely by the woman, but we wouldn't normally think of that kind of arrangement as egalitarian.
posted by PJMcPrettypants at 3:35 PM on May 17, 2015


Melvin Konner makes a similar argument in Women After All. Konner was also instrumental in developing the Paleo diet, however, so I find it hard not to read this as another round of The Way We Never Were. Possibly unfair of me.
posted by frumiousb at 3:40 PM on May 17, 2015


That hunter-gather societies may have been egalitarian isn't much of an argument for the merits of egalitarianism, insofar as those societies tended very strongly to evolve into hierarchy and agricultural, and those that didn't so evolve were easily absorbed or destroyed by by hierarchical agricultural societies when the two came into conflict.
posted by MattD at 3:48 PM on May 17, 2015


So, are the MRAs as incensed about this article as they are about the new Mad Max movie?
posted by matildaben at 3:49 PM on May 17, 2015 [1 favorite]


Is this what we would call equality if we observed it in our own society? Influence over the choice of who to live with? I mean I'm sure it's a good thing, but it seems like it's very different from equal opportunity.

I mean, some older couples who have a very patriarchal division of labour also seem to have their social engagements maintained and managed almost entirely by the woman, but we wouldn't normally think of that kind of arrangement as egalitarian.


I think it's closer to a wife having absolute equal say to her husband in where they lived, and the couple having equal respect for each of them having access to their own resources (that is, in this case, relatives).

So, along the lines of a modern wife saying, "Great for you that you have a nice job and friends here, but I'm deciding we're moving to be closer to my family anyway." That certainly happens now, but it requires a fairly egalitarian relationship.
posted by jaguar at 3:51 PM on May 17, 2015 [1 favorite]


So, are the MRAs as incensed about this article as they are about the new Mad Max movie?

I'm sure it'll get twisted into "Patriarchy allowed civilization to begin, so it's right and just."
posted by jaguar at 3:53 PM on May 17, 2015 [1 favorite]


The idea that a lot of hunter-gatherer societies and small-scale horticultural societies are fairly sexually egalitarian is not new or controversial for anthropologists or sociologists. Hunter-gatherer societies are not remotely all alike, so "a lot of hunter-gatherer societies are X" or "some hunter-gatherer societies are Y" is not the same as "hunter-gatherers are X" or "hunter-gatherers are Y". Egalitarian is also not the same thing as peaceful and idyllic.

It's really important to progressives to see themselves as more "evolved" and "civilized" than their political opponents, described as "backwards", "primitive", "neantderthals". This ideology can get projected back onto history and onto other societies. Some people have contrary tendency to idealize hunter-gatherer societies as living in an idyllic state from which we've strayed, onto which is projected everything we see as good. Both of these are ideological projections which ignore the actual diversity, and reality, of human societies.
posted by nangar at 4:08 PM on May 17, 2015 [10 favorites]


That hunter-gather societies may have been egalitarian isn't much of an argument for the merits of egalitarianism, insofar as those societies tended very strongly to evolve into hierarchy and agricultural, and those that didn't so evolve were easily absorbed or destroyed by by hierarchical agricultural societies when the two came into conflict.

Evolution doesn't necessarily mean a progession towards something better, though. Cancer, for example, can also be described as a within-organism evolutionary process, in which selection operating on individual cells allows them to "outcompete" their neighbors for nutrients, but that doesn't mean that a tumor is some kind of more perfect state than normal tissue even though you could argue it is "more evolved" (if you define that as "heavily and recently diverged in a way that improves its fitness, at least in the short term").
posted by en forme de poire at 4:16 PM on May 17, 2015 [1 favorite]


I'm not even thinking to get into the research here, because it is so politically fraught. At the end of the day, history is never going to be my argument for what I do.
But I was brought up to believe that in viking-age Scandinavia, the women held the keys, and there is data to support that interpretation. The non-historian ideology behind my educations was that women were better at long term management and planning as well as conceptual work.
In my view, that was a very essentialist understanding of gender. Men can easily be as creative and innovative as woman. But you know, it takes a village…
posted by mumimor at 4:19 PM on May 17, 2015


> I'm sure it'll get twisted into "Patriarchy allowed civilization to begin, so it's right and just."

It's been done already. This was a fairly popular idea in the late 1800s. Mid 20th century feminists, like Riane Eisler (who's already been mentioned), rediscovered it and flipped it around. (I still think it's bullshit even if if you flip it.)
posted by nangar at 4:23 PM on May 17, 2015 [3 favorites]


Sarah Blaffer Hrdy made much the same argument in her Mothers and Others, though it was secondary to her main point (that humans are cooperative breeders, with kin and friends helping to raise children). She noted that in the hunter-gatherer societies she references, status is judged not by money or land, but by how many kin connections one has - the more family you had the richer you were. Women not only supplied much of the food, they supplied many of the kin connections as well. This gave them power. Added to the fact that divorce was easy to obtain and carried no stigma for men or women, and this was an incentive for a husband to treat his wife with respect - because the woman's family wouldn't stand for her to be badly treated, and she could threaten to take her marbles (family connections) and go home, if she was abused.

