Date: Tue, 27 Apr 2004 13:57:58 -0700 (PDT) From: "J.M. Adams" <ringfingers-AT-yahoo.com> Subject: [postanarchism] Zerzan: Patriarchy, Civilization, and the Origins of Gender PATRIARCHY, CIVILIZATION, AND THE ORIGINS OF GENDER (from Green Anarchy #16/Spring 2004) By John Zerzan Civilization, very fundamentally, is the history of the domination of nature and of women. Patriarchy means rule over women and nature. Are the two institutions at base synonymous? Philosophy has mainly ignored the vast realm of suffering that has unfolded since it began, in division of labor, its long course. Hélène Cixous calls the history of philosophy a "chain of fathers." Women are as absent from it as suffering, and are certainly the closest of kin. Camille Paglia, anti-feminist literary theorist, meditates thusly on civilization and women: When I see a giant crane passing on a flatbed truck, I pause in awe and reverence, as one would for a church procession. What power of conception: what grandiosity: these cranes tie us to ancient Egypt, where monumental architecture was first imagined and achieved. If civilization had been left in female hands, we would still be living in grass huts.1 The "glories" of civilization and women’s disinterest in them. To some of us the "grass huts" represent not taking the wrong path, that of oppression and destructiveness. In light of the globally metastasizing death-drive of technological civilization, if only we still lived in grass huts! Women and nature are universally devalued by the dominant paradigm and who cannot see what this has wrought? Ursula Le Guin gives us a healthy corrective to Paglia’s dismissal of both: Civilized Man says: I am Self, I am Master, all the rest is other—outside, below, underneath, subservient. I own, I use, I explore, I exploit, I control. What I do is what matters. What I want is what matter is for. I am that I am, and the rest is women and wilderness, to be used as I see fit.2 There are certainly many who believe that early civilizations existed that were matriarchal. But no anthropologists or archaeologists, feminists included, have found evidence of such societies. "The search for a genuinely egalitarian, let along matriarchal, culture has proved fruitless," concludes Sherry Ortner.3 There was, however, a long span of time when women were generally less subject to men, before male-defined culture became fixed or universal. Since the 1970s anthropologists such as Adrienne Zihlman, Nancy Tanner and Frances Dahlberg4 have corrected the earlier focus or stereotype of prehistoric "Man the Hunter" to that of "Woman the Gatherer." Key here is the datum that as a general average, pre-agricultural band societies received about 80 percent of their sustenance from gathering and 20 percent from hunting. It is possible to overstate the hunting/gathering distinction and to overlook those groups in which, to significant degrees, women have hunted and men have gathered.5 But women’s autonomy in foraging societies is rooted in the fact that material resources for subsistence are equally available to women and men in their respective spheres of activity. In the context of the generally egalitarian ethos of hunter-gatherer or foraging societies, anthropologists like Eleanor Leacock, Patricia Draper and Mina Caulfield have described a generally equal relationship between men and women.6 In such settings where the person who procures something also distributes it and where women procure about 80 percent of the sustenance, it is largely women who determine band society movements and camp locations. Similarly, evidence indicates that both women and men made the stone tools used by pre-agricultural peoples.7 With the matrilocal Pueblo, Iroquois, Crow, and other American Indian groups, women could terminate a marital relationship at any time. Overall, males and females in band society move freely and peacefully from one band to another as well as into or out of relationships.8 According to Rosalind Miles, the men not only do not command or exploit women’s labor, "they exert little or no control over women’s bodies or those of their children, making no fetish of virginity or chastity, and making no demands of women’s sexual exclusivity."9 Zubeeda Banu Quraishy provides an African example: "Mbuti gender associations were characterized by harmony and cooperation."10 And yet, one wonders, was the situation really ever quite this rosy? Given an apparently universal devaluation of women, which varies in its forms but not in its essence, the question of when and how it was basically otherwise persists. There is a fundamental division of social existence according to gender, and an obvious hierarchy to this divide. For philosopher Jane Flax, the most deep-seated dualisms, even including those of subject-object and mind-body, are a reflection of gender disunity.11 (the rest is at http://www.infoshop.org/inews/stories.php?story=04/04/26/4003193 ) ===="Being at one is god-like and good, but human, too human, the mania Which insists there is only the One, one country, one truth and one way." - Friedrich Hölderlin, 1799 __________________________________ Do you Yahoo!? Win a $20,000 Career Makeover at Yahoo! HotJobs http://hotjobs.sweepstakes.yahoo.com/careermakeover
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