Coronavirus has provoked some of us to think about our worlds in new ways and to consider different horizons of change. Yet in many pandemic-related discourses and policies, I have been frustrated to see hegemonic ideals about care, kinship, and residence distract attention from empirical realities and adequate solutions. Examples range from the ubiquitous representation of care as embodied by women health workers and mothers to the shocking silence about disproportionate burdens of coronavirus illness and death born by men, and the wildly incorrect assumption that most humans live in and are cared for by nuclear family households.
Covid masculinities
Much attention has been drawn to vulnerabilities of women nurses, health aids, and caretakers. More gender awareness is needed for millions of men performing essential jobs as sanitation workers, truck and bus drivers, agricultural workers, miners, fishers, and loggers. These occupations are absolutely vital for public health, yet were already among the most dangerous and deadly before adding exposure to coronavirus. Around the world, they are performed overwhelmingly by men, in patterns of workplace violence so highly gendered that, in countries like USA, men suffer 92% of occupational deaths. The workplace, then, is a realm that calls urgently for improved care.
Data from countries around the world show that coronavirus infections tend to be much more severe among men than women, with death tolls as high as two times greater for men (Bhopal and Bhopal 2020). In the US, the death rate from coronavirus for men is 1.6 times that of women. This intersects with disproportionate burden of coronavirus infections and underlying conditions among racial and ethnic minorities, and among those who are less wealthy and less educated. In many contexts, then, it is poorer less-white men who are most vulnerable to suffer critical illness and death from coronavirus (Rushovich et. al 2021). Care for these groups needs to be much more visible in news and policy responses.
While analyses of structural inequalities in occupation, residence, and healthcare rarely address masculinities, some airtime has been dedicated to men’s behavior. Studies in various contexts found men to be much more likely than women to go without masks and to break quarantine. How can criticism of the behavior of individual men shift to societal commitments to supporting self-care among all humans, including variously positioned men?
Is it useful to blame men for getting sick? Feminists have struggled to motivate compassion for women whose conditions constrain the development of skills and confidence needed to establish dignified lives for themselves. Transitions to care-full worlds will also require compassion for boys and men whose gender expectations push them to demonstrate their manliness by performing dangerous labor in hazardous conditions, by exercising and enduring violence, and by taking risks with their health and their lives. Perhaps the devastating gendered impacts of the virus can spark mobilization against gender-linked violence that harms men and women in different ways.
While some people find safety and comfort at home, others face conflict and crowding, or lack homes altogether. Reports from diverse countries indicate that domestic violence has intensified during lock-downs, impacting women disproportionately. People who don’t even live in homes face different kinds of vulnerabilities. In most countries, women outnumber men among residents in long-term care centers, while men make up majorities as high as 90% in prisons, jails, migrant labor camps, homeless shelters, immigrant detention centers, and military barracks, all of which became hotspots for the virus. In these residential patterns too, the forms of violence and discrimination borne by men intersect with ethno-racial and class inequalities. Demands of care for those not living in households call for moral and institutional shifts away from private family responsibility toward community and commons.
Normative households
Kinship and sexuality are also fundamental in the organization of care. Many public health messages, exemplified by those pictured below, reinforce the widespread—and incorrect—assumption that contemporary populations live mostly in heteronormative nuclear households. In the US, however, only 20% of households consists of nuclear families, as measured by the US Census Bureau. Can we do better at supporting the other 80% to respond to this pandemic and conditions of life beyond?
The false portrayal of residential life as reflecting a normative kinship model limits support for the actual residential and kin arrangements through which care and provisioning are organized in today’s societies. Inaccurate assumptions that all people live like the Flintstones, the Simpsons, or the Jetsons seriously limit public health efforts by obscuring empirical realities, which are plural. Those public messages also operate to demean and delegitimize other ways of living, and to stifle creative responses to coronavirus and other challenges.
Across wealthy countries, the most common household category is a single person living alone (27% US and Canadian households, 40% of Swedish households). This New Yorkers Stay Home poster taps into possibilities of nourishing companionship in uni-person households through literature and interspecies relations (human & plant). Another creative response to needs for care and conviviality is found in queer dance parties organized online with scopes ranging from local communities to celebrity-filled global gatherings. This is not a trivial example; opportunities to dance, laugh, move together not only provide care and acknowledgement needed in quarantine (and other isolating conditions), they can also build values and pleasures outside the realm of economic competition, consumption, and profit. Alliances with LGBTQ and related social movements help to honor the diverse household and kin arrangements that people are already living, and to support innovations provoked by the pandemic, as well as those motivated by desires for positive transformation.
Where did this ill-fitting model come from?
Generations of anthropologists and archaeologists have documented a rich variety of arrangements for care, protection, provisioning, and regeneration of human communities. These are often lumped together under the term “extended family,” reinforcing the false assumption that all kinship is based on the nuclear family, from which other relations may “extend.”