All that changed with agriculture - not only did (some) men amass property and goods, these, not (just) kin connections, became a measure of wealth. So men didn't have to treat their wives as equals in order to stay in her family's good books - he could ignore them or buy them off. Families began to overlook mistreatment of daughters because daughters were less valuable as workers or family connections. And women having more children meant that children were seen as more fungible, so they were more abused and less carefully looked after by a network of kin.

Obviously, it doesn't work quite like this in all foraging societies, and there have been agricultural societies like the Minangkabau of Sumatra, and the ancient Egyptians, who were egalitarian (see here for Egypt).
posted by Rosie M. Banks at 4:43 PM on May 17, 2015 [5 favorites]


So I only had time to skim the article, but it sounds like they were trying to create a model whereby individuals didn't specifically want to end up living with unrelated people, but the group ended up with this constitution over time, and they found that this is possible if men and women are equally responsible for choosing who lives with them. And this is important because this is the social structure found in two modern day hunter gatherer groups.

Is this approximately correct?

If so, it's a big jump from there to saying that early humans would have had gender equality. First, not all hunter gatherer societies today function like the two they describe. In fact, I'm pretty sure most Australian Aboriginal groups did not and do not. Secondly, especially given the variation in hunter gatherers today, we can't know how much they reflect early human society. Thirdly, there are presumably a LOT of ways you can end up with non-kin living with the group. Their model successfully does this by having men and women be equal in choosing who lives with them, but you could also, for example, have particular marriage rules that cause this outcome, or particular patterns of nomadicism. Agent-based models are great for finding variables that CAN result in a particular outcome, but they don't tell you whether you found the correct variable, or even the only possible variable.

Finally, it seems to me a stretch to say that sex equality over determining camp composition would necessarily correlate with sex equality in everyday life.
posted by lollusc at 5:36 PM on May 17, 2015 [5 favorites]


One shouldn't forget just how much anthropological research is informed by researcher bias, or to put it a bit differently, every single one of us must of necessity see the world before us in terms of our own preconceived ideas. It has been interesting for me recently to re-read a number of popular anthropological texts: The Harmless People, by Elizabeth Marshall Thomas, and works by Colin Turnbull, The Mountain People and The Forest People. And one thing that is very striking from a contemporary standpoint in all three of these books is the attitude to women. Men are seen as absolutely primary actors, and women are regarded with bemusement, and a sort of sense of "Look at her try and manipulate things to her liking, the minx! Women! What are they like, eh?" It's awfully jarring. I don't remember noticing this reading the texts in the seventies, and yet there's never been a time in my life I wouldn't have called myself feminist. I should hope this attitude isn't still endemic in the discipline.

And yet one of the passages from The Harmless People I best remember is a description of the husband and son of a woman who suffered from regular awful PMS, begging her to go out foraging on one of her bad days, and doing the foraging (half-assedly) themselves when she wouldn't. The way the passage is written, 1950s attitudes to gender roles are just as evident as anything that may have been going on with the !Kung people.
posted by glasseyes at 5:58 PM on May 17, 2015 [4 favorites]


“There was a time when you were not a slave, remember that. You walked alone, full of laughter, you bathed bare-bellied. You say you have lost all recollection of it, remember. The wild roses flower in the woods. Your hand is torn on the bushes gathering the mulberries and strawberries you refresh yourself with... You say there are no words to describe this time, you say it does not exist. But remember. Make an effort to remember. Or, failing that, invent."

--Monique Wittig, Les Guérillères
posted by overglow at 6:25 PM on May 17, 2015 [5 favorites]


I have always wished that there was a scholarly effort to make a numerical index of misogyny in a society -- a kind of Gini coefficient for gender equality. It could take into account differing views of women's legal rights, of women's prominence in politics, in property division, in culture, etc. It might begin to explain why, for example, ancient Egyptian women were comparatively free, while ancient Greek women suffered a kind of purdah. But when I tried to search for something like that, I just found some nonsense about "Eurabia."

glasseyes, I'm surprised to see that you found gender bias against women in Thomas's work. She wrote Reindeer Moon, which is far and away the best novel of prehistory I have ever read, and a necessary corrective to the Earth's Children series with Ayla. In Thomas's novel, men and women had differing kinds of power, but they were equals in a constant and terrible struggle for survival. It surprises me that Thomas had such popular works about living with dogs and cats, but I'm glad she made money somehow. Reindeer Moon is not the kind of novel to get itself a movie starring Daryl Hannah.
posted by Countess Elena at 9:46 PM on May 17, 2015 [1 favorite]


I'm sure it'll get twisted into "Patriarchy allowed civilization to begin, so it's right and just."

