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Deconstructing "Matriarchal Myth"

The outlines of the book's critique will be familiar to any well-read
person. Feminists have invented a "golden age," a utopian narrative
fantasizing a time when women were free. Eller calls it "a
universalizing story: once things were good, everywhere; now they are
bad" -- an account based on dualistic thinking and "a reductive
notion" of who women and men are. (Wait, which is the reductive idea:
that women have always been subordinate and men dominant; or that
other models have existed in human society, and that even patriarchal
societies show a significant range in the degree of domination? Eller
scolds that theories for the cause of patriarchy "tend to find fault
with men," who are described as awful and wicked. But elsewhere we are
told that "narrators of the myth are generally reluctant to blame
men..." It's enough to give you whiplash.

The simplistic charge of inventing a "golden age" avoids having to
look at evidence for a more complex picture. Feminist historians are
not the only targets of this characterization. It has also been
leveled at indigenous accounts of European conquest and slavery, for
looking to cultures that revere Nature, in which the sacred permeates
daily life. Eller makes this connection, comparing what she calls
"essentialist" feminists to people of color who embrace a positive
vision of their "race." (Actually, "blackness" or "Raza" or
"Indian-ness," are generally used for their cultural rather than
biological meanings.) She finds this "discomfiting" because race has
been a tool used against people of color. The oversimplication doesn't
serve her analysis well. Reasonable people will acknowledge that there
is much more to Afrocentrism than theories about "sun people" and "ice
people." The ideas are more usually based on culture and history and
address the ideological underpinnings of racism.

The Myth seems to admonish that the issue of identity under oppression
should not be engaged directly. To speak of groups with common history
comes too close to "essentialism." On those terms, it's hard to see
how to stop the dominant groups' ideology from continuing to define
reality. As Chris Brickell comments, "the term 'essentialism' has
become something of an epithet," even a term of abuse. ["Radically
Speaking! A Reply to Alison Jones," Feminist Journal of Aotearoa,
Number 59, December 1998, http://www.massey.ac.nz/~wwwms/59.html] Most
often it is levelled at feminists, whose analysis of historical
patterns and behavorial conditioning gets equated with biological
determinism, no matter how explicitly they reject it.

To hear Eller tell it, matristic historians have fixed on a theory
that women's original power was based on male ignorance of conception,
and its overthrow followed men's discovery that they had a part in
generation. This claim has been made, but it's a minority viewpoint.
Most of her targets overwhelmingly reject the assumption that archaic
peoples were ignorant of the basics of reproduction, maintaining that
humans ten thousand years ago were no less intelligent and observant
than we are today.) The sparse citations that Eller supplies don't
come close to proving her contention that the men-in-the-dark theory
of patriarchal revolution "reigns supreme" over all others. (A rich
irony here is that Bronislaw Malinowski, whose functionalist
interpretation of patriarchal takeover myths Eller espouses, himself
interpreted the cultural unimportance of paternity among Trobriand
Islanders as ignorance of how children were conceived.) [See his
Argonauts of the Western Pacific, 1950, pp 52-55, 71-2]

Eller believes that "virtually all feminist reconstructions of
matriarchal society" focus on childbirth. [INLINE] She finds it
significant that many childless women celebrate birth or menstruation
as central mysteries of matrix cultures. She deplores this approach as
a centerpiece of "essentialism," but the feminist resacralization of
women's bodies was drieven by more than a reaction to historic
misogyny. The rediscovery of ancient art and surviving cultural
traditions celebrating women's embodied power played a crucial part.

<<< Brazil

For Eller, there is to be no reclaiming of female experiences which
lie at the foundation of life itself, yet have been so deeply marked
by patriarchal definition and control. She concedes it's reasonable to
rehabilitate degraded categories which have been defined as feminine,
but objects to continuing to define them as female. (In the case of
childbirth, it's hard to do otherwise.) Women looking for positive
female history are just deluding themselves: "inventing" a past.

In the brave new world of deconstruction, the heaps of cultural
baggage calling the female "bad" and "inferior" can be disposed of at
will. But the positive associations of "woman" must be stripped away
as well, in hopes that this will somehow make oppressive realities
disappear. It's hard to imagine the world's women going along with
this prescription. I think most would be skeptical that the problem is
that superficial, and rightly suspicious of giving up what identity
and power they do have for theoretical projections of pie-in-the-sky.

Eller throws out charges of "biological determinism", then backs away,
qualifies them, and reasserts them again as fact. At one point she
says Òthe myth of matriarchal prehistory could almost be read to say
that gender, at least as we know and experience it, is a cultural
invention.Ó But on the next page, she asserts that even though
feminist theory is reacting against the idea of biological causes for
patriarchy, Òyet its basic approach is to accept these biologically
determined sex differencesÓ in the guise of ÒtimelessÓ femininity.
Some pages down the line, it's a settled question: ÒDespite their
claims of biological determinism and robust sex difference, feminist
matriarchalists recognize the cultural determinants of gender."

