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Ten Thousand Years of Patriarchy

Alice Evans has a long write-up of some of her ideas about the origins of patriarchy, Ten Thousand Years of Patriarchy:

Patriarchy has persisted for at least ten millennia. Cereal-cultivation, the plough and irrigation increased agricultural yields, enabling a taxable surplus, state-formation and social stratification across much of Eurasia. Land and herds were inherited by men, who maintained lineage purity by guarding women.

Eurasia then underwent an important divergence. South Asia and the Middle East saw tightening endogamy (caste and cousin marriage), alongside religious authoritarianism. The more visible the woman, the greater the suspicion and moral ambiguity. By preventing rumour, men preserved piety, honour, and inclusion within vital kinship networks. East Asia remained exogamous, while Europe became increasingly nuclear, democratic, and scientific. But as long as women laboured on family farms (lacking both economic independence and their own social organisations), this global variation in kinship, institutions and religion may not have made an enormous difference.

I was one of the people Alice corresponded with, so I knew the general outlines, but this is a massively interesting effort, and work in progress.

19 thoughts on “Ten Thousand Years of Patriarchy

  1. Question is, why did some humans become sedentary and agricultural? Why not remain nomadic hunters/foragers?

  2. Jason – On the good land the foragers were sedentary, not nomadic. This is true of the Pacific Northwest, California, Jomon Japan, probably also of the Mesolithic Baltic. People in these situations had social conventions that amounted to land tenure. The transition to sedentary agriculture was natural for them.

    Land tenure drove male dominance in society because, weirdly, only men fought over land and resources. This isn’t just humans; chimps are the same way. It’s a very old pattern

  3. Problems: I don’t like the introduction and some of the body which which gives a framing implying that matrilineality is the norm in SSA and Southeast Asia. We can see from the cited figures, that there is only a “Matrilineal Belt” in Africam at the frontier of Bantu Expansions, and some matrilineality at the frontier of Austronesian expansions.

    Even when we look at the source paper’s Fig 2 – https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6664141/ – you can see that only within a small subset of the Bantu and Austronesian trees is matrilineal, and that this is probably a derived state.

    I think this framing by Evans gives too much predominance to a theory that different technologically bound “Modes of Production” predict lineality, and thus gender relations.

    The framing also seems to underplay the patrilineality of SSA as a whole; we’d expect you don’t get that E3a patrilineal expansion (one of the most profound in human history) without some patrilineality and concern for patrilineality, at least bilinearity.

    I’d also say this contrasts particularly with the idea she presents that “Africa was late to transition to intensive agriculture and herding, due to poor soils and the tsetse fly. When the Bantu belatedly acquired cattle, they ceased to be matrilineal. “.

    But matrilineality doesn’t seem to be the ancestral state among Bantu, rather derived in some subgroups. I think Evans clearly downplays this because her thesis is probably “The plough and pastoralism created patrilineality”, and emphasizing that matrilineality is marginal and derived even in SSA and SEA would not be good for that thesis.

    As another cite, also consider the population size of these societies- https://www.worlddevelopment.uzh.ch/en/atlas/culheri/socorg/pama.html – provides a 2D space that plots lineage intensity against male:female bias in lineage focus and differentiates their sample by pop size by the size of the icon. Larger population size correlates to less intensity of kinship lineage (no surprise that for’ex Urdu speakers from a large scale society have lower kinship intensity than small scale African societies). And in general, even within Africa, on top of there are being few societies that have a matrilineal focus, those that do are small. (“Matri-oriented rules are rare (upper-left quadrant) which means that societies are rarely organized entirely along matrilineal rules. Not only is the number of such cultural units very limited, but the population size is usually quite small as is indicated by the size of the signatures. They typically are found in sub-Saharan Africa. “). So “Larger societies tend to weaken patrilineal lineage structures. Though East- and South Asian societies maintain patridominance, the lineage factor is less elaborated and inclusive. It semms that the alternative to patrifocality is not matrifocality (though logically possible), but are non-lineal, ego-oriented, bi-linear cognatic systems (lower left).”

    I’d also take exception with the claim that “Patrilineal clans emerged in Europe as a result of colonisation by horse-riding steppe peoples”. What we know of the EEF from adna indicates that this is just not so. (A list of many cites – https://pastebin.com/9nbvkFUr).

    So it’s kind of fine in many ways, but I think is misleading by overemphasizing the degree of differentiation in patrilineality among human societies. Certainly among agricultural human societies of the “Old World” as a whole. It seems the claim is “The plough and pastoralism created patrilineality” but I think this is quite doubtful. (It seems in general part of the idea that plough agriculture created a sort of anti-modern mindset that is later responsible for a reverse of fortune, but I don’t really believe that either.)

  4. @Jason: Gorillas too.

    @Matt: Thanks for the research.

    I am not going to do the research, but there was some pop anthropology in the 80s or 90s that claimed that the neolithic farmers of Europe were matriarchal and worshiped the mother goddess, and that it was the evil Indo-European pastoralist invaders who brought the Patriarchy to that sad sick place.