Today, much public discourse, together with a surprising amount of academic work, ignores the diverse realities of kinship across cultures and through history, and instead features an ideological model of (re)production that was established and disseminated with the rise of colonial capitalism, through the following historical processes:
conceptual and institutional divorce of market-oriented activities identified as “productive labor” from other activities identified as “reproductive care“
designation of the first as “masculine” and the second as “feminine” allocation of disproportionate monetary value, resources, and power to masculine-associated production
20th century push toward nuclear family households as economic and residential unit
media, political, and educational messages convey expectations that human organization be based in heteronormative nuclear family households where men are excluded from care work
What drives ongoing pushes to keep imposing this model on populations that it so poorly represents? Why continue allocating responsibility of care to putative nuclear families in strategies that overburden some and fall short of needed care for many?
One key motive is the role this model has played as an instrument of industrial capitalist growth, adapted to engineer and to justify forms of appropriation that support profit and accumulation. The model has also been instrumental to the militarization of domestic and international conflicts related to this push. For me, then, challenging normative assumptions about this gender-kinship model is a vital move to curb and to heal eco-social damages provoked by the drive for growth.
What policies, practices, messages can support and motivate people of all identities to organize care with healthier arrangements of care?
A silver lining can be found in the potential of historical crises (like COVID-19 and climate break-down) to destabilize established orders, opening possibilities for new alliances toward healthier and more equitable worlds.
While respect for planetary boundaries demands degrowth of the total quantities of resources and energy transformed each day by the global economy, some features need to be nurtured and developed, namely infrastructures and institutions of care that enhance the well-being of more people in more places. Care-full paths forward are being explored by Degrowth and Feminism(s) Alliance (FaDA), in contexts including the coronavirus pandemic (Paulson 2020).
Amid the pandemic, we have been happily surprised to see governments experimenting with policies proposed in our book The Case for Degrowth (Kallis et al. 2020): companies and governments have reduced working hours, implemented work-sharing, and subsidized workers during quarantine and business closings. Enhanced public services have supported household and community economies, and mechanisms such as the US Defense Production Act have been mobilized to secure vital supplies and services.
Can we think about these moves as anticipatory strategies that may secure ongoing care for populations, and slow down the rush toward future disasters? For example, can provisional cash payments to sustain residents through the crisis lead the way to basic care incomes? Can defense budgets shift emphasis from updating military armaments toward protecting and regenerating human resources?
Policies like these may work in very different ways, depending on the degree to which they are institutionalized to stimulate economic growth or to promote equitable wellbeing; to prolong productivism or to support reproduction; to provide charity for vulnerable people or to replace hierarchical and exploitative social systems that produce those vulnerabilities.
Beware that these crises also nourish divisive and reactionary alliances. Amid the ongoing pandemic, powerful actors continue pushing to reconstitute the status quo, and to shift costs to others. There is danger that abilities to ally for change will be undermined by politics of fear, xenophobia, and blame; intensified surveillance and control; and isolation that constrains political organizing and all kinds of common efforts. Campaigns to discredit vaccinations and masks synergize with attacks against climate action, gender equity, and racial justice. All are rallied in the name of political economic stability and defense of geopolitical interests. On personal levels, this allied resistance to change is fueled by understandable fear of losing identities and relations that have been construed and experienced as natural, meaningful, and morally correct (even as I understand them as historically adapted to support growth). In the face of polarizing narratives and blame, what strategies can support shifts away from divisive competition toward mutual collaboration?
Conclusion
I would like to see economies slow down by design, not disaster, in ways that support societies to become more caring and equitable. However, it looks like transitions may be unplanned and messy, like those we are living through now. Finding ourselves amid global pandemic and climate change, we must seize opportunities to build healthier priorities, policies, and sociocultural systems. Such transitions depend on alliances among differently positioned actors. And they must involve attention to gender and kinship systems that honor diverse contributions, and that assure care and minimize vulnerabilities for all.
Susan Paulson is Professor at the University of Florida’s Center for Latin American Studies. She studied and taught about human-environment relations during 15 years in Latin America, and taught sustainability studies during 5 years in Europe. Paulson contributes to theory and practice in political ecology; degrowth; and gender, masculinities and environment.
References
Bhopa, Sunsil and Raj Bhopal. 2020. ‘Sex differential in COVID-19 mortality varies markedly by age.’ Lancet 396 (10250): 532-533.
Kallis, Giorgos, Susan Paulson, Giacomo D’Alisa, Federico Demaria 2020. The Case for Degrowth. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press.
Rushovich, Tamara, Marion Boulicault, Jarvis T. Chen, Ann Caroline Danielsen, Amelia Tarrant, Sarah S. Richardson, and Heather Shattuck-Heidorn 2021. ‘Sex Disparities in COVID-19 Mortality Vary Across US Racial Groups.’ Journal of General Internal Medicine 36: 1696-1701. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11606-021-06699-4.