No perspective on historical patterns enters into this muddled and
distorted picture. The vast majority of matrix historians are saying
that patriarchy emerged out of historical processes, not from
biological necessity. Turning this problem around the other way, isn't
declaring patriarchy a historical universal a kind of biological
determinism? To insist that, amidst all the luxuriant variation in
human culture, that egalitarian societies never emerged, seems pretty
equivalent to positing male domination as an inherent trait.

>>>--<<<

Although the book is titled The Myth of Matriarchal Prehistory, its
true subject is anthropological theory. Having rebuked matristic
historians for using ethnographic data to buttress their case, Eller
proceeds to do just that. She writes that "it makes good sense" for
anthropologists to use ethnography to speculate about prehistory. For
her the salient point is that "Ethnographic analogies to contemporary
groups with lifeways similar to those of prehistoric times ... show
little sex egalitarianism and no matriarchy." A further disproof is
"the fact that matrilineal kinship systems are found at all levels of
social complexity, not just in groups judged to be most like the
social model we conjecture for prehistoric times."

Eller's covert assumption appears to be that modern hunter-gatherers
or horticulturalists can be taken as representative of some primeval
order, socially as well as technologically. This kind of theoretical
leap has been rejected by American Indians, among other critics, as
giving off more than a whiff of the racist evolutionary ideas that
modern anthropologists find so embarrassing. Because the foraging
peoples' technology/economy has not changed dramatically does not mean
that their social organization remained static over the millennia.
They live within history, like the rest of humanity.

Given the paucity of material evidence and the absence of written
records, how would we know if these peoples' social structure had
changed? The primary source would be their own oral histories. These
have been chiefly available through anthropological mediators, due to
the way information has been organized in "Western" institutions. They
are presented as "ethnography," not as "history," and are not treated
as history. There has been a marked tendency to analyze them as
mechanisms of societal function, rather than on their own terms. But
in recent decades this kind of analysis-as-if-from-above has come
under heavy fire by anthropologists themselves.

Nevertheless, functionalism is Eller's approach as she turns to the
widespread legends that female power was overthrown by men who took
over the primary rituals, lodges, and sacred objects. Such traditions
have been recorded among Australian and Melanesian peoples, the Dogon
and Mende in west Africa and the Kikuyu in the east, northern Amazon
peoples and in southernmost South America, among others. Eller upholds
Malinowski's functionalist thesis of "charter myths," which interprets
the legends as a means of maintaining male dominance and defining
morality.

But this would be no less true if these traditions do contain a memory
of actual shifts in social organization. In fact, they would be more
necessary. If male dominance is universal and existed from the
beginning, what need is there to justify it in "charter myths"?
Eller's suggestion that they relieve social tensions falls flat. If
anything, they emphasize and reinforce them. Reenactment of the legend
involves an element of enforcement, as shown by her example of men
disguised as demons terrorizing nonconformist women by tearing through
their property and even beating or stabbing them. (Where? We aren't
told.) Eller thinks these myths function to reconcile women to their
status through a fantasy of former power, but the show of force seems
a more convincing reason.

Eller fails to consider a possible relationship between these
traditions of male seizure of ritual power and the many ceremonies in
which men imitate birth and menstruation, or wear fake breasts and
other female regalia. She also disregards historical patterns of men
taking over spheres originally presided over by priestesses. Some will
argue that references to Apollo's priests taking control of the female
oracles in Greece and Anatolia are more mythical than historical, but
the historical record does reflect an escalating encroachment of male
priests on female turf. For example, an inscription of the 4th century
BCE shows the high priestess of Eleusis fighting in court to stop the
male priest from usurping her traditional privileges. [Zaidman, 372]
We can also roughly track the elimination of priestesses from public
authority in Mesopotamia, China, and across Europe.

Nor are such accounts limited to ritual offices. Columbia River
legends of Tsagaglalal speak of a time when female chieftainship
ended. The Aztecs remembered a challenge thrown out to the male chiefs
by the female warrior Quilaztli. Historical documentation proves that
such female leaders existed in many American Indian societies. In
Angola, the BaChokwe say that the female ruler Ruwej was overthrown by
her brothers. (Another version says that Ruwej married a BaLuba chief
who took over her political functions and imposed patrilineal
descent.) To preserve their matrilineal ways, BaChokwe oral history
says that they split off from the BaLunda and migrated south to
Angola. Among the BaLunda themselves, the name Ruwej remained as one
of the titles of female officers in court councils. The names of other
court officesÑMwad Mwish, First Female Pillar, and Mwad Chilab, First
Courageous WomanÑindicate that they originally belonged to women. [B.
Crine-Mavar, ÒLÕAvant-Tradition Zairoise,Ó Revue Zairoise des Sciences
de l'Homme, No. 3, 1974] The high Aztec office of Cihuacoatl (Serpent
Woman, perhaps not coincidentally one of the titles of Quilaztli)
carries similar implications.

