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From International Socialism 2 : 49, Winter 1990, pp. 123–128.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive.
In Sheila McGregor’s article on rape in International Socialism 2 : 45 [1], she refers to anthropological evidence for male domination in one pre-state society. Her reference to the Yanomamo is the first time a member of the Socialist Workers Party has mentioned, in print, that pro-state societies exist in which there is the systematic oppression of women. This omission up until now has severely weakened our credibility with those who have a slight acquaintance with the relevant anthropological literature. Therefore Sheila’s article is a very welcome opening up of issues that can, in my view, be more adequately explained by Marxists than by patriarchy theorists in the light of recent advances in anthropology.
The reasons Sheila gives for male domination are, however, highly problematical. The key passage is in footnote 12:
The case of the Yanomamo Indians in Brazil and Venezuela which is often used as evidence to illustrate that hunter-gatherer bands can be extremely violent in fact proves very little. The interpersonal violence does sound appalling, but then it has to be remembered that theirs is the only band in the region to have survived the Spanish conquest. Th impact of warfare imposed from without and the current scarcity of food in the area where they live adequately account for the violence today ... where there is violence against women there is also violence against men by other men fighting for supremacy. [2]
Sheila then quotes Leacock and Sanday as authorities for this view. This is actually three different arguments, although they are presented as one. The first two of Sheila’s arguments for the causes of violence against women are clear: a) war externally imposed from colonial impact b) war as a result of resource stress.
Neither of these positions is an adequate explanation of women’s oppression among the Yanomamo. Why should colonial war lead to women’s oppression? Colonial war could be called upon to explain a multitude of oppressive practices. Left as such a bald statement it only succeeds in closing off inquiry into more proximate causes. Sheila quotes no sources for the effect of the Spanish conquest on the Yanomamo, and this is hardly surprising, since the Yanomamo were unknown to the ‘outside’ world until a few decades ago. This claim can only be speculation on Sheila’s part. Even then, a four century time lag between cause and effect is equivalent to saying that the 11th century Norman conquest of England explains the 15th century witch trials! It also fails to address prior causes, the practices of women’s subordination that pre- date contact. Among many pre-state societies almost untouched by colonialism, and certainly not subjected to the Spanish conquest, the evidence for male domination is just as strong as amongst the Yanomamo, e.g. Baruya. [3]
And if it were just resource stress, as the second position maintains, then again this would not explain the Papua New Guinea horticultural societies which are not resource stressed but which do oppress women. Further, if we ascribe to Engels’ mistaken view that all the earliest societies were living in absolute scarcity, then that also implies that all these societies, following Sheila’s logic, also were societies that oppressed their women. Either Engels was wrong about primordial absolute scarcity, or Sheila is wrong in equating scarcity with women’s oppression. [4] Either they both cannot be true, or both are wrong.
But a third position is implicit in the argument. Sheila must be aware, since she quotes Sanday who provides the evidence, that the Yanomamo are by no means exceptional when it comes to the oppression of women. In 51 percent of pre-state societies rape, and usually gang-rape, regularly occurs and is consciously used by men to discipline women. ‘We tame our women with the banana.’ [5] This quote comes from the Mundurucu, who like the Yanomamo also inhabit the Amazon jungle. (Presumably another group of survivors from the Spanish conquest!) If you count wife-beating, general violence against all women, men’s houses and machismo as other indicators of oppression, and separation from the means of production as an indicator of exploitation, as any Marxist must, then according to Sanday in 87 percent of pre-state societies women are oppressed. [6] Why has Sheila failed to refer to Sanday’s evidence for the widespread oppression of women in the anthropological record, and only mentioned the Yanomamo? This evidence cannot be explained by the Spanish conquest, since Sanday’s sample is drawn from across the globe. Neither can it be explained by other forms of colonial penetration, since these practices pre-date contact. Nor can it be claimed that anthropology is a ‘pseudo-science’, since these are Sheila’s sources. Does Sheila intend her remarks to apply to groups other than the Yanomamo? Are they to be generalised to the many pre-state societies which are not severely resource-stressed and where colonialism is not a necessary or sufficient cause of women’s oppression? It makes no sense to quote Sanday as an authority for a position that applies only to the Yanomamo when it is Sanday who shows that it is the generally prevailing condition of women in pre-state societies. If we are to make anything of Sheila’s position, then her remark, ‘where there is violence against women there other men fighting for supremacy’, can only be interpreted as a third position: c) war generated between or within ‘supremacy’ leads to the oppression of women.