Cite as: Paulson, Susan. 2022. “Gender-aware care in pandemic and postgrowth worlds.“ FocaalBlog, 26 April. https://www.focaalblog.com/2022/04/26/susan-paulson-gender-aware-care-in-pandemic-and-postgrowth-worlds/
A review article on The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity, by David Graeber and David Wengrow. Allen Lane, 2021.
The Dawn of Everything’s central idea is
challenging. We are told that humans are politically adventurous and
experimental – so much so that after a spell of freedom and equality, people
are inclined to choose oppression just to make a change. History takes a rhythmic
form, oscillating between one extreme and the next. In recent times, however, we’ve
all got stuck in just one system and we must try to understand why.
All this is new and refreshing but hardly credible. I
prefer the standard anthropological view that the political instincts and
social emotions that define our humanity were shaped under conditions of
egalitarianism. To this day, all of us feel most relaxed and happy when able to
laugh, play and socialize among companions who are our equals. But
instead of building on this experience so familiar to us all, Graeber and
Wengrow (henceforth: ‘G&W’) oppose the whole idea that our hunter-gatherer
ancestors were egalitarians. In their view, they would just as likely have
chosen to be oppressed.
As they put it: ‘If the very essence of our humanity
consists of the fact that we are self-conscious political actors, and therefore
capable of embracing a wide range of social arrangements, would that not mean
human beings should actually have explored a wide range of social arrangements
over the greater part of our history?’ Among these possibilities, as the
authors readily acknowledge (pp. 86-7), were abusive dominance hierarchies like
those of chimpanzees. G&W seem to be arguing that if our ancestors were
so adventurous, then surely, they would have experimented not only with
egalitarianism but also with harassment, abuse and domination by aggressive,
bullying males.
G&W make these points in the context of a
consistent attack on any idea that we became socially and morally human during
the course of a revolution. All my academic life, I have been exploring the
idea that human language, consciousness, kinship and morality evolved in a
process of gradual evolution which culminated in an immense social and
political revolution. My motivation was always to challenge the popular
prejudice that socialism is impossible because by nature we humans are selfish
and competitive – and ‘not even a revolution could change human nature’.
I would always answer this way. Yes, we are a species of great ape. Yes, like our primate cousins, we have competitive, selfish, aggressive and often violent instincts. But these were not the ones responsible for our success. Everything distinctively human about our nature – our capacity to be brilliant mums and dads, to care for one another’s children and not just our own, to establish moral rules, to see ourselves as others see us and to use music, dance and language to share our dreams – these extraordinary capacities were precisely the products of the greatest revolution in history, the one that worked.
Chris Boehm’s theory of the human revolution
Nearly a decade after the appearance of my own book
detailing the complexities of this ‘human revolution’ (Knight 1991), the anthropologist
Christopher Boehm (1999) published a version of the theory that, despite its
insights, played safe in political terms by omitting any mention of the most
important element – the dynamics of sex and gender. It is this abstract, unisex
version of human revolution theory that G&W consider safe enough to mention
explicitly in order to discredit it.
Boehm points out that our earliest ancestors were neither one-sidedly cooperative nor one-sidedly competitive. Instead, they were psychologically disposed to dominate others while forming alliances to resist being dominated in turn. This collective resistance from below eventually culminated in everyone coming together to prevent any would-be leader from dominating the group. Our ancestors’ chimpanzee-style dominance was now turned on its head, culminating in ‘reverse dominance’ – rule by a morally aware community committed to an egalitarian ethos.
G&W go along with the idea that humans ‘do appear
to have begun … with a self-conscious aversion to being told what to do’ (p.
133). In this context, they agree that extant hunter-gatherers display ‘a whole
panoply of tactics collectively employed to bring would-be braggarts and
bullies down to earth – ridicule, shame, shunning …. none of which have any
parallel among other primates’ (p. 86). What they’ve no interest in is the idea
that such tactics played a crucial role in shaping human nature during our
evolutionary past.
Summing up their objection to Boehm’s account, they
describe any suggestion that hunter-gatherers consistently preferred
egalitarianism as an ‘odd insistence’ that ‘for many tens of thousands of
years, nothing happened’. If our hunter-gatherer ancestors were consistently
egalitarian, their political lives must have somehow been frozen, stuck in
time. G&W conclude with these words: ‘Before about 12,000 years ago, Boehm
insists, humans were basically egalitarian . . . according to Boehm, for about
200,000 years [these] political animals all chose to live just one way.’ (p.
87)
The only problem is that this isn’t what Boehm wrote.
His actual words are worth quoting:
‘Once one band, somewhere, invented an egalitarian order, this radical change in social ways of doing things would become visible to its neighbors. The advantages would have been evident wherever subordinates were ambivalent about being dominated, particularly in bands with very aggressive bullies…. One would expect a gradual cultural diffusion to take place, with attractive egalitarian traditions replacing despotic ones locally. … Over time, migration patterns over longer distances could have fairly rapidly spread this political invention from one continent to another.’ (Boehm 1999: 195)
This is how successful revolutions work. Plainly,
Boehm’s argument was not simply that until 12,000 years ago ‘humans were
basically egalitarian.’ Instead, he suggests that early humans developed a
variety of different political systems while gradually converging around one
particularly successful model – egalitarianism.