The Myth insists that all known human societies have valued men over
women, and points to anthropological studies which say that
matrilineages are just as male-dominated as patrilineal societies.
Sherry Ortner is cited for her claim that lower female status is "one
of the true universals, a pan-cultural fact." If so, Ortner's highly
theoretical paper does not demonstrate it; it is assumed as a given,
with only two shallow paragraphs on the Chinese and the Crow offered
as examples.* Eller mainly invokes Martin King White's attempt to
statistically calibrate indicators of female status -- a highly
problematic undertaking at best -- proving (she thinks) that it's
unrelated to goddess veneration, priestesses and matrilineage.
Predictably, contradictory findings by anthropologist Peggy Reeves
Sanday end up buried in the footnotes.

*(It turns out that classification of the Crow as male-dominated was
done on the basis of their menstrual taboos, and this negative
assessment has been stoutly challenged. Further, Ortner herself has
changed her mind about some of the ideas expressed in this article
written in the early 1970s. She apparently now concedes that not all
societies can be described as male-dominated.)

Anthropologist Barbara Joans notes that the subject of "matriarchy"
was long considered "a closed chapter" in her field, until feminists
like Sally Slocum (who wrote "Woman the Gatherer") reopened the case.
Joans thinks it likely that "some matriarchal systems" have existed.
She points to the few known examples of polyandrous societies: "Had
not several of them survived into the 20th century we would probably
be arguing the improbability of their existence." It would have been
declared a myth "because it contradicts so much current
anthropological data."

Eller has a basis for saying that matrilineage alone doesn't guarantee
an absence of patriarchal customs. The problem with her analysis is
that it's based on an either-or proposition, with no perspective on
historical shifts to patrilineage and patriarchal law. For example,
Elamite inscriptions show there was once matrilineal descent in
western Iran, and Duga, the oldest recorded epic of West Africa
proclaims: "Descendance from the woman, descendance from the woman has
ended..."

Countless folk traditions refer to an ancient era of mother-right. But
there don't seem to be any examples of patrilineal systems shifting to
matrilineal reckoning. The traffic is all in the other direction. In
the early '60s, Kathleen Gough documented signs of shifts away from
matrilineal descent reckoning under heavy colonial pressure.
Indigenous matrilineages today face even more intense pressures as
they battle for survival on all fronts.

Kathleen Sheldon of UCLA points to Vail and White's study of women's
songs in Malawi: "For Tumbuka women the late nineteenth century was
[INLINE] marked by a loss of power resulting from a shift away from
matrilineal descent patterns, an issue ignored in the conventional
regional histories of Ngoni raids and population migration."
["Periodization in AFrican History," H-AFRICA at H-NET.MSU.EDU, 11/22/00;
Leroy Vail and Landeg White, "The Possession of the Dispossessed:
Songs as History among Tumbuka Women, in Power and the Praise Poem:
Southern African Voices in History, ed. Vail and White, 231-277
(Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1991]

Kenya-Uganda borderlands >>>

What is completely missing from Eller's book is any discussion of
matrilineal societies with high female status, such as the Khasi (NE
India), [1]Musuo (SW China), Tuareg (Sahara), Keres (New Mexico),
[2]Minangkabau (Sumatra), Haudenosaunee (New York/Ontario), Amahuaca
(E Peru), Seri (NW Mexico), [3]Vanatinai (Pacifica). Nor are bilateral
societies with significant female spheres of power discussed. Also
missing is any historical perspective -- whether written, oral or
archaeological -- on female spheres of power in the Two Thirds World.
The Myth considers indigenous women only through the lens of Western
ethnography.

(Continued) .............................................[4] NEXT
------>

[5]Whose Interpretation?
[6]The Furor Over Gimbutas

[7]Where's the History?
[8]Arguing About the Goddess
[9]PoMo Prescriptions

Copyright 2000 Max Dashu

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References

1. http://www.suppressedhistories.net/articles/musuo.html
2. http://www.sas.upenn.edu/%7Epsanday/egginature.html
3. http://www.sas.upenn.edu/%7Epsanday/pacific2.html
4. http://www.suppressedhistories.net/articles/eller4.html
5. http://www.suppressedhistories.net/articles/eller.html
6. http://www.suppressedhistories.net/articles/eller2.html
7. http://www.suppressedhistories.net/articles/eller4.html
8. http://www.suppressedhistories.net/articles/eller5.html
9. http://www.suppressedhistories.net/articles/eller6.html
10. http://www.suppressedhistories.net/articles/articles.html
11. http://www.suppressedhistories.net/catalog.html
12. http://www.suppressedhistories.net/index.html