    In East Asia, the Chinese whose languages do not have gender marking, were matriarchal and worshiped the earth mother until European Colonialists imposed Patriarchy on them. /sarc

  5. Patriarchy exists in Sub-Saharan Africa too. But maybe it is not as prominent in the family structure, because Sub-Saharan Africa has the highest rate of single-mothers in the world, according to Gallup, 32%

    https://news.gallup.com/poll/286433/women-worldwide-single-moms.aspx

    The African proverb “It takes a village” (To raise a child) probably comes from the fact that 1/3rd of SSA families are single-mother, and therefore must require the rest of the village to rear the child.

  6. I should also note that they have some of the highest rates of being married with children; 51%. Nevertheless, 1/3rd being single-mother homes is notable and significant.

  7. @Jovialis, Pew found rates similar to or below Western Europe for “share of children in a single parent household” – https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2019/12/12/u-s-children-more-likely-than-children-in-other-countries-to-live-with-just-one-parent/

    Similar to Europe considering the range in SSA countries, though some are higher and lower.

    “Almost a quarter of U.S. children under the age of 18 live with one parent and no other adults (23%), more than three times the share of children around the world who do so (7%). The study, which analyzed how people’s living arrangements differ by religion, also found that U.S. children from Christian and religiously unaffiliated families are about equally likely to live in this type of arrangement.

    In comparison, 3% of children in China, 4% of children in Nigeria and 5% of children in India live in single-parent households. In neighboring Canada, the share is 15%.”

    Very consistent with my experience of Nigerians for this to be similar to Chinese and Indians.

    This may be demographic skew; maybe single mothers quite frequent but have only one child while married women have lots. Or it may just be bad data quality in either study. It is hard for me to imagine that 30% households really single parent in such a poor region though. Even though old man young woman marriage is frequent and death rates quite high.

  8. Also @Jovialis, there’s a high proportion of extended family and cohabitation in Africa, which might interact weirdly with how Gallup tested this, by asking whether a woman was single but lived in a household with children, which would pick up women who were aunties living with a married sister etc. They themselves noted:

    “Widespread poverty also often leads extended families to cohabitate, so it may be more likely in low-income regions for women who have children in their household to be a relative other than their mother.”

    They don’t actually explicitly ask if a woman is in a single parent household. Pew data don’t seem to have this issue, since they seem to be using census data sources to identify family structures.

  9. @Matt, those are good points to consider. It may be more difficult to decern the number of single-mother homes and the overall impact on family norms in Africa concerning patriarchy.

  10. Question is, why did some humans become sedentary and agricultural? Why not remain nomadic hunters/foragers?

    Hunting and foraging might afford a much better healthy lifestyle (better nutrition, more athletic bodies, more recreation, etc.) than farming, but it requires a vast amount of land per capita compared to farming. All those free resources have to renew themselves before being all consumed. Or, more accurately, there has to be enough new land with new resources, if current, present location supplies are exhausted.

  11. Question is, why did some humans become sedentary and agricultural? Why not remain nomadic hunters/foragers?

    Maybe because agriculture favored population size. It only had to happen one time, and once it happened, foragers were terminally disadvantaged in the long run.

  12. Hum… Why become sedentary and agricultural? Why not remain nomadic hunters/foragers? What ancient DNA has shown us is that lots of hunter gatherers don’t have an existing descendants. I.e. It’s a nice life style until everyone dies from lack of food over the winter. Agriculture and storage provide more consentient food security over the thin months.
    Cheers,
    Guy

  13. Maybe orthogonal to themain thrust, but the first para says:

    > In South Asia and the Middle East, most women remain secluded.

    Err, maybe? Is that true of Hindu peasant women in rural India? I’d say it is definitely *not* true of Sri Lankan women except for some Muslims.

    These societies are still sexist and perhaps patriarchal. But women participate in society and the economy, they are not hidden away.

  14. In fact, seclusion of women is at most a thing of the past for most of the Muslim world today.

  15. Is that true of Hindu peasant women in rural India?

    Perhaps in some parts of North/NW India, like Rajasthan, Haryana, and Western UP. Otherwise, generally no.

    I read the article but couldn’t figure out if “seclusion” referred to denial of participation in the economy or social intermingling with the opposite sex. I’d say India is mostly open on the former count and mostly not on the latter. I heard an interview of Alice on YouTube (by Shruti Rajagopalan) where she talked about women being allowed to gather around in groups with other females, and I’m not sure where in India there’s a proscription on that.

  16. Also, if you look at the female athletes who compete and win medals for India in the Olympics and other sporting events, I’d say a solid majority are from rural backgrounds. So whatever seclusion exists ain’t gonna last too much longer.

  17. @Numinous, may be influenced by ILO labour force participation statistics? They suggest India/Pakistan (lesser extent Bangladesh) unusual with female LFP around 20% (Bangladesh 35%) against a world mean around 47%. (Developed world is at 57-60%, while poorest countries in Africa+Laos+Vietnam+Cambodia around 70%).

    (E.g. via OWiD https://tinyurl.com/yu9wn9yy ).

    Possibly this is somehow not representative or not really a good measure of how free women are to participate in the economy though, perhaps due to some measurement differences with informal economy? I don’t really know though.

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