The Teatime of Everything
Quite unfairly, The Dawn of Everything conflates
modern evolutionary theory with social evolutionism – the nineteenth century
narrative of a ladder of stages progressing from ‘savagery’ through ‘barbarism’
to ‘civilization’. Darwinism claims to be scientific, we are told, but in reality,
is pure myth. Quixotically, G&W expect readers to give serious
consideration to a perspective on human origins that does not acknowledge
evolutionary theory at all.
The only science these authors do recognize is
‘archaeological science’, and then only if the archaeology doesn’t go too far
back. They justify dating ‘the dawn of everything’ to a mere 30,000 years ago
on the basis that nothing about politics or social life can be gleaned from
archaic human ‘cranial remains and the occasional piece of knapped flint’(p.
81).
This excuse no longer works in the light of recent
evidence that our species’ most unique trait – art and symbolic culture –
emerged in Africa three or four times earlier than was previously thought. By
no means limited to bones and stones, this evidence consists of beads,
geometric engravings, burials with grave goods and artefacts such as
grindstones and paint pots, all invariably found in association with red ochre
(Henshilwood et al. 2009, 2011). G&W do notice one or two of these
discoveries (pp. 83-4) but show little interest – despite the fact that when
cutting-edge Darwinian theory is applied to the ochre record, the possibilities
for generating predictions about social dynamics, patterns of ritual
performance and gendered alliances become very real (Power 2009, 2019; Power et
al. 2013; Power et al. 2021; Watts 2014).
Unfortunately, these authors won’t go near Darwinism in any shape or form. They concede that someone whom they term a ‘feminist’ (actually the highly respected founding figure in primate and human sociobiology Sarah Hrdy) has come up with a ‘story’ about the critical role of collective childcare in shaping our human instincts and psychology (Hrdy 2009). Commenting that ‘there’s nothing wrong with myths’, they describe this particular myth as ‘important.’ They then immediately cast doubt on it by quipping that ‘such insights can only ever be partial because there was no garden of Eden, and a single Eve never existed’ (p. 82). Tricks of this kind – in this case ignoring the fact that Hrdy’s groundbreaking work is focused on the emergence of the genus Homo some 2 million years before the dating of our common mitochondrial DNA ancestor – are clearly aimed at undermining the very idea that human origins research is worth pursuing at all.
Readers interested in Mesolithic and Neolithic
archaeology will find plenty of intriguing speculations in this book. But if
you are interested in how we became human – how we developed our unusually
revealing eyes, our extraordinarily large brains, our distinctively social
emotions, our laughter, our innate capacity for music and language – you won’t
find anything at all!
The title is seriously misleading. The Dawn of
Everything? ‘Teatime’ would be more accurate. The story begins with the
European Upper Paleolithic, best known for those spectacular cave paintings in Ice
Age France and Spain. According to the authors, by that stage the archaeology
is at last getting interesting because it indicates the emergence of an
economic surplus allowing elites to arise. For the first time, we begin to see
evidence for social complexity, hierarchy, sumptuous burials etc.
‘Tiny hunter-gatherer bands’
For G&W, the fact that our hunter-gatherer
ancestors established an egalitarian lifestyle much earlier in Africa is of
limited interest. They concede that extant hunter-gatherers such as the Hadza
of Tanzania share their resources, but instead of admiring this, they complain
that resistance to accumulation obstructs the emergence of ‘social complexity’,
using this term where others might have spoken of ‘class’. The authors, it
seems, are averse to the concept of social class.
So, hunter-gatherers obstruct complexity – i.e.,
prevent class society from arising – by resisting the accumulation of wealth. G&W
invoke the authority of the hunter-gatherer specialist James Woodburn here.
They conclude from his work that ‘the only way to maintain a truly egalitarian society
is to eliminate the possibility of accumulating any sort of surplus at all’ (p.
128). This, they argue, rules out social complexity and – with it – the full
richness of human cultural and intellectual life.
Woodburn (1982, 2005) certainly did argue that
deliberate resistance to accumulation underpins hunter-gatherer egalitarianism
and represents a political choice consciously made. He observed that such
egalitarianism was a feature only of non-storage hunter-gatherers, concluding
that ‘immediate return’ was the original type of human economy. But Woodburn did not argue that such egalitarianism was
lacking in complexity. In fact, he viewed the binary contrast between ‘simple’
and ‘complex’ social forms as damaging and misleading. For Woodburn,
maintaining egalitarianism was a supremely sophisticated achievement –
demanding far greater levels of political intelligence and complexity than
simply allowing inequalities to arise. The
Hadza, he explained, have the intelligence to realize how dangerous it would be
to let anyone accumulate more wealth than they need.