Camille Paglia once said that if it were up to women to invent civilization, "we would still be living in grass huts." But Paglia is the alcoholic aunt at the Thanksgiving of academia.
posted by Countess Elena at 9:50 PM on May 17, 2015 [8 favorites]


Is it a net benefit or a net detriment for people in general? We don't have a lot of pure hunter-gatherer people left, but from what I've seen on Discovery or National Geographic, their lives were rather challenging and didn't have a lot of what we modern people would consider pretty essential. It's somewhat easier to have an egalitarian society when no one has very much, and life is risky and difficult.

In other words, is it "better" to be in a society where everyone has 1-2 units of resources (hunter-gatherer), or in a society where the average is 100, some people have 5, and a tiny handful have 1,000,000 (modern Western culture)?
posted by theorique at 4:19 AM on May 18, 2015


We don't have a lot of pure hunter-gatherer people left, but from what I've seen on Discovery or National Geographic, their lives were rather challenging and didn't have a lot of what we modern people would consider pretty essential. It's somewhat easier to have an egalitarian society when no one has very much, and life is risky and difficult.

On the other hand, the studies I read, back when I was an anthropology undergraduate, claimed that in order to make a decent living as a hunter-gatherer, one need only "work" 15-20 hours per week. Of course that depends on the season, health of the individual and the party, knowledge of the available resources, and the location. But if you're good at hunting, and it takes you one full day to take a fur seal, then you're done with your work for the week.

Although, thinking about it, I suspect the studies focused mostly on obtaining the raw materials for food, and not processing them for food and material welfare: women would certainly be spending more time processing skins for leather than the men were hunting them, I assume...
posted by suelac at 8:27 AM on May 18, 2015 [1 favorite]


Countess Elena, as I said I re-read The Harmless People recently and that attitude leaped out at me with regard to descriptions of young barely post-pubescent women. Which I found surprising as that book's kind of seminal to the growth of my adult mind. But those sorts of attitudes are still culturally endemic even though nowadays it's not so unheard of to vigorously contest them; and it would be more surprising to find a young writer of the time who didn't have the remnants of such conventions festering away unexamined in their mind.

Actually imo early Ursula Le Guin displays much the same trajectory: young, highly intelligent and imaginative thinker shows traces of patriarchal thinking and exceptionalism* in her work, until life experience teaches her more about the structural causes of women's perceived limitations. Le Guin also having her mind nutured within a family of anthropologists.

* 'I'm intellectual, a masculine trait, not like the rest of the women in my family and their inferior feminine pursuits.' To be fair I haven't got the references to back this up - never bookmarked - but I have read early Le Guin essays that make me think this is how she started out in her thinking.
posted by glasseyes at 11:23 AM on May 18, 2015 [1 favorite]


"Their model successfully does this by having men and women be equal in choosing who lives with them, but you could also, for example, have particular marriage rules that cause this outcome, or particular patterns of nomadicism. Agent-based models are great for finding variables that CAN result in a particular outcome, but they don't tell you whether you found the correct variable, or even the only possible variable."

And maybe someone with a better anthropology background can tell me why they make the assumption (with no source as far as I can find it) that unequal decision making power is best represented by choosing kin of the same gender, rather than choosing kin in general. Is there some population basis, like if a couple has a daughter they're likely to have another daughter rather than a son?

(Thanks so much to dialetheia for a link to the damn paper.)
posted by klangklangston at 11:49 AM on May 18, 2015


dia's links are unfortunately blocked, so I'll try later at home, but any opinions on Les Guérillères as well?

(and huh, the Guardian's comments are sorta decent, even if they don't have the same bars to commenting.)
posted by halifix at 12:05 PM on May 18, 2015


Sexual equality is common sense. When entering "definition of life" into Google, the first response is this:
"1. the condition that distinguishes animals and plants from inorganic matter, including the capacity for growth, reproduction, functional activity, and continual change preceding death."

In keeping with this subject, consider "reproduction." In order to reproduce, both sexes are needed. What do you have against life? Both sexes are needed, and, since "reproduction" is one of the key aspects of life, both are equally needed, regardless of the roles they play in reproduction. Again, it is common sense; water is composed of hydrogen and oxygen. We can't have one without the other, regardless of how much we like the atomic properties of either atom.

The fact that the sexes are different (not that they should be treated differently) ensures the survival of the species. What? Are you an anti-humanist?

Looking at this chain of thought logically, you can never make any progress without introducing something different. Adding more of the same thing to the same thing only produces more of the same thing. The only thing one can expect from tautological thinking is to loose interest. You need interest in order to increase.
posted by rankfreudlite at 3:27 PM on May 19, 2015


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