Now taking the authorities first, it must be pointed out that Leacock and Sanday do not provide any justification for war between males (position c) to explain male domination of women. On the contrary Leacock argues that there is no evidence for male domination in any pre-state society (thus disagreeing with positions b and c). For Leacock it is either a failure of male-biased anthropologists’ observations that ideologically constructs oppression when none exists, or the success of colonial penetration that decimates these societies into social collapse (position a). ‘To the extent that ... warring ... were areas of male ritualisation, they were just that: areas of male ritualisation.’ [7] And Sanday’s position is not the one Sheila attributes to her. ‘Whether male dominance is part of the solution to stress depends on the previously prevailing configuration of culture.’ [8] For Sanday male domination is a result of prior cultural sex-role plans, and these create fighting and warring between males. Rather than war being the condition for women’s oppression, she emphasises that recent migration and resource stress in interaction with sex-role plans, causes a highly variable pattern of women’s status in traditional societies. Sanday’s insistence that it is at root the cultural choice of sex-role plan that shapes women’s destiny hers is not a materialist analysis of women’s oppression.
These two authors cannot be cited by Sheila in support of her view that male domination of women results from ‘men fighting for supremacy’. If we were to adopt this position, it would put us in an alarmingly weak position. If it were true, what explains ‘fighting for supremacy’? Sheila seems to favour the rise of the proto-state argument, by her reference to the Sumer. But while horticultural societies are the majority of pre-state societies today, they do not organise themselves through proto-state or class structures, nor are they agricultural societies such as Sumer. In the Sumer case agricultural accumulation within a priestly class, or rather competing priestly classes, is the key dynamic. How can Sheila explain, with her Sumer model, the oppression of women amongst the Baruya [9] where there are, according to her definitions, no classes, no state, no private property in land, no agriculture and no colonial penetration till the 196os? There are innumerable other examples, and I only mention the Baruya as they are well known. Besides Sanday, there is a large body of anthropological literature on this of which Sheila seems unaware. [10]
The argument fails completely when looking at hunting and gathering societies. If Sheila’s position were true, then we would expect no pre- contact oppression of women amongst hunters and gatherers when either there was no warring between males, or when there was no resource stress, or both. Yet according to Sanday rape regularly occurs in one quarter of gathering and of hunting societies. And in a further 50 percent of hunting societies and 23 percent of gathering societies, some other indicator or male domination occurs which pre-dates contact. Sanday, and other authors, show that there is no simple linkage between women’s status in these societies and either warring or stress. The ‘best’ case study is, of course, the Australian Aborigines, who are hunters and gatherers with systematic male domination. But how are we to incorporate evidence like this? The Aborigines do not have constant warring among themselves, do not have agriculture or indeed horticulture, have been studied by male and female anthropologists, and retain a culture that pre-dates Western contact. There was nothing like the Spanish conquest, and in Northwest Arnhem land white penetration did not begin until the 1940s, and it is not resource-stressed in the way we presently define it. Neither were they once horticulturalists who have ‘degenerated’ into hunters and gatherers. All of this can be confirmed in any of the numerous texts on the Aborigines. [11] If we accept Sheila’s generalisations, and then apply them to the evidence of the Aborigines, we are in danger of slipping into a position very similar to Godelier’s, that male domination is a product of men’s role as hunters in the primitive division of labour. This would make male domination a virtual universal in the anthropological record. While Sheila is not saying that, it would be the logical extension of accepting the ‘warring males hypothesis’ with problematical cases like the Aborigines. While widening the field of ethnographic evidence Sheila’s article raises highly problematic formulations that move dangerously close to the arguments of patriarchy theorists that men have always oppressed women.
For some years now the Socialist Workers Party has defended Marxism against the attacks of bourgeois feminism. But such has been the apparent strength of the orthodox anthropological critique of Morgan/Engels view of primitive communism that we have succumbed to adopting the feminist theory of women-the-gatherer. This theory suggests that when women’s gathered produce constitutes the majority of subsistence then women have a high status, but when hunted meat constitutes the majority of subsistence then men are of higher status than women. This model of human origins is but the mirror image of patriarchy theory. [12] With recent advances in anthropology we do not need such theories, and it is now time we returned to defending our traditions and to standing by Engels’ claim of primordial equality.