Wealth inequalities not OK
According to G&W, however, wealth inequalities are
unproblematic. In support of their position, they invoke Kandiaronk, the
seventeenth century First American critic of European ‘civilization’ to whom
they devote an inspiring chapter. Somewhat unconvincingly, they assure us that
Kandiaronk and his First American co-thinkers ‘had trouble even imagining that
differences of wealth could be translated into systematic inequalities of
power’ (p. 130).
G&W accept that immediate-return hunter-gatherers
refuse to allow wealth inequalities to develop. But surprisingly, they regard
this whole situation as disappointing:
‘This might sound like the basis of something hopeful or optimistic. Actually, it’s anything but. What it suggests is, again, that any equality worth the name is essentially impossible for all but the very simplest foragers. What kind of future might we then have in store?’ (p. 129)
What kind of future? They answer this by suggesting that activists who take inspiration from African hunter-gatherers are inviting modern city-dwellers to become ‘stuck,’ like the unfortunate Hadza, in the repetitive simplicity of life in tiny nomadic bands.
To be clear, I am no primitivist. I am in favor of
technological, social and political development. The Hadza illustrate that it
is fulfilling and enjoyable to share wealth on demand, to laugh and sing, to
‘waste time’ in play, to resist letting anyone dominate us – and to prioritize
caring for each other’s children over all other concerns. When it comes to
development, these politically sophisticated bow-and-arrow hunters can teach us
a lot.
In the beginning … private property?
G&W argue that private property is primordial
because it’s inseparable from religion. By way of illustration, they refer to
the trumpets and other paraphernalia used in some indigenous traditions during
boys’ coming-of-age ceremonies:
‘Now, these sacred items are, in many cases, the only important and exclusive forms of property that exist… It’s not just relations of command that are strictly confined to sacred contexts…, so too is absolute – or what we would today refer to as ‘private’ – property. In such societies, there turns out to be a profound formal similarity between the notion of private property and the notion of the sacred. Both are, essentially, structures of exclusion.’ (p. 159)
Note how ‘absolute’ here gets translated as ‘private.’
The claim seems to be that if ritual property is sacred to an ‘absolute’
degree, then it qualifies by definition as ‘private property’.
The conflation is reinforced when the authors seek authority for their association of religion with private property. At this point G&W (p. 159) invoke Émile Durkheim’s classic definition of ‘the sacred’ as that which is ‘set apart’:
‘Durkheim argued that the clearest expression of the sacred was the Polynesian term tabu, meaning “not to be touched”. But when we speak of absolute, private property, are we not talking about something very similar – almost identical in fact, in its underlying logic and social effects?’
The authors then describe how ethnographers working
with indigenous Amazonians discovered ‘that almost everything around them has
an owner, or could potentially be owned, from lakes and mountains to cultivars,
liana groves and animals.’ (p. 161) A spiritual entity’s sacred ownership of a species
or resource sets it apart from the rest of the world. Similar reasoning, write
G&W, underpins Western conceptions of private property. ‘If you own a car’,
they explain, ‘you have the right to prevent anyone in the entire world from
entering or using it’ (p. 159).
It is quite breath-taking to find G&W conflating
traditional notions of spiritual ‘ownership’ with ideas about owning your own
car. On what planet are they when they view modern private ownership as ‘almost
identical’ in its ‘underlying logic and social effects’ with a supernatural
being’s ‘ownership’ of natural resources?
When indigenous activists tell us that a lake or
mountain is sacred to a powerful spirit, they are not endorsing anything
remotely equivalent to ‘private property’. If the ‘Great Spirit’ owns the
forest, the clear implication is that it is not for sale, not to
be privatized, not to be claimed by a logging company.
One of the most powerful of Durkheim’s insights was
that when people invoke Divinity, they are envisaging the moral force of their
community as a whole. So, if a mountain belongs to God, that’s a way of
declaring that it cannot be privatized. When G&W turn that round – claiming
that the concept of ‘private property’ emerged inseparably from the very idea that
some things are sacred – you can see what a crude misrepresentation this
is.
What Durkheim really said
For Durkheim (1963, 1965), ‘setting apart’ was the
antithesis of private appropriation. In his quest to explain the origin of the
world-wide cultural taboo against incest, he puzzled over traditional beliefs
investing women ‘with an isolating power of some sort, a power which holds the
masculine population at a distance…’ (1965: 72). In such belief systems,
Durkheim wrote, women’s segregating power is that of their blood, bound up
intimately with notions of the sacred. If divinity becomes visible in women
when they bleed, it is because their blood itself is divine. ‘When it runs out,
the god is spilling over’ (Durkheim 1965: 89).
For Durkheim, then, the primordial concept of ‘setting
apart’ had nothing to do with private property. The issue was what happened to
a young woman on coming of age (1965: 68-96). Alerted by her menstrual onset, her
kin would assemble as a body to lay claim to her – that is, to ‘initiate’ her –
setting her apart from male company and from the world. Her seclusion
was accomplished through a special ritual – her coming-of-age ceremony. This
established that her body was sacred, her choices with respect to it
accountable to her sisters and other kin. In association with such collective
action, the emergence of human consciousness, language and culture, for
Durkheim, was the point at which a new kind of authority – that of the
community – first came into being.
If only G&W had shown an interest in modern
evolutionary science, they would have recognized how these Durkheimian insights
anticipated the most recent and authoritative modern archaeological explanation
for the ochre record in human evolution, based on the idea that blood-red ochre
was used by women as cosmetic ‘war-paint’ to alert men to the newly-established
sacredness of the female body (Watts 2014, Power 2019, Power et al., 2021).
Seasonal or lunar?
Now we come to The Dawn of Everything’s central
idea. It is that we were all once free because we could choose how to live,
experimenting now with one political structure and now another – sometimes even
oscillating between utterly different social states.
Anyone who has studied anthropology will have come
across the Eskimo seal-hunters who traditionally practiced sexual communism
throughout the winter months, only to switch over to patriarchal family life
throughout the summer – returning suddenly to communism on a particular day
announced publicly as the onset of winter. G&W apply this pendulum or
oscillation model to the Ice Age cultures of the European Upper Paleolithic,
arguing that these complex hunter-gatherers deliberately set up vertical
hierarchies of elite privilege and power – only to enjoy the pleasure of tearing
them all down as the old season gave way to the new.
Because they enjoyed this revolution so much, these
Ice Age political geniuses realized that they shouldn’t hold on permanently to
their revolutionary gains. They understood that in order to keep enjoying
successive revolutions, they would have to fill the intervals with transient
counter-revolutions – doing this by allowing ‘special’ individuals to establish
dominance so as to present a nice target for the next revolutionary upsurge.
I love this idea. As it happens, it uncannily
resembles the oscillatory principle that we in the Radical Anthropology
Group have analysed as the inner secret of hunter-gatherer
egalitarianism ever since Blood Relations was published three decades
ago (Knight 1991). On the other hand, my oscillation model was not quite the
same. Because we evolved not in sub-Arctic conditions but in Africa, there were
good ecological reasons why monthly periodicities should take precedence over
seasonal rhythms. So, if power was seized and surrendered in the way G&W
imagine, then social life would have been turned upside-down on a monthly
schedule, oscillating with the waxing and waning moon (Knight 1991: 327-373).
A pendulum of power
G&W’s history is bursting with oppositions and alternations among
hunter-gatherers but its periodicities are one-sidedly seasonal. Don’t they
know that hunter-gatherers follow not just the sun but the moon? Their most
important rituals, bound up as these are with women’s menstrual ebbs and flows,
are scheduled by the moon.
In the rainforests of the Congo, writes Morna Finnegan (2008, 2009,
2012), women deliberately encourage men to display their courage and potential
for dominance – only to defy them in an all-female ritual known as Ngoku before
yielding playfully in a ‘pendulum of power’ between the sexes. G&W (pp.
114-15) allude to this but then claim that:
‘… there is no single pattern. The only consistent phenomenon is the very fact of alternation, and the consequent awareness of different social possibilities. What all this confirms is that searching for “the origins of social inequality” really is asking the wrong question.
If human beings, through most of our history, have moved back and forth fluidly between different social arrangements, assembling and dismantling hierarchies on a regular basis, maybe the real question should be “how did we get stuck?”’
This final question is a truly profound one. It can
only be answered, however, once we have developed some realistic notion of the
situation that previously prevailed. Was there ever a time when our prehistoric
ancestors were truly free, truly ‘unstuck’?
When marriage became permanent
Among the Central African Bayaka forest
people, the Moon is said to be ‘women’s biggest husband’ (Lewis 2008). From the
standpoint of any man, his wife in effect abandons him for her celestial
husband each time she bleeds. The reality behind this
ancient metaphor (Knight and Lewis 2017) is a tradition in which women
playfully ‘seize power’ for some part of the month before willingly handing
over to men once they have made their point, establishing what Finnegan (2008)
has termed ‘communism in motion’. Patterns of kinship and residence in such
societies set up a pendulum swinging between menstruation and ovulation,
brothers and lovers, kinship and marriage, communal solidarity and the
intimacies of sex.
Given the probable antiquity of such
patterns, G&W are right to view some kind of block on political oscillation
as something which really did happen during the course of history. But
accounting for the blockage will require us to deal with a topic that G&W
will not touch. It will mean respectfully approaching indigenous peoples’
practices around menstruation (Testart 1985, 1986. Knight 1991. Lewis 2008.
Power 2017). It is also important to understand variability in kinship patterns
and post-marital residence – again a critically important topic that G&W scarcely
mention in their book.