In defending Engels, rather than retreating under the weight of patriarchy theory-inspired anthropology, we can both explain this evidence and extend Marxist method to pre-state societies. It is the view of a number of recent authors [13] that the conditions for primitive communism largely obtained during the last ice age. Women and men lived in complete equality in big game cooperative hunting societies – ‘matriarchal’ communism. After the last ice age, with the extinction of large game animals, most hunting and gathering societies became resource stressed compared to their preceding collective hunting strategy. For these societies the matriarchal relations of production became a fetter on the lower productive forces of privatised hunting and gathering, and the male control of women held sway over the claims of wider matrilineal kinship ties. Between 45,000 and 10,000 years ago most human societies lived in mass plenty and that was the condition for ‘primitive’ communism. This is clearly shown by M. Sahlins. [14] As Marxists, that is what we would expect, that the level of human freedom is related to the level of resources. Because we have got caught in the anthropological trap of refusing to build historical models, we try to sustain the indefensible position that all contemporary pre-state cultures possess a ‘rough’ egalitarian structure. Since in most of these societies men dominate women, and in half of them rape regularly occurs, this leaves us with an extremely impoverished version of ‘communism’. Exactly what our critics accuse us of.
1. Sheila McGregor, target="new">Rape, Pornography and Capitalism, International Socialism 2 :45, Winter 1989, pp. 3–31.
2. Ibid., p. 28.
3. M. Godelier, The Making of Great Men (Cambride, 1986).
4. Or all of Marxism is wrong in linking women’s oppression with material relations. The answer, for Marxists, lies in how to define a primitive (‘matriarchal’) communist mode of production, but that lies outside the limits of this note.
5. R. Murphy, Social Structure and Sex Antagonism, Southwestern Journal of Anthropology 15, 1, p. 195, quoted in R. Reiter (ed.), Toward an Anthropology of Women (London, 1975), p. 163.
6. Sheila makes a number of errors on page 8 of her article in claiming that Sanday says ‘... in 33 percent [of 150 different societies] there was no male aggression and women wielded economic and political power.’ First, she does not make clear that these statistics refer to traditional pre-state societies only. This is important, since on page 7 of her article she claims that all ‘band’ societies are ‘free from sexual oppression’. This is clearly contradicting the argument on page 8 quoted above. But most importantly, Sanday does not say what Sheila suggests. Sanday in fact claims that in 33 percent of pre-state societies rape does not occur and women wield economic and political power. If you include other indicators of male aggression (wife beating, men’s houses, machismo) then this reduces the proportion of societies ‘free from sexual oppression’ where women wield economic and political power to only 13 percent. See P.R. Sanday, Female Power and Male Dominance: on the origins of sexual inequality (London 1981), pp. 166–167.
7. E. Leacock, Myths of Male Dominance (London 1981), p. 142.
8. P.R. Sanday, op. cit., p. 186.
9. M. Godelier, op. cit.
10. J.G. Flanagan, Hierarchy in Simple “Egalitarian” Societies, Annual Review of Anthropology 18 (1989), pp. 245–266.
11. K. Maddock, The Australian Aborigines (London 1973), is perhaps the most accessible.
12. This is most clear in C. Harman, Women’s Liberation and Revolutionary Socialism, in International Socialism 2 : 23, Spring 1984, pp. 3–41. For a critique of this position see L. Sims, Engels Revisited: a new look at the matriarchy thesis (unpublished, 1989).
13. A. Testart, Des Classification Dualistes en Australie (Lille 1978). A. Testart, Le Communisme Primitif (Paris 1985). C. Knight, Levi-Strauss and the Dagon: Mythologiques Reconsidered in the light of an Australian aboriginal myth’, Man (NS 1983), 18, pp. 21–50. C. Knight, Menstruation as Medicine, Social Science and Medicine, Vol. 21 (1985), No. 6, pp. 671–683. C. Knight, Menstruation and the Origins of Culture: a reconsideration of Levi-Strauss ‘s work on symbolism and myth (unpublished PhD thesis, London 1987). C. Knight, Menstrual Synchrony and the Australian Rainbow Snake, in T. Buckley and A. Gottleib (eds.), Blood Magic (London 1988). C. Knight, The Origins of Human Society (London 1989). C. Knight, The Hunter’s Own Kill Rule, in R. Willis, (ed.), Symbolising Animals (London 1989). C. Knight, The Origins of Society (New York 1991). C. Knight, The Greatest Myth on Earth (London, forthcoming).
14. M. Sahlins, Stone Age Economics, (London 1974).
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