Among non-storage hunter-gatherers, women
generally insist on living with their own mother at least until after she has
had a couple of children (Marlowe 2004). Genetic studies have shown that in
Africa where our species evolved, this pattern extends far back into the past
(Destro-Bisol et al., 2004. Verdu et al. 2013. Wood et al. 2005). In place of
life-long marriage, ‘bride service’ typically prevails, each African
hunter-gatherer woman accepting her chosen lover while continuing to live in
her mother’s camp. Her temporary husband must make himself useful by bringing
back hunted meat to his bride and her household. If he doesn’t measure up – he
is out! Under such arrangements, everyone alternates between kinship and marital
life, in that sense switching between utterly distinct worlds.
Living with mum is a resilient pattern, but pressure from the husband can compel her to switch residence and live permanently with him and his kin. Where this happens, a young mother with her children may find it difficult to escape. As she loses her former freedom, her husband’s care for her may then morph seamlessly into coercive control. It was this disastrous outcome which Engels (1972 [1884]) described so eloquently as the ‘world-historic defeat of the female sex’. Across much of the world, the patriarchal forces that transformed marriage into a fixed bond correspondingly imposed fixity on social life as a whole.
How humanity got ‘stuck’
This looks like a promising answer to the
question, ‘How did we get stuck?’ So, what answer do G&W give to this
question? Their final chapter is so meandering that it is difficult to know. They
mention how care for a person may morph seamlessly into coercive control – but
for some reason don’t connect this with changes in postmarital residence or
family life. The nearest they get is when describing spectacles of execution
and torture in seventeenth-century Europe and among the North American Wendat.
We are reminded that the King’s right to punish his subjects was modelled on
the patriarch’s duty to discipline his wife and children. This political
domination was publicly represented as his duty of care. By contrast, when the
Wendat subjected a prisoner to prolonged torture, it was to make the opposite
point – publicly distinguishing dominance and control from loving care. Since
the prisoner was not part of the household he needed to be tortured, not loved.
And so it is that G&W find in the
distinction between care and domination their long-awaited explication of how
we got stuck:
‘It seems to us that this connection – or better perhaps, confusion – between care and domination is utterly critical to the larger question of how we lost the ability freely to recreate ourselves by re-creating our relations with one another. It is critical, that is, to understanding how we got stuck….’
Instead of exploring hunter-gatherer
research and gender studies, then, G&W confine their horizons to the
experiences of First American military leaders, torturers and European
monarchs, exploring how we ‘got stuck’ by imagining these peoples’
psychological conflicts. If the bewildering words quoted above mean anything,
they seem to suggest that we got stuck because certain power-hungry figures
confused caring for people with violently dominating them.
Is this a serious explanation? Did people
really get confused in this way? In place of an answer, G&W themselves seem
to have got stuck. We are just offered the same question in slightly different
words:
‘Does this newly established nexus between external violence and internal care – between the most impersonal and the most intimate of human relations – mark the point where everything begins to get confused? Is this an example of how relations that were once flexible and negotiable ended up getting fixed in place: an example, in other words, of how we effectively got stuck?’
No further effort is made to answer the
most crucial question of the entire book.
Morgan and Engels
What is missing here is any real understanding of
human evolution. In Chapter 3, G&W criticize what they describe as the
mainstream anthropological consensus for likening our foraging ancestors to
extant African hunter-gatherers – simple folk living in ‘tiny mobile bands’.
Then in Chapter 4 they change their mind. The mainstream anthropological
consensus, they now tell us, is that hunter-gatherers such as Aboriginal
Australians:
‘… could travel halfway across the continent, moving among people who spoke entirely different languages, and still find camps divided into the same kinds of totemic moieties that existed at home. What this means is that half the residents owed them hospitality, but had to be treated as “brothers” and “sisters” (so sexual relations were strictly prohibited); while another half were both potential enemies and marriage partners.’
It was Lewis Henry Morgan (1877, 1881) who founded our
discipline on the basis of his discovery of so-called ‘classificatory’ kinship.
Its principle can be summed up as the ‘equivalence of siblings’. Two brothers,
for example, will step into one another’s shoes with respect to their
relationships. A woman will say to her sister: ‘Your children are mine and mine
are yours’. So, there’s no concept of ‘private property’ with respect to children.
Family life is not ‘nuclear’. Every child will be free to move between her
numerous different ‘mothers’ and other supportive kin, and she will continue to
enjoy such freedom throughout her adult life.
When life is structured in this way, the result is
extraordinary. Everyone can expect hospitality from ‘brothers’ and ‘sisters’
treated formally as equivalents to one another in chains of connection
stretching across vast areas. One consequence of this is that the state has no
soil in which to grow. When people are self-organized, allied to one another
and where the joys of childcare, sex, dance and domestic life are more
communally experienced, then there are no dead spaces – no social vacuums – for
the state to enter and fill. You can’t abolish the state without replacing it,
and communal family life – in today’s world, self-organised neighborhoods and
other wider communities – is one way of doing this.
Curiously, Graeber and Wengrow say almost nothing
about kinship in their long book. Instead of critiquing the Morgan-Engels
paradigm, Graeber and Wengrow turn Engels’ vision in The Origin of the
Family, Private Property and the State (Engels 1972 [1884]) upside-down. In
the beginning, they say, was private property, religion and the state. To quote
the concluding words of Chapter 4, ‘If private property has an “origin”, it is
as old as the idea of the sacred, which is likely as old as humanity itself.’
In an earlier book with Marshall Sahlins, On Kings (2017),
Graeber even suggested that since imagined supernatural agents such as divine
kings and forest spirits have always exercised authority over people, the
principle of the state is an immovable feature of the human condition.
It may seem paradoxical for an anarchist to accept the
inevitability of private property and the state. But The Dawn of Everything adds
weight to that message. Yes, say the authors, anarchist freedom can be implemented,
but only in precious moments or enclaves. Personally, I find it hard to imagine
what kind of ‘enclave’ might be found in a planet already beginning to burn up.
Graeber and Wengrow seem to have abandoned the revolutionary slogan that
‘another world is possible’. Instead, they offer only the sobering message that
‘hierarchy and equality tend to emerge together, as complements to one
another’. (p. 208) They seem to be saying that we cannot have freedom in one
place without accepting oppression somewhere else.
Where do we go from here?
Despite these criticisms, the one important point
about this book is its advocacy of oscillation. All living things have a pulse.
They live and they die, wake and sleep, breathe in and out in ways driven by
the changing seasons and the many other periodicities of our life-friendly,
earth-sun-moon orbital system.
We need to get Planet Earth turning once more, not
just physically but socially and politically, too. This will not be done by
telling people to stop confusing care with dominance and control. It will be
done by supporting the school strikes, singing on their picket lines, extending
the action to workplaces, dancing in the streets, blocking traffic, bringing
capitalism to a complete halt.
But once we’ve taken control, what next? If we stay on
strike too long, we’ll soon starve. So, let’s oscillate. Those weekly school
strikes, for example, could, perhaps, be lengthened, joined up and staged once
a month, spreading across the world until we’ve released all humanity from
wage-slavery. Carbon emissions immediately cut by 50 per cent. Then we go back
to work, re-organizing it as necessary. We can risk returning to work only once
we’re sure it won’t lead back to capitalism. And we can be sure of that only
once we’ve all sworn to be back with our children on their picket line next New
Moon. We keep doing this, seizing power and surrendering it, until the world is
rocking and breathing once more. Reclaim the future. Neither patriarchy nor
matriarchy but, something like, rule by the moon.
That would be to repeat the class and gender dynamics of the original human revolution, but this time on a higher plane. Might any of this be possible or practical? Let’s open up the debate to everyone and see what we can do. That surely is what the activist-anthropologist, David Graeber, would have wanted.
Chris Knight is a senior research fellow in anthropology at University College London, where he forms part of a team researching the origins of our species in Africa. His books include Blood Relations: Menstruation and the Origins of Culture (1991) and Decoding Chomsky: Science and Revolutionary Politics (2016).
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Tiny bodies, the remains of little children entombed without name or mercy, are uncovered in Tuam, a small Irish town in Co. Galway in the west of Ireland, at the site of a former Bon Secours Mother and Baby Home in 2017. The excavation, part of a Mother’s and Baby’s Home commission of inquiry (set up in 2015), precipitated by the tireless research of a local historian Catherine Corless, uncovered an eerie underground structure demarcated into 20 chambers (possibly a sewage tank) containing the children’s remains. The commission stated that ‘multiple remains’ were found, but some estimates run as high as in the region of 800. The home was run by the Catholic Bon Secours order of nuns from 1925 to 1961, one of many on the island of Ireland at that time. Now in Oct 2020, even before the Commission of inquiry publishes their long-delayed report (original deadline Feb 2018 due now Oct 30th, 2020), the Irish State has stated it intends on sealing the Mother and Baby records for 30 years.
Even for the kind of conservative politics that argues for keeping asylum seekers out of the European Union or the United States, a variety of social roles and behavior are deemed acceptable for men and women. Why then, when issues revolve around war and bare survival, do debates fall back on such rigid assumptions about men as soldiers and political actors and women as victims or objects of protection? Why is it taken as a given that men traveling alone cannot be legitimate refugees? That empathy and victimhood should be naturally and only associated with women and children? Continue reading →
Ever felt like the best conversation at the party is happening in the next room? When I did my field research in an urban neighborhood in Java some twenty years ago, it was at a time when we were “bringing the state back in” (Evans et al. 1985). I was deeply influenced by Philip Abrams’s “Notes on the Difficulty of Studying the State” ([1977] 1988) Corrigan and Sayer’s The Great Arch: English State Formation as Cultural Revolution (1985), and Everyday Forms of State Formation: Revolution and the Negotiation of Rule in Rural Mexico (Joseph and Nugent 1994) through my supervisor, the late Daniel Nugent. In my own work, I found “everyday forms of state formation” to be more than a great title; it provided a perspective on understanding how relations of production (and crucially reproduction) were entangled with culture, community, and forms of rule. Continue reading →